Presentation

This intensive course offers an immersion into the relationship between design, childhood, and play as drivers of social transformation. From an intercultural and critical perspective, we will explore how the design of objects, spaces, and experiences can promote the development of more conscious, inclusive, and sustainable ways of inhabiting the world.

Body, space, and action will be understood not only as elements of playful activity, but also as the universal language of childhood, a tool for learning, and a space for collective construction. Through participatory methodologies and practical work, the course invites participants to design with children, integrating their perspective, imagination, and way of relating to their environment.

The classroom will become a ‘designer’s playground’, a small laboratory where we can experiment, prototype, and reflect from the perspective of play as a cultural, educational, and social practice.

Who is it aimed at?

The course is aimed at people interested in the relationship between design, education, and childhood, coming from fields such as design, architecture, art, pedagogy, cultural mediation, or community work.

Objectives

Explore the value of play as a tool for learning, expression, and intercultural encounter, recognizing its potential to generate connections, imagination, and understanding between diverse realities.
Promote design practices with and for children that can contribute to more sustainable, inclusive, and intercultural ways of inhabiting the world.
Create a transdisciplinary learning environment among professionals in design, education, art, architecture, and other fields related to childhood.
Collectively test interventions, devices, and play situations in real contexts through a laboratory–playground for experimentation, observation, and prototyping.

Structure and contents

The course is held at Elisava’s facilities and has the collaboration of a local organization linked to childhood, which will act as a real-life context for observation, dialogue, and experimentation, which students will visit at various points during the course.

1/ Understand the context

Listening and reading the context from a sensitive and intercultural perspective
Identifying opportunities for action through design

2/ Play, body space, and action

Play as a space for intercultural encounter
Creation of experimental projects related to celebrations, stories, shared imaginaries, etc.
Work with materials, scales, and bodily experiences
Development of devices, situations, or micro-interventions

3/ Testing, action, and reflection

Implementation and testing of proposals with children
Observation of emerging intercultural interactions and dynamics
Documentation of the process
Connective reflection

Faculty

Curro Claret

Freelance designer since the late 1990s of artifacts, products, objects, services, some interior design, and strategies, paying special attention to disadvantaged sectors and groups. Projects carried out indiscriminately with companies, galleries, associations, foundations, public institutions, and universities where participants can discuss and explore “the act of living and doing” in a more conscious way in terms of their social and environmental impacts.

Danae Esparza

Designer and PhD in Public Space and Urban Regeneration from the University of Barcelona. She currently works as an associate professor and researcher at Elisava, where she develops social innovation projects in collaboration with public entities and social organizations. She has experience in developing methodologies and design processes aimed at social impact and environmental transformation. She has worked at LEGO Concept Lab Barcelona, integrating research and design.

Matteo Ferroni

Matteo Ferroni is an architect. His creative involvement with children began in 2018, when he transformed an early childhood school space in his studio, turning it into the Centro Montessori Educazione e Pace. His career spans performance art, social design, and artificial intelligence applied to open design. His work has been recognized by the FAD and published by MoMA.