Starting with children and delving into their concepts and perceptions of space really excites me.
This workshop took place in a Montessori kindergarten (Dodi Egitim Kurumlari) in Iskenderun, one of the developing and well-educated districts of Hatay - my beloved home town.
The aim was to provide an experimental platform for three to five year old children to see how they could turn their dreams into something tangible. They were asked to bring only waste materials, with no prior information.
We started with a quick brainstorming based on the questions "How would you describe a happy place and why? Who uses this place?''
No instructions were given to boost their inventiveness but we continued with questions; What will be the characteristic features of the space? What should be taken into account to present them in a concrete way? What material would work better or not according to the concepts they had defined? How big or small should the space be, considering the users?
To encourage them to create something they already like by learning-by-doing, rather than putting them in a position where they must-like the final product. In the end, they came up with a variety of spaces, from a finger painter's house - painted, of course, using only the fingers - to a space where you can move just by sliding, and many more out-of-this-world brilliant ideas.
It was a very mind-opening bottom-up attempt to engage with often ignored city dwellers in a local kindergarten.
