MIMU
PERSONAL PROJECT
3 DAYS
2022
MODELING AND VISUALIZATION
This project was a three-day personal challenge to design and model a children’s toy. I came up with the idea whilst thinking about how every child loves to play with different kitchen and home utensils even though they have all the toys they want. The main idea was to create a set of toys based on kitchen utensils that could foster associative visual narrative. In that case, children could assign real meanings, already known to them, to abstract figures and play with them to create various situations and objects.
Approach to this challenge was to take all utensils and try to play with them as children would play. I grouped different-shaped objects, similar-shaped objects, same-shaped objects but in different sizes, and objects different in material. After that, I ask myself questions and wrote down observations for every group of objects. Some of them were:
What does it remind you of?
Is it smooth, rough, warm, or cool?
How heavy is it?
What does it sound like and do these sounds remind you of something? (ex. wood with glass, metal with wood, plastic with wood, etc.)
Can you make relations out of them? Put them together, line them, and build with them.
The idea for the name came from the Latin word mimus which means actor, mime, play. I connected the term with the concept of play and acting that children achieve during play with kitchen utensils. Each of them becomes an actor for a moment.
