Designers Australia Awards '21 (Design Institute of Australia) - Award of Merit, Category 'USE'
Channel: JDT Design
Date: 2022-04-22

Jesus del Toro Design received an Award of Merit in the first edition ever of the Designers Australia Awards from the Design Institute of Australia in 2021. The Award was given in the category 'use', for a non-commissioned and altruistic project with pre-schoolers about 3D printing their own Lego-friendly spinners after designing them. 

In this video, Jesus del Toro explains what kind of constructive discontent motivated him to pursue this little adventure and dive into Design 101 with a great bunch of super-enthusiastic 5-year-olds.

The 2-month weekly workshop was split in manageable sessions where each one was an analogy to the Design Process:

- Constructive Discontent as a motivator
- Finding and building a solid brief
- Modeling ideas and testing/iterations
- Sketching ideas and other tools like computers to speak to machines
- 3D printing induction, manufacturing process, machines dialogues
- Recycling, cradle to cradle
- Kids legacy for the open source Lego system
- Learning outcomes in Design: data collection, analysis, synthesis, idea generation, modeling/drawing, testing, producing, iterating.

We all had a great time and ended up with good results and pieces that the kids could combine endlessly. 

I would really love to thank KU Phillip Park in Sydney for allowing this wonderful story to become true, especially the former Director Bonnie and the educators who helped during the sessions and vouched for it to happen, especially Cassandra and John.

Also thanks to the DIA for supporting this type of projects and Awards to individuals with an intrinsic curious mind and swift proactiveness . The diffusion of this video is helping to put this program together for other schools around the World (already started in Singapore) and we hope it provides consciousness in general to avoid one of the greatest issues of adulthood, underestimating the skills and capabilities of those little cheeky monkeys.