could readily be a part of and intertwine with their children. The idea was that we scaled it up so that it could serve almost as a hammock-like situation. You sit on it, you could crawl on it, and you could also crawl through it. There are different sized gaps between the strings so small children can fit, but older adults could also fit. It accommodates a wide variety of users, and it allows the younger children to interact with their parents as opposed to separate entities. You usually see parents talking in the corner while the kids play. Here they can use the exhibit together. MG: That was just the one final project, though. You all had other designs? AS: Yes, some of the other students, not me in particular, had a pregnant woman as a user. What she did was find a model that had niches in it that could accommodate the pregnant female body, in a scenario where they could rest or be comfortable. We used these kinds of attributes and scaled them to the condition needed that would work. She treated it as more of a comfort space for that specific user. Something else that I did was fold up paper to overlap it so that it became a climbing system. There were different increments that were small blocks scaled to about the size of an adult step. An adult could use them as stairs and climb on them, but those smaller climbing elements would be perfect for children. To reiterate, the system accommodates two different user groups together as opposed to making it only for children. A different model had several strings through straws and then the children could climb through them and jump off of them. That was similar to a jungle gym aesthetic. MG: There was also a board of nails that stepped up? AS: Oh yes, I did that one. MG: You did that one? Could you explain
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that one more because that one caught my attention. AS: I think the interesting part about it was that we had no idea what we would be doing with them afterwards. We started and it was perfectly okay to make a model with a bunch of nails because we didn’t think we would eventually have kids climbing on it. I think we envisioned that one, in particular, becoming more of a tactile surface as opposed to climbing on literal nails. We had to abstract the models into something different but maintain similar principles for design. MG: How many iterations of models did you have to make? AS: There were a lot of tries in between, and I ended up doing more than ten. I experimented with the same materials but different types. For instance, I used elastic string to make a similar model that inherently had different
properties. That stretched so that when you pulled it around each other, it would create indentations in the string and would begin to react when force was applied. MG: I don’t know if the Costa Rica studio works in a similar manner where every time you’re working on a project there’s always that “big reveal” -- that moment when you’ve been working on something where you don’t know what direction it’s going in and then all of a sudden there’s a realization. Then you flush out more ideas. Costa Rica is pretty straightforward. MD: Central Park was originally going to be used just as publicity. We were initially focused on producing designs that looked nice to get the attention of the people. Then towards the end, we had a final review and we had a couple of big government firms come to the review.