So much more than just 'toys': Emily Carr design students bring learning and healing to refugee camps

Reza Marvasti has always believed in the importance of play. 

As a kid growing up in Iran in the 1980s, when that country was at war with Iraq, the ability to play helped Marvasti have "a safe bubble," even as bombs fell outside.

"I was hiding in the bunker with the lights off," he says. "It was dark and scary, but I had my escape, and my escape was play. I used to get my friends and my cousins together, and we used to play games. And anytime we played a game, that was my safe bubble. That was the time I was in control. Everything made sense. I knew what I was doing. I was in charge."

Marvasti immigrated to Canada when he was 19, settling in British Columbia. But even in his new home, he was plagued by a kind of restlessness. He jumped from one major to another in school: design, business management, automotive technology. He became a self-described "adrenaline junkie," taking up sports like speed flying, a hybrid of paragliding and BASE jumping. After a close call following a speed-flying accident, and having a close friend die in a similar accident, Marvasti went into a period of deep self-reflection, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Eventually, it came to him: bring play to the kids who need it the most,  including kids in refugee camps, prisons, and disaster zones.

"I sold everything that I could turn into cash," he says. My business, cars, whatever I had. I hit the road and started building playgrounds and I've been doing that since then."

For the past two years, his not-for-profit, The Power of Play, has been working with design students at Vancouver's Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Christian Blyt, an associate professor at Emily Carr, first came into contact with Marvasti through a student and immediately appreciated how the organization was using design in a way that it was tangible and making an immediate difference in people's lives. He says the organization also provides good challenges for his students: they have to think of everything from the availability of materials to accessibility for children with disabilities to having to design in a way that's sensitive to the potential traumas of kids in war zones.

"There's lots of constraints," he says. "I really believe that constraints bring really good design because you can't just have an open book and do whatever you want."

This year, Blyt's doing something a little different. Previously, he's had senior undergraduates design playgrounds for children in need. This year, he's letting his second year students design interactive objects — "I don't like to use the term toy," he says — for children in South Sudan's Gorom Refugee Settlement.

"This is their first real industrial design assignment," he says of his students.

He adds that, earlier in his teaching career, he'd have students design interactive objects — what the rest of us would call toys — for local kids, but in recent years, that's been a harder and harder sell.

"I was finding that, over the years as digital toys or devices got more prevalent, we got less and less response from [local] children," he says. They didn't want to play with these analog things."

Sasha Bishop and Alex Turnbull were two of the students who took part in the project. They designed a modular spinning top that allows children to change the top's weight balance, thereby changing how it spins. They say that they wanted a toy that allowed kids to explore and learn on their own.

"As a kid, play is how you learn to understand your environment," says Bishop. "With our top, you can take the different discs off and it plays with the weight bias. You're learning how to create this stable movement. If you make it too top-heavy, it won't spin for as long.

Turnbull adds that the challenges faced by children in a refugee camp added a different dimension to the design process. 

"For a while we had a whistling module," she says. "Then Sasha brought up the fact that a whistle sort of sounds like a bomb dropping. So you have to put [design] into a really different context than you're used to. It's definitely heavier, but it's an interesting sort of way to think about design cues."

Marvasti says that by designing play objects for children in Gorom, the Emily Carr students are actually helping these kids heal.

"There is so much that happens during play," he says. "That's the opportunity for kids to learn how to socialize, how to be with their peers, how to take risks… [We] create these objects for the kids to play with so that they can process trauma and regulate their emotions."