Over the past few months, MOLD spent a lot of time with different kinds of makers.
Some were young children building functional yet imaginative objects with cardboard. We also had older kids learning how to recreate their ideas digitally before seeing them come to life with a 3D printer. Others were adults slowly understanding that designing a lamp is primarily about drawing from one’s own personal experiences and allowing happy accidents to happen.
Looking back, this season of programming has reminded us that we, at MOLD, are both teachers and students. While our goal is to help people become more aware of the process and materials behind day-to-day objects, by doing so, we are constantly reminded of what we need to deepen our own understanding of an object’s life cycle.
We live in a world built for consuming. Most of us have grown used to consuming things without knowing how they're made, or that we're even capable of making them ourselves. MOLD exists to change that narrative. Through workshops, classes, and community events, we open up the process and bring it within reach so anyone can step in, pick up the tools, and try their hand at making something meaningful.
Cardboard Club: Making as Confidence
Cardboard Club has been a constant reminder that creativity does not need to begin with expensive or complicated tools. With younger kids, especially those around 4 to 7 years old, cardboard is a forgiving material and offers a low-pressure environment for them to be imaginative. A used sheet can become a house, a chair, a vehicle, a mask, or something that has never even existed before.
What stood out across these classes wasn't just what the kids made, but how differently each of them made the same object. Every object revealed something about how a child sees the world, and how they respond when something isn't working. We noticed how they weren't focused on making something beautiful, but on trying out ideas, building confidence, and overcoming discouragement when encountering road blocks in the process.
Ultimately, these classes teach these kids something simple: that their hands can follow their imagination, and that there is value in trying even when the result is imperfect.
3D Printing for Kids: Imagination Meets Technology
3D Printing for Kids revealed a different kind of curiosity. For children aged 7 to 13, there is already a strong aptitude to think in systems, forms, and functions. They begin to understand that something can first exist as an idea, then a sketch, then digitally-modeled to be printed as a real-life object. That sequence is powerful.
3D printing can somewhat feel intimidating, especially for adults. That’s why we believe children should encounter it early on. When they do, they can view technology as something exploratory and as a means to expression. In an age where devices are used almost entirely to consume content, we want children to experience what it feels like to use them as tools to create.
Part of our initiative is to make emerging technology more accessible and genuinely enjoyable. We walk kids through the decisions that go into designing an object: why something is shaped a certain way, why it needs support, why scale matters, why a certain material behaves differently from what they imagined. These are the building blocks of gaining confidence and a mindset that tells them they have the capacity to create whatever they set their mind to.
Lamp Making for Adults: Slowing Down the Design Process
Our adult lamp-making classes have been a different kind of learning challenge. With grown-ups, there is often more pressure to make something “good” because of a stronger awareness towards taste, utility, and whether the final output feels worth keeping. But that same awareness also makes them more willing to slow down and think thoroughly about the process. It creates space for a more deliberate, low-pressure, and experimental approach to making.
Our lamp-making classes teaches people that design is not only about the aesthetics. It asks them to consider light, proportion, material, mood, and function. A lamp is an extension of the space, shifting how a room feels and how people move through it. Designing one means thinking about the kind of atmosphere you want to live inside, which turns out to be a surprisingly personal question.
What we've noticed in these classes is that adults an environment that will allow them to play and make mistakes alongside other creatives. They want a place to sketch, test, revise, and make decisions without the need to get it right the first time. In many ways, adult workshops remind us that the ability to create is something you can always come back to.
The Kid Edit: Children as Designers of their Own Objects
One of the most meaningful activations this season was a collaboration with The Kid Edit, where kids assembled their own lamps. This experience highlighted many parts of MOLD’s practice at once: education, product design, and play.
There is something special about a child making a lamp. It's typically understood as an adult object. It belongs to interiors, homes, furniture, and design stores. But when a child gets to build one, the object becomes more accessible, and design as a discipline becomes open to anyone willing to try.
Our team kept minimal guidance throughout, offering just enough structure to give the activity shape without taking the decisions away from them. The Kid Edit became a reminder for us that good education doesn't always have to be serious and technical. Sometimes it's just choosing colors, attaching pieces together, setting subtle parameters, and encouraging them to make unexpected decisions.
Material Exploration: Learning From the Things Around Us
Internal material explorations have also been a favorite and grounding studio activity, happening alongside our workshops and classes. At a studio level, excess material and waste become starting points on how we think about improving our product design and methodology. Posing the question: how do we work with what we already have, with what would otherwise be thrown away?
This connects deeply to our efforts to practice circularity more intentionally, as we've come to believe that paying attention to our habits within and outside the studio builds a level of awareness needed when designing objects. Cardboard, one of our studio’s primary byproducts, is in early development as a potential element in our lamp fixtures, adding texture and tactility to our pieces. We're also testing bioplastics made with organic food waste, materials incorporating excess textile fibers, and an alternative plaster using eggshells.
Most of these are unfinished and still in its early stages, but that's part of the point. Taking the time to interject play and rest through experimentation can question and expand our own practice. Emphasizing the process asks us to notice what is usually thrown away, undervalued, or treated as useless all the while imagining a new life cycle for these materials.
What this Season Taught Us
This season of making taught us that education has never been separate from our design practice, It's one of the most immediate ways we can apply what we've learned and share it with other creatives.
Every program gives us an opportunity to step back and assess what's working and what needs refining. What are people responding to, and what are we missing? Cultivating a space where anyone can exercise creative agency and begin building technical design literacy isn't just a service that MOLD offers. It's a practice we return to, season after season, because it grounds our values and keeps our thinking honest.
We've come to believe that when people are more exposed to the process and become active participants, it builds a deeper awareness of what they consume. They're no longer observers of finished objects but makers themselves, equipped with a newfound appreciation for how things are made and the quiet confidence that they, too, can make something.
Moving forward, MOLD’s educational work will continue to grow as an extension of our own learnings in the realm of creativity, circularity, and design thinking. The relationship between teaching and making isn't one-directional. It exists as a symbiotic exchange between our own object-making and teaching. The people who walk through our programs, kids and adults alike, bring perspectives that shape us in ways we don't always anticipate.
Making is not something we simply pass on. It's something we keep figuring out, together.