San Mateo California held a Green Dollhouse competition in 2005 to draw attention to environmentally sustainable architecture and building materials. This book about their project is designed to help children and adults explore how everyone can make their homes more eco friendly.
Green Dollhouse - Creating a Doll's Eye View of a Healthier World, Ecotone Publishing 2005, ISBN 0-9749033-3-7
Engaging New Ideas Through Play
When people sit down to discuss how to create a more environmentally friendly home or community they are often overwhelmed by discussions about technology. The Green Dollhouse project set out to create a museum exhibit that would bring all ages into the discussion helping to relieve some of the adult anxiety, while making the concepts an integral part of children's play.
Through play, children engage in imaginative story lines about who lives here, what do they do, how do they share. Environmentally suitable building design, recycling, reuse, and sustainably harvested building materials may not be at the forefront of their minds as they play, but playing with recycled or environmentally sustainable materials, does bring those concepts into everyday reality far more easily than playing with the latest plastic home for plastic people. If they have the opportunity to design their own houses, incorporating ideas like grey water recycling, solar panels, or recycled materials into the design, the concepts of sustainable housing become much more rooted. Adults interacting with these children also get to ask and answer questions of their own, about what footprint their family is leaving on the earth and how can they create a healthier living space for their child.Who Is This Book For?
This is a book that encourages discussion. An adult can sit down with a young child and they can explore it together, or older children and adults can use it as a focus for discussions on housing, environmental design and sustainability. The book includes references to many of the concepts involved in green building; solar power, grey water, insulation, water and energy use as well as information about the many new green building materials available.
Further Explorations by Building Your Own House or Furniture
Green Dollhouse aims to allow children to continue to explore the concepts of building and environmental design, by presenting general design guidelines for a green home which can be created by a child, possibly with some adult help. The design guidelines include suggested environmentally responsible materials. To encourage a child to put their own stamp on a house design, the guidelines are left as loose as possible while still allowing for the creation of a appealing play structure. Children who may not be able to manage a complete house can still explore the concepts through a second book section which explains how to reuse shoe boxes to create a house of rooms that will fit in a bookcase. Finally some simple ways to create recycled furniture from found objects help encourage children (or adults) to re use and recycle.
Empowering the Imagination
Imagining the future is a key part of this book. Rather than encouraging children to play in traditional ways with traditional dollhouse themes, this book helps children to incorporate their own ideas about what their life in the future should or could be. What rooms will we need? Where will we sleep? How many of us will live in single family houses? What about cities? Where will we grow food? The book offers all of us a great way to share in the discussions created by the original Green Dollhouse projects, and gives a new twist to what play with a dolls house might involve. Lucky the child whose family sits down to share this book. The adults may be encouraged to enhance their current house, while children will be given the opportunity and design freedom to create their own environments for the future. The book promotes the concepts Start Small, Think Big, Build Green. Throughout it's 70 pages there are many places where a child's or adult's imagination can take flight, encouraging discussions of building green to become a norm rather than an exception.Green Dollhouse - Creating a Doll's Eye View of a Healthier World, Ecotone Publishing 2005, ISBN 0-9749033-3-7
