Bruno Munari, the Italian designer who’s centenary of birth was celebrated last year, described himself as an "inventor artist writer designer architect illustrator player-with-children". Munari applied his own main characteristics, good sense, simplicity, exactitude and wit in his work. He is counted as one of the founding fathers of Italian design and wrote during his life over 70 books or creative pills, both essays on design topics and booklets dedicated to children, including the only multi-lingual guide to Italian hand gestures. He owned a child-like vision of the world and through his refusal to make a treasure of memories he succeeded to be active and productive during all his career. One of his sayings is “Take life as seriously as a game”. He worked always very much with artistic experiments but also upon Italian industry, for which he produced many objects which were almost immediately defined "Italian design". Good examples could be products like the much-loved Zizi toy monkey for Pigomma in 1954, his simple melamine cube ashtray which remained a best-seller for decades and the lamp Falkland both designed for Danese.
He was also renown for his pedagogic methods and for instance several childhood laboratories were set up after the end of the Seventies where he tried to stimulate and expand children's creativities.
Our field of interest and research is to understand how to extrapolate the didactic approach of Bruno Munari relating it to the nowadays design teaching models.