Kidzania

Yesterday I went to my niece's birthday. She took some of her friends to Kidzania and I was in charge of my youngest niece. This meant my sister-in-law was going to be taking care of her other daughter and 11 other kids.

Kidzania was once called La Ciudad de los Niños, a mexican project made by Xavier López Ancona and Luis Xavier Laresgoiti back in 1999. I was part of the team of graphic designers working for the launch of the project in Santa Fe, their first location.

Architects, industrial designers and a bunch of creative people spent hours not only imagining the concept behind each of the spaces that was offered to the sponsors but around the dynamics that had to happen around those spaces.

Back then I had some conflicts thinking on how this could potentially be a marketing  experiment more than anything else, after all in regards to branding and interaction, Kidzania provided (and still does), the closest and highest interaction a sponsor can dream of which is not  a pasive TV commercial or even an interactive game, it's playing with a brand actively.

The new Cuicuilco location although different from the first project, did bring back some good memories not necessarily from it's opening but from going to the working site and being amazed on how it was built bit by bit out of an original idea. I was just a designer back then but yesterday I experienced Kidzania as an aunt. 

My niece is really small and all the outfits were too large but she ran around as a firefighter, storing milk based products in shelves, made her own yoghurt, pretended she was a paramedic on a scaled ambulance where they had to save someone from a smokey crash and played around with some dogs at the Pedigree space.

Yes, it is a marketing experiment but from what I remember the idea behind this project was that while one of the partners in the project bought a fake telephone so his kid could play with it, the kid still was more intrigued by the real one. This fact still remains true to this day and aside from the big brands splattered all over the place these still try to work as educational resources: they teach the kids how much to feed a dog or pick up fake pieces of feces on the ground, at the hospital they teach incredibly basic stuff as how to listen to their heartbeat and you watch many kids exerting role playing at large.

For a moment I thought on how as adults are also part of the same experiment but in a larger and invisible scheme of work/consumption cycle. We are supposed to be more independent from these marketing schemes but are we, really?  
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