CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Children's Furniture and Design
Furniture, toys and picture books made for children, scaled to small bodies and shaped by changing ideas about play and learning.
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About
Designing for children took off when educators began to treat play as learning. Friedrich Fröbel, who opened the first kindergarten in 1837, gave children sets of wooden blocks and shapes, and a century later Alma Siedhoff-Buscher at the Bauhaus designed a ship-building game of coloured blocks (1923). In the Netherlands Ko Verzuu created sturdy wooden ADO toys in the 1920s and 1930s. Mid-century designers followed with small plywood chairs, stools and stacking pieces, and Kay Bojesen's jointed wooden monkey (1951) became a Danish favourite.
Picture books form a parallel design history. Jessie Willcox Smith illustrated children's classics in the early 20th century, Dick Bruna's Miffy (1955) reduced a rabbit to flat colour and bold outline, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) changed how pictures carry a story. Look for scale, rounded edges, durability and room for imagination.