The cards stack, and the windows nest right through the pile.
The Discovery Project
A card that makes children want to go out and discover — and while they are at it, new words arrive on their own, through play that never runs out.
Children are born wanting to know what everything is. We wanted to emphasize on that with something to hold — a card set that takes a child outside and asks them to look closely at the real world: the pink inside a flower, the brown of a tree trunk, a lawn they have crossed a thousand times. The words for what they find arrive on their own, in the middle of the playing. And this kind of playing never quite finishes.
I spy with my little eyes
Every child already knows this game. "I spy with my little eyes… something pink." We printed that line along the top of a card and cut a circle clean through the middle. Under it sits one big word — PINK, GREEN, BROWN, RED — and that is the only instruction anyone needs. Hold the card up, look through the hole, and go and find the thing that matches. Whatever lands inside the circle becomes the subject: a stem, a patch of grass, a piece of bark. Ordinary things are suddenly worth walking over to.
A RED card against a bush of red flowers, with the words landing on the list one at a time
Pink goes looking for flowers. Green is perfectly happy with a lawn — one card, and grass becomes worth crossing a garden for. Brown ends up pressed flat against a tree trunk, and the bark inside the ring looks nothing like the bark on either side of it, because a circle does something generous: it gives one small piece of the world a child's whole attention.
Bring it back and draw what you found
We wanted a card you could write on and wipe clean, so new discoveries can be made all the time. A child can fill it in with a marker, one word to a line, for everything the circle caught — flower, apple, bus, tomato. Inside the circle itself, they can also draw it, and a simple guide waits in the bottom corner for anyone who wants a hand. Ladybugs are red, and here is how to draw one. One wipe, and the card is blank again, ready for the next colour.
The circle was the whole idea
Hand a child anything with a hole in it and watch what happens. Up it goes, and within seconds they are looking through it at the ceiling, at the dog, at you. That instinct is where this started. We took a game that already exists, the words we wanted children to meet, and the plain business of designing for children, and put all three on a single square of card. Going out to explore is the part they feel; the vocabulary comes along for the ride.
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When a child sees a circle with a hole in the middle, they want to take it and look through everything. That is the nature of children — so we took what we saw and designed it into a product.
Panu Chiraguna, Co-Founder
The cards come as a set: colours first, then textures and sizes, so a card can send a child after something rough or something big just as easily as something red. They arrive boxed, with a window cut through the lid and the cards showing through it, which means the box is already playing the game before anyone has opened it.
What these cards keep showing us is the happiest thing we could have hoped for: children want to be outside finding things, and they carry home a pile of new words picked up along the way, without ever noticing they were learning. It takes a card and a garden. It ends with one small circle holding everything a child decided was worth looking at. If you are dreaming up something for children — a product, a kids event, a place to play — we would love to hear what you have in mind.
