For Edmontonians who’ve grown up here, it’s tough to think of childhood summers without thinking of the sights and sounds of K-Days — the roar of the rides and the screams of the riders, the painted faces and music that accompany the throwing of darts and the whacking of the moles. But for Nick Kazakoff and his fellow designers at Onetwosix Design — which won K-Days’ design competition this year — they think about tasty treats.
“We kept coming back to what K-Days meant to us as kids, and honestly, it was the food. And when Matt [Carr] came up with the idea to do giant popsicles, Brendan [Gallagher] and I said yes right away.”
So the group got to sketching what would become the Pop-upsicles to commemorate K-Day’s flavours and colours — and to provide weary festivalgoers a place to rest their legs. “The design is really unique from a visual standpoint. But we also wanted to make sure that it was something that people would want to sit on. And [K-Days] really liked that idea. So we produced two tables on top of the benches as well. It’s the same design, just flipped on its side. I think we got the right balance between it being impactful, and it still being a functional bench.”
To keep the benches and tables — using recycled plastic and white oak for the sticks — functionally sturdy, the team took advantage of the one bad thing about eating popsicles in the blazing summer heat: the melt. “There were a few sketches at first — one based on a corndog, one was a hotdog, and maybe a burger. But we thought the idea of a melting popsicle that’s been kind of forgotten on the concrete — and then using that melt as support — is almost like an iconic K-Days image that we kept coming back to, and thought it’d be cool to design something around that.”
After their K-Days debut, keep an eye out for the Pop-upsicles at events around town.
This article appears in the Sept/Oct 2023 issue of Edify
