Children are clearly the future of the market, but even today they constitute an important part of it. There has been an abundance of proof of this during recent months. Designers are increasingly thinking about their own children and the results of this are extremely fruitful, as demonstrated by Stokke’s revolutionary new pushchair, which has won several prizes. Children view their environment differently from adults, so designing for them is not simply a question of a reduction in size. The designer has to take of their specific needs and wishes into account to be able to produce appropriate furniture. Creating furniture for children makes the designer project himself giving birth to an inevitable blending of an adult’s vision and memories of his/ her own childhood with our children’s own reality. As the experience of Mobidécouverte demonstrates, the creative impulse can also come from children themselves, budding artists that they are. An interesting aspect of this is that the role of the designer is then to turn the child’s dreams into manufactured reality, whilst still somehow preserving them intact. Designing children’s furniture is a somewhat schizophrenic exercise, caught between a final consumer with an unfettered imagination, a restrictive industrial and prescriptive reality and, above all, a buyer who is not the actual consumer but his or her educator. However, the stakes are getting higher. Designing well for our children also makes them more demanding, meaning that when they come of age they will not be satisfied with the run-of-the-mill. These demanding consumers could well represent the best opportunity French manufacturers have to differentiate themselves in a globalised marketplace.

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