Sit Down

Seating for Kids

V&A Museum of Childhood

6 February – 5 September 2010

Free admission

When is a seat not just for sitting on? When it’s a plaything, for eating, for transport or for a quick snooze. Sit Down: Seating for Kids, the V&A Museum of Childhood’s next big exhibition on design for kids, will explore the vast array of seating used by children in their everyday lives. Taking the children’s classic tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a starting point, the exhibition will invite the visitor, as Goldilocks did, to consider what makes a successful seat. Is it comfort? Is it style? Is it ease of use?

Sit Down will delve into the world of children’s seating with classic and more unusual examples. After centuries of traditional seating forms following accepted design conventions, the 20^th century witnessed an explosion of creative solutions to the idea of seating, including those for children. This exploration of new forms, materials, and production methods, as well as technological developments, resulted in more colourful and innovative seating designs for children. Designs by Charles Eames, Vitra and El Ultimo Grito will be on display, as well as the Modernist high chair by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld and Spotty, a 1960s paper chair designed by Peter Murdoch.

The exhibition will use the term ‘seating’ in its broadest sense, encompassing a wide range of functional and playful objects designed to be used primarily for sitting upon. This will include chairs, benches, sofas, bean bags, ride-on toys, potties, highchairs and play equipment.

Sit Down will be set out in three main sections, each asking a question for visitors to consider: What is a seat? Who is the seat for? and How is a seat made? The first room, entered through a large, medium or small doorway, recreates the feel of the Three Bears’ cottage, with an interactive dinner table where visitors can vote for their favourite chair by placing a coloured spoon in different porridge bowls. Different examples of kids’ seating will be on display.

In the next room, the exhibition looks at how seating has been adapted for wellbeing, learning, play, resting and transport, again with the objects on open display. Visitors will see how these objects have developed and modernised over time, in particular developmental furniture such as highchairs and potties, where safety and hygiene have influenced new designs. Here visitors will be able to try out different seat types to work out their function and match the seats to the different room settings that will be illustrated on the exhibition wall. The exhibition closes with a timeline from 1600 to the eco-friendly designs of the present day and the opportunity for visitors to build their own seat.

Changes in the notion of ‘childhood’ have effected design for children throughout history. The exhibition will draw from the Museum of Childhood collection of furniture as well as selected loans to explore the range of seating made for or used by children. Issues including social context, how and why styles have changed and the growing popularity of designer seating specifically created to meet children’s needs are also considered.

The exhibition experience will be engaging and multi-sensory with images and hands-on activities and interpretation for a family audience. In addition, a group of students from Bucks New University’s Furniture Design course will look at how best to reinvent the school chair, which has barely changed from its Robin Day-inspired design. And Ercol’s school chair arch, unveiled for the London Design Fair, will be on display in the Museum’s central hall.

Events

Musical Chairs Marathon – Saturday 6 February

How quick can you sit?  Celebrate the opening of Sit Down with a hilarious musical chair challenge. In the afternoon, design a miniature chair to take home.

Sit on it!  February half-term activities – Monday 15-Friday 19 February

Enjoy stories, trails and crafts about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Plus Three Bears Storytrail

Who’s been sitting in my chair?  Search for clues in a Three Bears Storytrail for a chance to win a goody bag.  Make a bear mask and bear chair in a free, fun, drop-in arts session.

Notes to editors

The exhibition has been designed by architects Wells Mackereth. www.wellsmackereth.com

Sit Down: Seating for Kids opens on Saturday 6 February and closes on Sunday 13 June 2010. Admission to the exhibition is FREE. V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA. Admission to the Museum is free. Nearest tube: Bethnal Green. Open daily: 10.00 – 17.45, last admission 17.30. Switchboard: 020 8983 5200 Website: www.museumofchildhood.org.uk

The V&A Museum of Childhood aims to encourage everyone to explore the themes of childhood past and present and develop an appreciation of creative design through its inspirational collections and programmes. The Museum is part of the V&A, housing the national childhood collection. The galleries are designed to show the collections in a way which is accessible to adults and children of all ages.

