Flashback: Kid safety labels

Fun & Games
Flashback: Kid safety labels
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This week’s flashback is one of my favorite pieces from the pages of MAKE, appearing in Volume 07 in August of 2006. It’s not so much a project as a call to action. Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School, strongly believes in the power of, well, tinkering, and its positive effects on the minds of children. From their site:

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

It’s no secret that our society at large encourages raising kids in an overly cautious manner out of fear that they might get hurt, which inevitably hinders their ability to explore, grow, and think outside the box. We at MAKE are all about “Permission to Play” and so we were thrilled to see the warning labels Tulley came up with to replace the traditional safety labels most often seen on children’s toys.

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Awesome. What alternate labels would you propose?

For more, check out Tulley’s talk at TED titled “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Child Do.”

4 thoughts on “Flashback: Kid safety labels

  1. Maureen says:

    Hi. I really like the child safety labels!! Have you already produced them? If so, I would like to buy some.
    Thanks.

    1. Goli Mohammadi says:

      Hi Maureen,

      We have not produced them, but feel free to print them out on sticker paper and make your own!

      Cheers,
      Goli

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Tagged

I'm a word nerd who loves to geek out on how emerging technology affects the lexicon. I was an editor on the first 40 volumes of MAKE, and I love shining light on the incredible makers in our community. In particular, covering art is my passion — after all, art is the first thing most of us ever made. When not fawning over perfect word choices, I can be found on the nearest mountain, looking for untouched powder fields and ideal alpine lakes.

Contact me at snowgoli@gmail.com or via @snowgoli.

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