Potter Children’s Garden, Parana Park, Hamilton. Image Jill Rice Children at play in the natural environment. Image Jill Rice
DESIGN FOR PLAY WORDS JILL RICE
I
have always believed that children don’t need to be told how to do most things, they watch and learn from others, they figure it out! What they do need is time and opportunities to explore their world, and options for engaging with it — lots of opportunities, lots of options — to stimulate their innate curiosity and drive to explore and learn. A supportive adult/sibling to take an interest and offer encouragement is also useful. As a child, play for me had nothing to do with play equipment. Play had everything to do with learning to navigate the environment, to know and push the boundaries. A lot of it was about learning to manage my own relationships with friends and siblings. We grew things, made things, made up our own games and adventures. My parents were teachers, and fully supportive of our freedoms and all of our endeavours. The reality, however, is that not all children have the same access to environments in which there are a rich source of play opportunities and resources, nor do all children have supportive adults in their worlds. There is definitely a need to plan for play in order to ensure equity and freedom of access to play opportunities. To play is a child’s fundamental right.
THE ROLE OF THE ADULT Through my own play design journey, I have learned that what children need is not so much completed structures for play but rather scaffolding or provocation, so that children can continue the construction (or destruction) themselves, in a way that they choose. Like good parents and great teachers do, it is about offering children choices, observing them as they follow their own interests, and engaging with children, not instructing them about what to do and what not to do. Our role as play enablers for children is to offer affordances for the kind of play
that is the child’s innate drive and their right to do. An affordance is what a user can do with an object based on the user’s capabilities. An affordance is a possibility. It is not our role to dictate how spaces and resources are used or even to give permission. The child will make discoveries and play in ways that the adult designers have not even imagined. Children and youth need to be in charge of their own play, supported by adults who understand their innate drive to play. The issue is that not all those involved in creating these opportunities to play agree on the “what” and “how” of play, so the possibilities available to children and youth can be limited by adult’s limited perceptions of play “provision”. While educators in Aotearoa (New Zealand) have long been aware that the desire to play and explore is innate in children, they can sometimes confuse “play” and “learning”, so that instead of play being truly child-driven and for no particular outcome, it becomes a “tool” to achieve adult constructed measurable goals. City planners have not always understood the importance of self-directed and freely chosen play to children and youth, and often give priority to the built environment, including constructed playgrounds, rather than to all the spaces in between where play can happen. Sometimes they have stood in the way of children’s use of both natural and urban spaces for their play, applying rules as a blunt instrument to protect the environment, ensure people’s safety or avoid liability. They have missed opportunities to support the need children have to connect with nature, to test their own limits and to play in their own way. Playground designers have not always appreciated the need to provide environments that invite play rather than play structures, or the wide variety of cultural understandings about play. Children can and will play wherever they are, within their own families and cultural
14 AUSTRALASIAN PARKS AND LEISURE | Autumn 2022
communities, given the opportunity and the right environment. In designing for play, what we need to be asking children and youth is not so much what equipment would they like to have in their playspace, but rather to ask them how they connect to a place. How do you like to play? How can we support your play in this place? The whole city, or country, is their playground, so it is about co-designing with them their backyards, their neighbourhoods, their schools, their streets, their parks, to be places where they can play in the way that they choose.
THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENT The best play environments offer opportunities and encouragement for children to build, to experiment, make mistakes, make messes and take risks. They offer affordances for self-directed, experiential learning in environments that are rich in relationships. They provide different spaces and lots of different materials for children to be able to change, rearrange and engage with their own physical environments. They offer open-ended outcomes, not finished products with a guidebook on how to use them or a measuring stick to determine the child’s success. As Gandini from the Reggio Emilia school of thought said back in the 1990s, “Children are rich, powerful and competent.” (Gandini, 1993) Given the right environment, children have the power to create their own play. On the positive side, there has been growing acknowledgement of the importance of connection with nature for all of us. The term “nature deficit disorder” was first coined in 2005 by Richard Louv; the new generation of doctors have “nature prescriptions” in their toolkit when addressing issues around health and wellbeing. The last decade has seen a huge move towards promoting “natural” playspaces. In Aotearoa, a return to ideas championed