For further PRESS information or images please contact Rebecca Ward on 020 7613 3306 or email press@rebeccaward.co.uk.

ENDS

Image below provided by Mimimyne

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Announcing a new competition – I am ordering 500 eco friendly shopping bags from the fabulous Smartbags for Mimimyne shoppers either to buy online or as giveaways for events etc. I haven’t come up with a great slogan yet and am running a competition to see if you, my lovely blog readers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans can come up with one! I will put down all the suggestions I’ve had here and will have a poll by the end of January to find out whose slogan wins. The copyright for all these slogans remains with the people who suggested them until I announce the winner, at which point Mimimyne will have copyright in the winning slogan. The competition winner will get 10 reusable bags with their slogan to keep for free plus a free gift from Mimimyne! Competition will end by January 25th.

Entries so far!

Twitter @londonsue Green bag lady
@mumstheboss How about “Caution. May contain cake, wine or chocolate” about 19 hours ago from web in reply to mimimyne
mumstheboss

@mimimyne Or “I may look like an old bag but inside I still feel sixteen”
From Facebook

Sarah Keery
Go green – eat more peas
Love me? love my shopping addiction!
Remember, wine counts as one of your 5-a-day
I love the internet because my friends live there.
Helen Lindop
‘It IS easy being green!’

To enter competition in the blog: post comment below this entry!
To enter competition on Twitter: tweet @mimimyne using hashtag #mimimynecomp in your tweet!
To enter competition on Facebook simply add a comment with your suggestion to the Wall

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It’s been such a busy time in the run up to Christmas that I’ve had little chance to update my blog and let you all know Mimimyne’s news! First of all, I’m happy to say that it has been a good Christmas for my customers with nearly every single order getting to customers on time. I still have a little further to go to be 100% perfect, and there are sometimes problems with mail – couriers or Royal Mail – which are out of my control. For these glitches, I do apologise to any customers who have been affected. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work on customer service and make some much-needed improvements to the website, as you requested in the customer survey, to make it easier and more convenient to use.

Secondly, Mimimyne’s Mumpreneurs meetup has been going great guns and I’m happy to say that BTTradespace have offered to sponsor this informal networking lunch for mums and women in business, or looking to start a business, for all of next year! Setting up a Tradespace has been a great help to me in terms of publicity, sales and traffic, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their offer to sponsor this event in 2010. I hope plenty of you will be able to come! It’s been a great opportunity to meet in person and chat with some of my favourite bloggers, ‘mumpreneurs’ and business owners and a chance to give back to the online community of businesswomen that has been so welcoming to me. Thank you everyone for being part of this event!

If you’d like to see some of our brilliant speakers at the last event, Dr Nicola Thomas of eco style blog The Ginlady, Natalie Lue of contemporary kids design review site Bambinogoodies and Birgit Medele of Clear of Clutter, visit Mimimyne’s Youtube Channel to watch their videos!

Mimimyne also benefited from some great publicity in November and December, including a fabulous article in the Sunday Times just after Christmas! The boys modelled some beautiful t shirts by Green Eyed Monster (shortly to be available on Mimimyne) and the cushions we are holding are limited edition ones by another company we love, Minimoderns.

The photo shoot was great fun, although I had difficulty stopping the boys making faces!

I was also featured with my puppy Dexter on BT Tradespace’s mini site with an article and a video interview with me about what inspired me to set up Mimimyne.

So with a successful – if challenging – 2009 under Mimimyne’s belt, what does the future hold? As I said, I’m hoping to make the changes requested by my customers such as enabling customer reviews, shipping to Europe and maybe the US as well, offering free shipping in the UK and so on. What’s really been holding me back is time and money, those old barriers, and I’m hoping for more of each in 2010!

