Toy Box | From Utility to Delight | Changing the meaning of aid packaging to provide emotional relief to young hands and minds
Toy Box is a transformative package design offering opportunities for creative play for children in the most challenging of circumstances. Incorporating an innovative toy function to a simple cardboard box, it is specifically designed for use with existing relief aid cartons delivered by non-governmental organization and charities to developing countries and disaster areas.
The block pieces incorporated in the Toy Box design can quickly and easily be punched out and detached from the box to be used as a creative construction toy. These pieces are simply joined to one another and freely assembled by the user, with the possibilities of assembly only limited by the child's imagination.
The Toy Box design requires minimum cost for production making it particularly suited to its context as intervention to provide emotional relief to the world's poorest children. This is achieved through the innovative re-appropriation of existing aid packaging ubiquitously used by charities and NGOs to distribute aid in disaster hit areas.
Toy Box is an innovation of meaning in that, through a design-driven innovation-in-use approach, it alters the meaning of an aid carton, from purely utilitarian and largely expendable cardboard box to an opportunity for engagement, play and discovery. In this it has the potential to provide much needed relieve to young hands and minds as they struggle to come to terms with the most difficult of conditions.
