Figure 5.1 Children

Source: @google

Children are the future of tomorrow; they are included towards the economy and the finance of the country. Since they lead a passive life, they need to be included with creativity, sensitivity and perseverance. The young child is a learner and is naturally curious and wants to understand and is interested in many things. Simultaneously this can be done through architecture,

It can provide for the aesthetical and educational needs of children, It can provide a creative environment for them to learn in, It exploits the modern technologies of visual and audio aids in education, It can make learning an enjoyable and fun experience, It helps to develop the personality and confidence in the child, It can make the children aware of their historic past, culture, environment and wildlife, It can inculcate sensitivity by making the children sense what people feel, being able to make other perspective and inculcate a rapport with a broad diversity of people.

The human mind always endeavours to analyse architectural spaces from the point of view of tangible parameters such as anthropometrics, scales, proportions, etc. The architect often interprets the due considerations of intangible aspects that form emotional parameters of the deeper realms of the human psychology on an individual level. The ultimate challenge is to

design an open and informal recreational space for 4-16 years old children. The understanding of how a child perceives such spaces and what he/she experiences while using that space is often misinterpreted. Often children fail to express their opinions, based on perception and experiences of such spaces. Hence the requirements, the elements those that are to be provided by an architect to such spaces need to be investigated to render them as avenues for adding positive reinforcements to the developmental child psychology, that otherwise remain unexplored.

The need of psychology is not limited to overall understanding alone. An architect needs to address psychology as an analytical tool for understanding the basic behavioural pattern, i.e. how a person behaves, why does he behave in that manner and as per the answers obtained for the two previous questions, what are the elements of design that could be designed for his use. When child psychology is under question, then additional care needs to be taken to study the behavioural pattern as emotional traits differ in the different stages of the socio-cognitive development of a human being.

Hence, if it is to be related to architectural spaces or forms.

Psychology focuses on the mind and behaviour of children from prenatal development through adolescence. Child psychology deals not only with how children grow physically, but with their mental, emotional and social development as well.

Some of the major contexts of child psychology include:

• The Social Context

• The Cultural Context

• The Socioeconomic Context

• The physical context

i. Relationships with peers and adults influence how children think, learn and develop. ii. Families, schools and peer groups all make up an important part of the social context.