Baufix / Lorenz Co. Germany
A play set composed of designed industrial parts as screws, nuts, washers. If you seriously work on such details as the numbers of the washers to be put onto the screws, their lengths, the assembly orders, etc, you can make up fine intricate forms, which will give you an excitement of architects’ and engineers’at their work.
Jovo’s Construction Toy / Jovo International Denmark
Jovo’s construction toy is a play set to allow kids to produce three dimensional objects from flat two dimensional plates made up of the three kinds of parts of triangle, quadrangle and pentagon. Mainly in Scandinavian countries, schools and day-care centers all over the world have adopted and used this play set as a high quality educational toy.
Hama Beads/ Malte Haaning Co. Denmark
Hama Beads enable us to draw various pictures with small beads of various colors. The plastic beads set to a base board are fixed by ironing and you can complete the art work for yourself, which will keep on giving pleasure to you as an ornament. You may want to decorate the Christmas Tree in your house with the pieces of your own art works created with them.
Madmug/ Madmug Co. Korea
This is a play set consisting of Magnet bars and iron balls. The compositions enabled by their strong magnetic force can suitably represent the models for such structural objects as towers, bridges, molecular structures. This toy has much greater possibilities than its original purpose toys are expected to meet. It’s been attracting the attention of widely ranged people such as architects, designers, scientists. |
Please come and see ‘CONSTRUCTION TOY-The Exhibition for the Toys Selected by 8 Creators’. By Yasuko Seki
From the 24th. of March, at Design Gallery on Matsuya Ginza’s seventh floor, an exhibition with the title‘CONSTRUCTION TOY-The Exhibition for the Toys Selected by 8 Creators’ will be held. We, the staff members of Try Plus, a company I and a friend of mine founded, are helping make the planning for this exhibition. This exhibition is a joint project of Japan Design Committee and Bornelund Co. （http://www.bornelund.co.jp/）which, for more than 25 years, has been introducing toys with high design quality to Japan from all over the world. The idea of holding this exhibition came on to us when we asked Mr.Taku Sato, a product designer and member of Japan Design Committee if it’s possible to hold an exhibition for ‘Toys and Designs’as its theme. Mr.Sato is the designer we asked to design the graphics of Try Plus.
Try Plus（http://www.tri-plus.com） was founded three years ago and now it's being run by me and my friend living in LA . With a motto‘Let’s give kids the chances to have contact with better designs!!’, we published a book ‘100 Selection of World Toys’ as the initial step of our activities. This book introduced the toys mainly of Europe, which we can easily get in Japan and their background stories.
Presently Japan sees the arrival of aging society brought about by falling birthrate. And naturally, parents’ and grandparents’ wish to provide their kids with good things has been stronger than ever. The people’s strong attention to the European toys which were born based on the ideas of such people who greatly influenced the principles of child education as Steiner, Frobel and Montessori well indicates that. We tend to have such a stereotypical idea, however, that ‘toys’ are for ‘Children and their ‘Mothers’. Here we want you to think about the great healing effect toys have on yourselves. You, too, like small cute things as your kids do, don’t you? With our conviction of the common nature shared by both kids and adults, the original idea for holding this exhibition ‘ to show how adults should play with toys in the same way as their kids do’ gradually developed.
Around 3 years ago, Bornelund Co. published a book ‘Universal Play Things’ which introduced the concept of ‘the toys beyond age’ with a view to attracting people to the toys and plays playable by both children and adults. With the strong support of designers’ net-work Japan Design Committee takes pride in, 8 creators representing Japan’s design field selected 4 items from the Construction Toys (toys in sections to be assembled to make objects of various forms) presented by Bornelund and propose their hidden charms and new ways of playing with them. These eight creators are Hisae Igarashi (an interior designer), Motomi Kawakami (an interior designer), Kashiwa Sato (a graphic designer), Kazumasa Nagai (a graphic designer), Shunji Yamanaka (an industrial designer) , Ayumi Han (a space designer), Katsuhiko Hibino (an artist), Tomohiko Hirata (an industrial designer). At present, the ideas presented by them all are gradually showing themselves in their concrete forms. Looking at them, I cannot help being impressed by the works and the ways to play with them being suggested, each of which shows the special creative mind of each design-artist. In addition to them, Taku Sato presents a new piece of graphics, which gives us the joyous feeling of the coming of spring with the use of Hama Beads.
This is an exhibition for the toys that even adults can enjoy playing with, but its most important goal is to give such message to you as ‘Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle, Aunty and any other grown-ups, enjoy playing with kids with wonderful toys, trying to find new ways of playing with them. Spare the time for that!’ If a father, who may usually be a busy businessman gets the ideas that he has never thought of before and exclaims ‘Oh! My! There is such a way to play with this! ‘, we can say that the goal of this exhibition is attained.
Period :
March 24(Wed)---April 19(Mon) 2004 (Closed at 5 pm on the last day)
Admission Free
Place:
Design Gallery 1953 on the 7th. floor of Matsuya Ginza
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