Children are the professionals when it comes to play and what makes a great playground. Design efforts that don’t include children are missing out on some great insight into play. This past November the Children at Play Network teamed up with Matt Spalding, Director of Stewardship at The Olmsted Parks Conservancy and Veena Reddy, an architect with Schmidt Associates to host a design charrette with 34 third-grade students at Sacred Heart Model School.
Across a pretty fall morning at Bernheim each child rotated between three design opportunities that included:
- An opportunity to solve a specific design challenge related to an eventual tree house that will be built in the Exploration Play Zone of Playcosystem. The challenge – how to get people into and out of the treehouse – even if you are in a wheelchair.
- An opportunity to use language skills to articulate what an eventual Play Resource Library might include
- An opportunity to use loose part modeling materials to envision an eventual Play Clubhouse that will be used for small group gatherings including play birthday parties
Each design session took place in the exact location where the future structures will be built. By connecting the children to the specific site conditions for each of these structures there was the added benefit of designing for place – where the ecology, topography and other site conditions help inform the design. We are compiling the information we received from the children which includes observations, drawings, descriptions, photographs and teacher reflections. That information will help us design three structures that will appear in Playcosystem in the next several years.
Just as importantly the design charrette brought a diverse team of play professionals together to cooperatively envision and host the design experience. An opportunity might arise in the future that will allow this team to share the experience with other design professionals interested in exploring participatory design that includes children. Building networks of people that champion play is the vision of the CAPN.
Stay tuned to future blog posts about the findings that came from this charrette.
