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Children's creative spaces

Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s giant crochet sculpture

Last month I was fortunate enough to visit the Hakone Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park located a couple of hours outside of Tokyo. A highlight of the visit was seeing the wonderful crochet play ‘sculptures’ of the artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam. The artwork, titled ‘Knitted Wonder Space 2,’ is a gigantic textile structure that has the appearance of a net suspended in mid-air. The sculpture has a strong architectural quality to it, creating an immersive and sensory-driven play space for children. Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s crochet play sculpture ‘Knitted Wonder Space 2’ at Hakone Open Air Museum On the afternoon that I visited, there was a tribe of toddlers and elementary-aged kids climbing, jumping, rolling, somersaulting, dangling and swinging their way through it. As the children played in the net, it moved and swayed with them, igniting squeals of delight and even more physical play. Creating the crochet sculpture…

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Amazing artists and educators

Vygotsky on collective creativity

This post shares Vygotsky’s idea of collective creativity, a concept presented in his article ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’. I firstly talk about how he defines creativity and imagination. I then use these understandings to consider how children’s creativity emerges through play. Lev Vygotsky (1896 -1934) was a Soviet psychologist who researched children’s learning in social and cultural contexts. In particular, his theory of ‘social constructivism’ discussed the importance of social interactions in children’s cognitive development. Vygotsky was also very interested in creativity and imagination how these were understood in education. What is creativity? Vygotsky believed that creativity arises from any human activity that produces something new. Creative acts could produce anything from physical objects to a music score to a new mental construct. Creativity is therefore present when major artistic, scientific and technical discoveries are made. It is also existent whenever an individual alters, combines, images or makes something new.…

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Children's creative spaces

The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, USA.

This post features a reflection on my visit to the Tinkering Studio at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, USA with a focus upon what art galleries can learn from the Studio’s approach to constructing immersive creative environments for children based on experiential learning and play.  In August 2015 I participated in a ScratchJr/Light Play prototyping session between the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group and the Tinkering Studio team at The Exploratorium. The Tinkering Studio, which opened in 2008, is a research and design laboratory housed inside the Exploratorium, a museum devoted to the intersection of art, science and technology. The Studio is an “immersive, active, creative place” [2] for experimentation, investigation, making and hands-on play for all ages. Scientists, artists, programmers and academics frequently take up residence in the studio, working alongside the Tinkering Studio team to create new installations, run programmes and run public forums. I have closely followed the progression of the Tinkering Studio’s programme for…

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