Darkooba Toy Design and Making Group

In 2000, during a climb to Mount Azad Kuh, we met one another. We were so excited by every piece of wood and stone we saw that friendship was inevitable.

Very soon we opened a small woodworking studio together. It stood in the yard of an old garden and did not even have proper walls. Ignoring the winter cold, we spent long hours designing and making things simply because we loved it. At that time there were three of us. As life went on, our third friend moved to England and is now a design professor at Brunel University. Farzaneh went to the far western edge of the world and studied public-space architecture in Vancouver. She later worked in Canada and the United States on playgrounds and public spaces, and those experiences led her toward participatory design and working with teenagers. During those same years, Yasaman turned our woodshop into a home workshop and became a full-time teacher, creating creative lesson plans that introduced children of different ages to the arts and helped them believe in the abilities of their hands and minds.

In the winter of 2013, each of us sat down with a long list of wishes, dreams, skills, and possibilities, plus two cups of tea, and imagined a group that could help make “play for everyone” real. A group that designs and produces high-quality Iranian toys, creates special play tools and environments, and runs educational workshops. That is how Darkooba was born.

Watch the video above to get a closer sense of Darkooba’s philosophy and working environment.