I’ve also been lucky enough to win 500 bags from Smartbags and am trying to think of the perfect slogan for them: if anyone can come up with one for me, I will give them 10 bags for free! These eco friendly reusable shopping bags will be a great addition to my range.

I’m also planning to add some great new designs and eco friendly products to the Mimimyne range next year. I’m particularly excited about the Wattson, a very cool-looking device that helps families monitor their energy usage. I will be using it myself in my new home office. Because – at last! – I am moving house in January and will have a ‘room of my own’ rather than a corner of the kitchen to run things from. Don’t worry, your orders will all be processed as usual, though I might be a little slower than usual to respond to emails!

Finally, as a member of 10:10 I will be working hard on energy saving in my new office. I hope to save 10% of my carbon footprint in 2010 – like all the other 10:10 companies and individuals – and have had a detailed assessment of my energy usage from LCRN which offers small businesses in London a free energy audit. I hope to reduce my carbon footprint as a business and my family’s as a household and will keep you updated on how this is going. I think most of us who care about the environment were disappointed by the Copenhagen summit and the failure of our leaders to reach a truly binding agreement on carbon emissions. Let’s hope that by continuing to do our bit as businesses and individuals we can make the difference that our governments have been too timid to make on our behalf. I think that’s the most important New Year’s resolution any of us can make!

Happy New Year to all customers, readers and friends of Mimimyne!

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Wednesday 9th December 12 noon to 2pm
Venue: Ping Pong Dim Sum (Private Room) 3 Appold Street London EC2A 2AF tel: 020 7422 0780 Nearest Town: London

Reserve your free ticket to the Mumpreneurs Meetup on Eventbrite here

After the great success of our first Mumpreneurs Meetup as part of Business Mum Week, Mimimyne is running another informal networking lunch for mumpreneurs/ businessmums and all women running or interested in running their own businesses.This event is aimed at encouraging women who might not otherwise have considered attending a networking event to consider starting their own businesses, however men are also welcome.

Speakers (to be confirmed) will include Sadie Knight from Glassraven to talk about ecommerce and web design and Natalie Lue of Self Employed Mum to talk about how to make a living as a blogger. These are informal ten minute talks and there will be opportunities to network as well.

BTTradespace will also give a short presentation about how to create your free Tradespace and maximise your online presence.

The event, in the gorgeous private dining room at Ping Pong Dim Sum (www.pingpongdimsum.com), is free to attend and includes a delicious Dim Sum buffet sponsored by BTTradespace! Spaces are limited but babies are welcome (there will be hot drinks served, so we ask all attendees to watch their children carefully) and there is space to leave prams.

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We were thrilled to get a lovely write-up from thegreenfamilia, the light green shopping blog for families, with her suggestions for the best gifts from Mimimyne! Check it out below:

Christmas Gifts from Mimimyne.

The Ginlady (Green, Independent and Natural) blog also mentioned two of our fabulous products in her round ups of the best gifts for boys and girls:

The Ginlady’s Eco friendly gift guide for little boys

The Ginlady’s Eco friendly gift guide for little girls.

Finally, we also made Greenmystyle’s Christmas list with a mention on their Top 10 Eco Board Games: Family Christmas Fun!

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Sarah from Boogles, a book keeping firm for businesses that Mimimyne has been working with, just sent me some copies of her fabulous maths game (on CD, suitable for PC only) for young people aged 5-11. There are a choice of questions – addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. And 3 levels – easy, medium and hard. Players need to answer as many questions as possible before the time runs out. In addition there are over 150 worksheet excercises which cover various math concepts – including shapes, ratios, fractions, weights and measures. This normally retails at £4.97 so you’ll be getting yourself a bargain, as shoppers on Mimimyne will get a free copy of this game with their next 5 orders! So come on, do the maths and get your Christmas shopping sorted out at the same time

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The Everywoman Conference was a very inspiring day for me. I was speaking on a panel, “Build Your Online Presence for Business Success” with two entrepreneurs I really admire, Paula Wynne of Remote Employment, Carol Savage of MyDish. Judith Lewis of i-Level was the panel moderator.

