BBM Design Lab Award 2020

BBMLab Award 2020

Toolkit for Self-resilience [Top 10 finalist at XYZ Internataional Design Competition: Reimagining Play]

Project Team:

Nurul Azman, Lyana Ibrahim, Hafizah Mohammad, Calvin Thoo [Supervision: Christian Wetjen]

The toolkit’s primary objective is to encourage the children to be self-resilient through the building process of the play area as well as their interaction with the components. Providing them with a toolkit of their own would also instil a sense of ownership and responsibility while replacing the sense of loss, helping them to rebuild their confidence and trust. The ability for them to come together and expand the play modules with each toolkit would foster stronger bonds between friends and neighbouring families.

Through the concept of Self-Resilience, the process of re-imagining play has created a set of design principles which are explored through a series of modular typologies that are geared towards addressing the socio-cultural issues in the Kutupalong Refugee Camp. This camp along with other refugee camps, requires the temporariness of any structure or material. Additionally, proposed design principles include the understanding of psychological aspects of the user group, in which they are children that have experienced displacement from their home, trauma and violence.

The ‘tool kit’ consists of several components and elements - primary structures, joineries and independent components which forms the base module. The base module is centred around integrating a design response within a circular economy through which components can be assembled, disassembled, up-cycled or re-used, repurposed and re-assembled. Both primary and secondary components within a module are designed to be resilient and long-lasting in value. The primary components act as structural elements that qualify as temporary but are designed to be sturdy, essential for the safety of the refugee children. Modules could be expanded and adapted into different cognitive variations depending on the children’s imagination and creativity.