Make Your Own Character

Want to see how creative a child really is? Unlock their imagination and let them design something of their own. To make that possible, the tool has to fit them — sized for their age, and playful enough that designing feels like playing. This is how we taught design thinking, in our own playful way.

We hid the lesson inside a story

To unlock the creativity in every child, we took the techniques of design thinking and buried them in a world of fun. Together with Playville, we built the whole morning out of three things children already love — making up stories, inventing characters, and animals. It starts quietly, with a book that has nothing in it yet, and a child writing their name on the front.

The first thing every child does: put their name on a book that is still empty.

A bus that goes to four worlds

First things first: we used projection mapping to teach the children about animals, so they would have that knowledge ready in their hands once they began to design. They climb aboard a bus where six of our characters are already waiting, the windows fill with somewhere else entirely, and the whole morning tips over into a fully immersive experience — real enough that everyone settles in like passengers and watches the world go past.

The bus travels up to the Arctic, into a forest, out across the savanna and down into a swamp, and at every stop the animals come out to introduce themselves. And in the midst of all that fun, somewhere between the thick, fluffy fur of the Arctic and the bare, sun-tough skin of the savanna, knowledge about animals quietly seeps in: where you live shapes how you look.

Six characters ride along, and the windows become the Arctic, a forest, the savanna and a swamp.

Projection mapping does the travelling.

In the tent, the designing begins

Friendly staff — disguised, fairly convincingly, as camping leaders — lead everyone off the bus and into a tent, and this is where each child starts making their own choices. Where will your character live? The savanna? What does it love to eat? Is it up all day, or does it come out at night? The staff make a game of every question, and each answer gets chosen and stuck down as a sticker.

Each sticker is a small creative decision, and together they hand the child something brilliantly useful: a set of rules that are entirely their own. Designers call these constraints. The children just call it their animal. And a handful of playful rules makes imagining easier, because now every new idea has something to build on.

Every sticker is a choice, and the choices add up to an animal that is entirely theirs.

The Character Maker

And then, the machine. The Character Maker is the one everybody has been waiting for — big, bright and genuinely thrilling to stand in front of — and its components are cut from wooden tiles that small hands can pick up and turn over. Children feed in their pieces, and the choices they made back in the tent decide what fits: a meat-eater earns sharp teeth to eat with. Something awake all night earns big eyes to see with.

So they build one animal out of many. A nose from here. Ears from there. Eyes from somewhere else altogether, until the creature on the screen is one that exists nowhere else and belongs entirely to them. A colour. A pattern. Print.

Every combination makes a character that belongs to that child alone — one of a kind, made specially for them — and you can watch the pride land the second it prints. That pride does real work: a character a child is proud of is a character they want to know more about, and that is what has them opening the book again at home.

It goes home as a book

What they remember, in the end, is the smallest thing of all: giving it a name. The character gets its name, gets pressed into the book they signed an hour earlier, and goes home to be read at bedtime.

The book leaves with them — their character, their name, their story.

This is what a design lesson looks like when it is built as play. Children from four years old up spend a morning thinking like designers while they are busy having fun — up on their feet, hands moving, making something real and carrying it out of the door. The proudest moment arrives the second a child understands that the character in their hands is one that only they could have made. If you are dreaming up a kids event, an interactive installation, or a workshop that works like this one, we would love to hear what you have in mind.