This scenario based workshop hypothesised that in the future children and young people will be the driving force of the creative economy, formulating the design and aesthetic of our environments, objects and products. Meanwhile adults would facilitate the production at full scale, focused mostly in project management and manufacturing sectors.

This proposal is based on the fact that youth culture is becoming more and more influential, coupled with young people becoming increasingly empowered by rapidly changing technology (e.g BBC Micro Bit). Meanwhile, large creative corporations are designing their workspaces to look and function like playgrounds (e.g. Google HQ) in order to try and encourage freer, more experimental, ‘child-like’ thinking and foster unrelenting innovation and enterprise. It also touches on how education and schooling are starting to operate more like business’ and commercial organisations - with less and less funding coming from central government potentially they will have to explore unorthodox ways to generate revenue. We asked the workshop participants, consisting of MA design students and professionals, to prototype future construction kits for children; intended to model and design our future built environments, wearable technologies, biological and ecological worlds.

This workshop was devised with Lisa Bengtsson for the Growing with Design Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ref: Knotty Objects: Brick by MIT Media Lab