Paula Wynne talked about her business Remote Employment, which helps remote workers find jobs, how it is important for businesses to ‘punch above their weight’ (making sure your website is professional and attractive, for example) and making sure your search engine optimisation works right from the start. She also talked about how important it is to work hard at PR.

Carol Savage gave a fantastic account of the tough time she had facing the Dragon’s Den with her MyDish concept (helping people share recipes with each other) but showed how it was worth it in terms of publicity and increased visits to her site. I am planning to get on it straight away and share some of our family recipes: I’m lucky enough to have some of my mother’s already printed in her Pauper’s Cookbook but as most of my family are good cooks there are lots of family standbys I’d like to share with others.

Judith gave a very useful analysis of how important it is to build a good online presence on the web, pointing out that if you don’t put yourself on the web, someone else will, and talked of the importance of monitoring what other people say about you online. My talk was about how I have built up a presence online using Twitter, BTTradespace and Facebook and I mentioned some of the tools I have used to make it easier and quicker.

We also listened to some great talks, including Allegra McEvedy’s sometimes hilarious story of her life and adventures as a chef. Her main points were that you should build a great team, that hard times define you, that respect is important (never treat people badly) and that you should enjoy what you do. There were also some fascinating panel discussions and workshops, I didn’t have time to attend everything but all-in-all it was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking day. I will be back next year!

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Today I was lucky enough to have a visit from LCRN who help small businesses like mine audit their energy use and environmental policy. They went through my gas and electricity bills and had a look around my home office to assess my energy consumption. It was a bit shaming to admit I didn’t realise my boiler had a timer function but I was proud of the fact that I recycle absolutely everything I can (garden waste, food waste, plastic, tins, cardboard and paper) and have a low energy computer and low energy lightbulbs. They will tell me my carbon footprint and then I will be working on my environmental policy with them and building up a list of targets (which will also count towards Mimimyne’s 10:10 commitment as a business) on which my progress will be assessed in a year’s time.

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Mimimyne is proud to announce that we are now stocking the beautiful, hand made organic cotton baby clothes made by designer Maggie Gibbs from Daisy Dumpling.

I particularly recommend her newborn baby gift sets (there’s an organic cotton baby boy gift set in blue and an organic cotton baby girl gift set in pink as well as a neutral organic cotton baby gift set in white) as a tremendous bargain at £30 plus free delivery! These would make great gifts for a christening, a new born baby girl or boy or for a special occasion. Other treats for young babies in her range include beautiful organic cotton baby bootees, organic baby shoes, hats and organic baby mittens, all in a complementary range of colours so you can mix and match. Daisy Dumpling is a really exceptional addition to Mimimyne’s range of organic baby products and I think you will be delighted with your purchases!

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Mimimyne is very excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with Funky Little Darlings to sell their gorgeous eco friendly, funky kids wallpaper and wall stickers. These bright, modern designs are perfect for personalising your kids’ bedroom, nursery or playroom, and some of them work very well for grown ups too… We will have some more products from them coming soon, watch this space!

Who are you?
We are Mandy Colliss and David Quinton and we established Funky Little Darlings in 2006 as a high-end luxury interiors brand… exclusively for children.

Tell us more about your design background
Having designed for children for most of our careers, we are passionate about creating environments and products that encourage children’s creative development. Our expertise is in interior design, graphics, 3D and packaging design. Working in the children’s toys and computer games industry, we have designed for the BBC, Disney, Hasbro and Endemol and on global brands such as Monopoly, Teletubbies, In The Night Garden, Playskool, Action Man, Big Brother, Purple Ronnie and Sindy.

What’s your environmental policy?
As parents ourselves, we want our children to inherit a cleaner and less exploited planet. We strive to be as eco-friendly as possible and work with suppliers who share our ethos.

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