Build Week 16: Designing Playgrounds
At Long-View, we don’t have a playground – and that’s by design. In the middle of each school day, we walk, with our lunches in hand, to spend an hour at a public park, where we run, climb, banter and pretend, unconstrained in our visions of how to play.
But lately, we’ve found ourselves thinking about the value of playgrounds to a wider community. In a series of Campfires in early October, we inquired into the history and function of several types. From “adventure playgrounds” that encourage “risky play,” to the highly designed structures and spaces brought to life in local projects like Fortlandia or the work of the Danish playground design firm MONSTRUM, places designated for play have a unique role in a community. In MONSTRUM’s words, “a great playground should be a gathering place sparking the imagination and challenging all visitors to create the best play experience for themselves.”
All this inquiry led up to the big reveal on Thursday, October 12: for Build Week 16, we would be designing playgrounds! Just after this big reveal, and even before the “official” start of Build Week, learners began by considering MONSTRUM’s “Three Major Principles of Inclusive Design”: 1) artistic quality, 2) inspiration to move, 3) gathering places. With these concepts in mind, we headed over to Kingsbury Commons to study (and test out) a playground in action so that we could be ready for the week ahead.
For this Build Week, we wanted to emphasize the process of design and how spending more time in initial phases yields a higher-quality final product. To this end, newly formed teams of 4-5 learners spent most of Monday (officially, Day 1) brainstorming – with the support of mini-lessons on the principles of idea generation. As teams settled into their dedicated workspaces for the week, visual ideas began to proliferate on their whiteboards. After the initial brainstorming, the work of creating a united theme – the “story” of their playground – occupied teams with building consensus.
At the end of our work time on Day 1, Mrs. Zapalac unveiled the form that teams’ final products would take for this Build Week: “pin-ups” of visual representations of the teams’ designs, to be evaluated by architects and other experts who would join us on the final day. Based on a “genre” familiar to many architects – both students and professionals – “pin-ups” are generally used to communicate (and defend) a conceptual plan. Thus, our pin-ups would comprise a collection of site maps, two-dimensional architectural renderings, concept drawings, and sometimes scale models and would be accompanied by a 5 minute oral presentation by each team detailing the narrative behind the design and the specific elements of the playground. Explaining and defending the proposed plan to a group of professionals and peers would allow the design to come to life, not to mention provide an excellent opportunity for building more sophisticated speaking skills.
To support learners’ work in creating quality representations of their designs, experts came in to offer a variety of workshops on Day 2. Architect Arthur Andersson presented a session on “Using Scale and Euclidean Geometry to Improve Your Design.” Professor and art director Dale Wallain instructed learners about techniques for “Sketching and Drawing to Enhance Your Design.” Architect Chris Gannon shared ways to construct perspective to impart geometric realism to architectural drawings. Artist Lindsey Heddleston showed learners how to use watercolor to bring depth and nuance to their renderings.
As elements of pin-ups began to appear on Day 3 and 4, teams worked on dividing labor and ensuring that the various facets each communicated a consistent theme and spoke to the design principles that were articulated at the start. Playscapes inspired by melting ice cream cones, musical instruments, the Pease Park mascot squirrel, and the color green (among many other themes) started coming to life on paper and through CAD drawings. A group working on a plan themed around local birds envisioned a treehouse so one designer on the team began to create visuals on layers of trace paper, starting from the base and working up through tiers of decking, to culminate in a lounge area nestled in the canopy. Along with the visual representations, teams designated an “anchor speaker” who rehearsed to narrate how the pin-up’s images conveyed the guiding theme and design process.
After lunchtime on Day 4, our expert guests arrived to participate in the presentation of pin-ups. In addition to return visits from several of our experts who led workshops earlier in the week, we welcomed even more professionals in the fields of architecture, parklands, and construction project management. In each room, teams of designers stood by their pin-ups in front of the guest critics, with an additional audience of their fellow learners, and articulated their concepts for the playscapes, with emphasis on how their designs fulfilled Monstrum’s three principles of inclusive design: artistic quality, inspiration to move, and gathering spaces. While they spoke, the critics watched intently with clipboards in hand, evaluating the teams on their fulfillment of each domain. Perhaps the most exciting part of these presentations, however, was the question and answer period, when learners got to hear feedback and questions from our expert guests, and get a glimpse into the world of professional architectural design.
Artifacts of this Build Week still adorn some of Long-View’s walls, reminding us of what we’re capable of when we collaborate and stretch the limits of our skill and creativity to make something in which we can truly take pride. The energy of learners during this Build Week exemplified ideas from MONSTRUM’s protocol for analyzing inclusive design: our teams became “explorers, navigators, and code-breakers having ownership over their own play experience.” While using an inclusive playground, as MONSTRUM suggests, surely “inspires children to work/play together and accept one another,” it turns out that designing playgrounds inspires this behavior, too.
For more pictures of this Build Week, see our highlight on Instagram.
