The Game of Gears. Technology in Non-Fiction Picturebooks

A children’s picture book on technology should first of all be a book of wonders, because only in this way cab we show young readers the enchantment of human reason. Still today, more complex scientific and technological books – such as those on physics or mechanics – always need pictures, photographs and graphic and symbolic representations to explain experiments, hypotheses, observations and results. The pictures in technical and scientific books are irreplaceable in helping to understand the contents that the text seeks to explain. And all this is of even greater importance in children’s books, in which the relationship between text and illustration has always been very close. This may seem a radical or even paradoxical statement, and yet in fact technology is precisely the result of the marriage of rigorous design and freedom of imagination. These are important books, because they can show not only the amazing progress civilization has made but also the potential dangers of the thoughtless use of technology, as well as the need to harmonise reason with beauty, design with art, machines with human sensitivity.