|São Paulo, Brazil|
Children's Furniture is an experience developed at Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo and is a socio-educational proposal to encourage students' social responsibility. Its objective is to guide students to design furniture, build and donate it to institutions that care for children. The challenge of this activity is to create children's furniture for children from 4 to 8 years old, which promotes greater interactivity on the part of its user, stimulating the discovery and invention of multiple forms of use.
Students always begin the course by selecting a children's book to inspire them in choosing shapes and colors for furniture. The process consists of developing successive models, then culminating in making a full-scale prototype. Conceived from a closed fitting system and limited to the surface of a single MDF board, students are taken through analog and digital steps, including the use of Laser and CNC Machines, to design furniture with a structure that offers safety and simplicity to assemble, disassemble and transport.
The purpose of the course is the composition of a set of furniture for a room to play, different each semester, which will later be donated to charities. This exercise challenges aesthetic reasoning, points to circular economy concepts, and stimulates the awareness of creative activity to focus on the realization of a more just social environment.