2009 Kids’ Digital Design Contest: Under Over Within

The First Annual Kids’ Digital Design Contest is a digital design competition for ages 0-15. With the help of parents, our goal is to provide a venue for kids to demonstrate, develop and reveal their capacity for creative three dimensional thinking using the digital modeling tool SketchUp (free to download, simple to learn, and amazingly difficult to put down). Our inaugural theme is:  “under/over/within” and features an intertidal aquatic site. Age based judging ensures fair competition and lots of cool prizes.

Design Brief

This site and program were chosen for the latitude they offer participants to interpret and develop both site based and program based opportunities. We know that the idea of a “design brief” will probably be lost on younger participants but it is our hope that parents and our older entrants will use the brief to enhance learning opportunities and develop meaning in the context of their designs.

Program:
Your charge is to develop a “structure for living” within the area shown in the base model. We ask that you challenge the idea of structure and permanence with your design by thoughtfully engaging our aquatic/intertidal site which is at once constantly changing due to factors that are both man made and of a natural consequence.

Labeled as a Marine Reserve, our site is caught within an apparent paradox of preservation: it sits at the intersection and periphery of a nearby residential neighborhood, a sewage treatment plant, a lock system, a retired army fort and finally a civic park.

By “structure” we mean that which has a physical permanence associated with an element that is here today, here tomorrow and most probably here in a few years or so—most literally, it is the thing you make.  In a broader sense, structure can include those temporal constructs we find within society and our culture diverse cultures as well as those physical constructs that float, rest or otherwise reside on the site.

By “living” we mean broadly the processes which distinguish organisms and inorganic objects from dead organisms. This can also be taken to mean and include any plants, animals or any mixture thereof either naturally found in and around the site or imported/foreign. This is not expressly a contest to design a place for humans to live.

Site:
Our site reference boundary is located on the Puget Sound shoreline within the city limits of Seattle, Washington within Discovery Park. Our site is located smack dab in the middle of an intertidal zone that is exposed to air at low tide and left underwater at high tides. The water level contained in the base model is to be considered “high tide.”

http://masonkirby.com/contest/