Abstract
Outdoor playgrounds, as part of urban space, with their equipment/settings play an important role in child development. For designing a child-friendly playground, looking at a playground through the eyes of children as end users should be of prime importance for designers. This study presents a new framework and methodology for exploring design parameters based on users’ real needs and wants and finally designs a child-friendly outdoor public playground for children aged 4-8 years old. Existing problems, gaps, and opportunities in Wuppertal’s playgrounds – especially in the Nordbahntrasse and Parkour Park area – provide the rationale and need, as well as the potential, for developing such a facility in this area. The co-creation mindset was selected as a suitable approach for leading this study. Because of that this research-design process was called ‘co-creative design process’. Through this process, different actors (mainly children aged 4-8 and adult stakeholders like parents, grandparents, kindergarten/school teachers, and pedagogues) got involved in different phases of the process from exploration, through extraction of design parameters, to the generation of an applicable playground design concept, and its final evaluation. The final playground design concept achieved in this study includes 5 main settings called: 1) ‘Peace under Sky’; 2) ‘Sense of Sea’; 3) Hill of Flying Balls; 4) ‘Tree of Adventure’; 5) ‘Clouds of Joy’.
Keywords
outdoor playground; children aged 4-8; child-friendly playground design; co-creation mindset
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.515
Citation
Batenipour, N.(2023) Developing a child-friendly outdoor public playground for children aged 4-8, through co-creation mindset, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.515
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Developing a child-friendly outdoor public playground for children aged 4-8, through co-creation mindset
Outdoor playgrounds, as part of urban space, with their equipment/settings play an important role in child development. For designing a child-friendly playground, looking at a playground through the eyes of children as end users should be of prime importance for designers. This study presents a new framework and methodology for exploring design parameters based on users’ real needs and wants and finally designs a child-friendly outdoor public playground for children aged 4-8 years old. Existing problems, gaps, and opportunities in Wuppertal’s playgrounds – especially in the Nordbahntrasse and Parkour Park area – provide the rationale and need, as well as the potential, for developing such a facility in this area. The co-creation mindset was selected as a suitable approach for leading this study. Because of that this research-design process was called ‘co-creative design process’. Through this process, different actors (mainly children aged 4-8 and adult stakeholders like parents, grandparents, kindergarten/school teachers, and pedagogues) got involved in different phases of the process from exploration, through extraction of design parameters, to the generation of an applicable playground design concept, and its final evaluation. The final playground design concept achieved in this study includes 5 main settings called: 1) ‘Peace under Sky’; 2) ‘Sense of Sea’; 3) Hill of Flying Balls; 4) ‘Tree of Adventure’; 5) ‘Clouds of Joy’.