In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv talks about the benefits of unstructured outdoor play, including reducing ADHD and childhood obesity, among other benefits.
Hiking is clearly a great way to expose kids to the outdoors, but it isn’t always possible, and it isn’t always play, exactly, especially not unstructured, open-ended play. In looking at the Douglas playground, we talked about making it unique and site specific, and incorporating more elements for unstructured play, and loosely, a “natural playground”.
GOOD Magazine talks about the importance of “free play”, and its diminished role in playground design over the past few decades. They also explain three different types of playgrounds focused on open-ended play.
- Adventure playgrounds are areas where kids, generally older kids, are provided with all sorts of open ended materials to create and modify their own environment. (Note, while interesting, and part of a range, Adventure playgrounds are not under consideration or Douglas. See Natural Playgrounds, below.) Adventure playgrounds are underpinned by the idea that “reasonable risk can be healthy”. Kids build tree houses, dig in the mud, ride a zip line, and climb structures other kids have made. One example is an award-winning adventure playground in Berkeley. Adventure playgrounds came out of post WWII Europe, where designers noticed kids playing on rubble rather than on playgrounds. Danger is definitely an element, and these playgrounds may have a wild appearance. Another summary: The coolest places you probably never played. And a nice description. A takeaway for us might be kids’ love of building even temporary things, e.g. stacking small stumps or arranging kid-size stones along the ground.
- Natural playgrounds, attempt to integrate play elements into the natural landscape. Sometimes this is a small degree, as in embedding a slide in a hill. Sometimes it’s to a greater degree, using carefully placed natural stones up a hill for kids to climb; constructing a mini mountain to run down; providing access to a stream or pool with discreetly set stepping stones and half-hidden crossings; setting up areas of small stone that can be dug in or stacked. I’d also include many of the kids areas in botanical gardens here, though they tend to use plants as their base materials. We’ve talked about the Natural Playgrounds company before, who seem to incorporate many standard play items into the landscape, and I think many of the concepts in natural playgrounds are good references for Douglas.
Teardrop Park (photo from NY Times, G. Paul Burnett)
- Loose parts playgrounds provide classic open-ended play materials outdoors. For example, colorful blocks and similar tools often used within schools. These tend to be more removed from nature, such as the playgrounds of David Rockefeller in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which is one criticism of them. While not strictly for Douglas, we may want to consider taking this simple approach for things like providing simple, inexpensive sand toys.
As the magazine points out, all of these playgrounds are following the same impulse that earned the cardboard box a spot in the Toy Hall of Fame: kids like to explore, manipulate their environment, and imagine stuff. And sometimes the most basic, low-tech materials — stones, water, wood — are pretty valuable in doing this.
