Fabio Guaricci

Fabio Guaricci is a professional inventor/designer passionate in Toys and Educational products and skilled in Design Strategy and Project Management.

In 2015, after more than 10 years as a freelancer cooperating for such companies like Hape Toys, Lisciani Giochi and Milaniwood, as well as institutions like Politecnico di Milano, Healthcare Agency of Milano (ATS) and Trentino Autism Foundation, he founded TOY, the Milan-based invention, design and communication studio with specialized services for the toy industry.

After a Diploma in Humanities, he achieved a Master Degree in Industrial Design with honors at Politecnico di Milano in 2006 and in the meantime he was exchange student for one year at the Product Design Department of NTNU in Trondheim, Norway.

His creative and yet analytic attitude expresses in his design methodology that is as close to play value as to marketing goals. Since 2010 he is part of teaching staff of the Co.Meta Lab at Politecnico di Milano, currently Contract Professor, experimenting the potential of Meta-design practices in the field of children with ASD. He is member of LUDI – Play for Disability (a European Network of researchers and practitioners around the theme of the Right to Play and Inclusion) and IPA – International Play Association.

PRESENTATION 2019

Awareness Toys – educational toys for independence

Awareness Toys are a collection of 6 wooden toys designed to allow adult people to benefit from the game in a Wellness-by-play perspective. The belief that playing can be good for your health, or your well-being, has become an educational bet that offers the player, in this case the prisoner, a path of personal growth through an object. A toy therefore that becomes a mediator through which to explore oneself and the relationship with the other, to weigh, to focus on aspects of one’s emotional life, one’s own balances and one’s own mental processes.

The project was born in 2015 from the will of TOY design and its founder Fabio Guaricci, to try to give a follow-up to the educational processes to which he had the opportunity to assist, deciding then to contact the Addictions Service – Specific Prevention of the ATS – Healthcare Company – City of Milan in the person of the professional educator Dario Gianoli.

So we talk about addictions in a broad sense, that is all those links that block the generative potential of the subject (gambling, substances, alcohol, etc …). The meeting of design with the educational practice has been the bearer of a lot of energy that gave rise to this first collection of which is still being tested at Milanese prisons, in particular at the Advanced Treatment Departments (called La Vela and La Nave) managed by ASST Santi Paolo e Carlo.