Japan‘s public broadcasting system, NKH, airs a show titled Design Ah!, a children’s education program that teaches out of the box thinking. Created in 2011, the Peabody Award-winning series broadcasts a series of whimsical and surreal clips that show lateral thinking for not just not just design but creativity in general. One of the segments on Design Ah! is It’s Different From What You Expected. Filmmaker Daihei Shibata, who worked on this segment, has recently been uploading a selection of clips from the years 2013 to 2015.
The look of It’s Different From What You Expected will be familiar to anyone who remembers PBS children’s programs, or even the BBC’s satirical Look Around You. It’s Different From What You Expected, as you will see in these clips, features the typical Japanese minimalism and sense of humor.
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In one clip, a girl blows up a yellow balloon in a park until, through some clever editing, she inflates it to gigantic proportions. In another clip, viewers see a lightbulb with two electrical wires leading to a battery clip, with the battery itself sitting just beside it. A hand then reaches in and plugs the battery into the clip, but instead of turning on the bulb, the battery itself becomes illuminated. These and other little whimsical bits of surreality await viewers of It’s Different From What You Expected.
Click here for more from Design Ah!
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