Tell me if I'm reading this right: One of the educational consulting offerings of Pesce Colorato is to develop children's creativity and deepen their understanding and mastery of the creative process through collaborative design and manufacture?
Because from here, it looks like when kids were asked to draw the "objects of their dream," they came back with some puffy clouds--shocker--which Pesce Colorato took literally and had fabricated as pillow- and mattress-like furniture. Without any hint at interpolating the unconscious reasons why kids might think pillows or clouds or soft is preferable, without any hint of self-awareness that asking 5-year-olds about their dreams is like three layers of subjective interpretation away from anything in the "real world."
Maybe I'm missing some key pedagogical nuance here, but this seems like a happy deployment of the kind of leading manipulation of eager-to-please kids by authority figures with an agenda that resulted in those phony preschool/daycare center child molestation trials back in the 1980's.
That said, I hope the kids don't suffer any long-term psychic damage, because I have to come down on the side of the furniture on this one; those Cloud Table and Cloud Chairs are kinda sweet.
PROGETTAZIONE PARTECIPATA, original article from Abitare 10/2001 and the auto-translated version; the bullet pointed pitch is here--and translated here [pescecolorato.com]
