KIBU and WAMP at the TENT London!

Hint of the future: kids-powered playground

Kitchen Budapest (KIBU) and WAMP launched an open call for young Hungarian designers to participate in a workshop and develop new projects with tutors Anab Jain and Jon Arden designers and co-directors at Superflux, a design studio based in London, UK and Ahmedabad, India.

The workshop challenged the current role of designers to contribute to the competitiveness of objects and services and encouraged them to design new solutions that can be potentially create the basis of new economies. In the course of the workshop four projects were developed and one has been chosen to be shown at Tent London Design Festival.

The winning idea came from Beata Csortan and Daniel Pifko. Their project is called Play4Power. The main concept of the project is that kids have a lot of untapped energy that they usually let out at playgrounds. The main focus of the Play4Power project is to come up with a creative solution with the help of which we can recycle the kids’ energy and turn it into electricity. In order to achieve this, Play4Power has designed a special unit that can be put on to each and every playground vehicle. According to our research that we have carried out at different playgrounds, parents would welcome the idea. Both mothers and fathers have initiated that the generated energy could be recycled in a way that those communities would benefit from it that visit the given playground the most often.
For the exhibition, we have installed the generator unit on a running barrel, in order to introduce the project in a spectacular and interactive way.

The idea will raise some ethical and social questions for sure making the project a more thought-provoking issue. One of the most important questions is that whether the energy generated by the kids can be considered as “green”. We should also take the issue of child labour into consideration.

Participants of the workshop came up with the following projects besides the winning idea:

Alguna is a concept of water plant based guerrilla gardens next to abandoned fishing piers along the river Danube. These could be ideal places for growing edible water plants.

Free Flow is a concept about a local pirate radio in Budapest along the river Danube. The radio is a 100% percent rebel (pirate) radio, and its community is fully against the current legal communication possibilities.

Watergate is a concept for setting up a tax free zone boat based in the Free Trade Zones along the Danube. The boat gives opportunities to creative start ups to set up businesses, turn their creative outcome into economic value by trading without taxes. The boat also has a small management office dealing with the trading process, offering legal and commercial advice to start-ups.

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