Discoverd! A Fantastic Playground Blog

Recently Hap Parker turned me on to the most incredible Blog by Arcady http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com/

She has collected the best examples of creative playgrounds that I have seen anywhere.  After fifty years of doing playground design I thought I knew most of the great examples and references.  I was amazed at the wonderful and noteworthy information she has accumulated on her blog.  Beyond incredible research her commentaries are insightful, full of information and very entertaining.  

I am so grateful to Hap for making this introduction.  Now I can send her all of the historical material I’ve collected and not have to post it here on Playful Planet and I can focus on the aspect of this project that is most intriguing to me: Community Supported Play Sculpture.

This is what we are talking about!

These are some examples of how playful art can not only be great fun and can also motivate new positive behavior.  Imagine how terrific it would be if we could watch a web-cam at these location!

Pop-up Parks

The concept of a community-built play sculpture garden that lasts only one year seems to right in step with the Pop-up park movement that is gaining traction around the world.  This idea springs up from two motivations.  There is a lot of under utilized space in cities and a great need for leisure space.  

Big parks and playgrounds are great, but they take a long time to plan, fund and build.  The great benefit of doing a fast community generated leisure setting is a great way to test the need and viability of making such a large investment.  Done with a thoughtful process it is also a way to gather community input; a notoriously fraught and frustrating process.

San Francisco recently started “Pavement to Parks” projects that reclaim unused city owned space and turn them into public plazas quickly and inexpensively.  In New York folks are just grabbing chairs and taking over the sidewalks or, when it’s cold, creating an indoor park.  And in London they are even creating pop-up art parks.

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For more on Pavement to Parks see

http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org/

By Allison Arieff on design and architecture.

New Yorkers take shelter from winter in a downtown pop-up park

By Alex Davies, TreeHugger

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/92/new-yorkers-take-shelter-from-winter-in-a-downtown-pop-up-park.html

Also at Tree Hugger:

Empty Building Sites to Become Pop-up Parks

by Bonnie Alter, London

Send Us Your Favorite Play Sculpture Photos

Here are a couple from my album.  The drift wood sculpture is a favorite with the locals in the North West.  The black and white is from my college days at SF State - That's me in the glasses.  The big Crystal Climber was just installed.  Its part of a BOLDR series I did with Dan Christensen.

Playful Planet – How Funded?

With an exhibit like this the goal is to find the funding through as many entities as possible so that the amount anyone organization contributes is manageable.  In addition we need to look for in-kind, or win-win contributions at every opportunity.  Here are some examples we’ve been kick around.

Shipping: We’d like to get the transport of the sculptures provided by one or two shippers if possible.  Ideally it would be a single shipper, but we may have to divide between air and ground/water.  The benefit to the shipper is a highly visual demonstration of their international capabilities.

Internet: This will probably be broken up into several suppliers, on-site connectivity, video feed, web video platform, etc.  Again the benefit to suppliers is a compellingly engaging demonstration of capacity. 

Sculpture: As mentioned in the prospectus, the idea is to have each community fund their own sculpture and the copies they make to be shared with the other participants.  This could be one funder in each community, but more likely it will be various local suppliers stepping up to make contributions for design, fabrication, installations, etc.

Coordination: Since we are structuring this Exhibit as a peer supported and controlled event we expect that the overall management budget requirements will be very slim but there will be some overhead expenses.  The current idea is that these will be supported by corporate interests who will benefit from their association with a playful event of this magnitude such as playground equipment manufacturers.

Playful Planet Exhibition management will be largely peer-to-peer

To pull this project off successfully by 2013 it cannot have a “top down” structure.  First of all, the core idea of the Exhibition is sharing and that will take lots and lots of direct contact between participants.  That is actually one of big benefits of the whole effort, cross-cultural communications.

Just take the “simple” process of shipping the sculptures.  Let’s say we have 40 participating communities.  Each will have its own importation requirements.  Loading at the freight depot and unloading the sculptures at the sites will have their own issues.  And each sculpture is likely to have unique handling requirements.  Sure coordination could be done through a centralized authority but the task of creating a centralized management team from scratch that can deal with these complexities is daunting.  It is much better to allow the process to start as a peer-to-peer process and add facilitation as the needs become clearly identified.

The same situation crops up when we begin to think about the managing the video feeds from all the sites and their multiple cameras.  The vast interconnected community that will spring up within and through this network will be impossible to manage centrally.

I’m sure there are examples we can draw from.  

 Ideas anyone?

1-11-11 Gauging the interest in the idea

Playful Planet Exhibition

The aim of the Playful Planet Exhibition is to simultaneously install dozens of interactive “play sculptures” in communities worldwide.  The installations will remain in place for one year and can be adopted by their communities for extended periods thereafter.

Participating communities start by submitting a proposal to create a unique play sculpture that they feel represents their community’s best talents.  An internationally recognized group of play experts will select the best designs for inclusion in the Exhibition.  Once selected, the community is responsible for creating a “proof of concept” prototype.  These will then be critiqued by a panel of experts for safety, structural soundness and installation issues.

Once the designs are approved the community then locally fabricates a sufficient number of the sculptures to give one copy of each sculpture to all the other participating communities.  For example, if 40 communities are ultimately selected they will need to make 40 copies of their design.  In return they receive different sculptures from the 39 other participates. In addition to the investment to make copies of their design, each participating community will also be responsible for installing the full set of sculptures in their chosen sites.  The result for every community will be a wonderful “playground landscape” that is unique and creative and, because of economies of scale, at far less cost than most traditional civic art.

The physical play sculptures are the most visible aspect of this project but are a small part of the total experience.  Each play sculpture will have one or more web cameras focused on them 24/7 which will stream the activities that occur there onto the web. An online map of the sculptures and their accompanied local web information will be accessible by mobile communication devices so that the local activities around the sculptures and the associated social networks that spring to life will become part of the play.  The ultimate result of the Exhibition will be both a real, and virtual, worldwide playful landscape where hundreds of thousands of people from many different countries can share their respective joy in the simple act of play. 

Example

Let’s pretend that there is a town that is famous as the home of several world champion table tennis players.  They decide that it would be fun to create an “artistic” table for the game and commission a local designer.  She decides to use concrete as her medium as it is very durable and there is a local company that can make them for her.  She submits her design to the community group, who in turn submits it to the Jury.   

The Jury accepts the proposal with the provision that the community come up with some way to provide balls and paddles.  Initially the community is thrown for a loss when an inspiration hits: a school child suggests that they ask the “God of Table Tennis” for an answer.  The immediate response is laughter until the designer says; “Hey, why not let the Table Tennis God” provide balls and paddles?  No one knows what to make of this idea until the designer returns with another concrete sculpture.  This one looks like a Tiki God with a large paddle for a head and ping pong ball eyes.  There is a drawer between the statue and its pedestal.  Everyone wonders what the drawer does until the designer does a little dance in front of the “god” and the drawer opens to reveal two paddles and three balls.  It turns out that the statue is really a dispenser for the equipment.  The designer has found that a local company that makes bamboo flooring could make the paddles at very low cost and is donating 5000 sets to the project.  Each paddle has the company’s name and logo so the supplier gets very low coast world-wide promotion.  With this change the project is accepted by the Exhibition for production.  The concrete pre-casting company gets lots of attention and new business for their involvement so they set the cost very low for all the tables and statues.  The very best part is that once the installations are completed, in addition to popularizing table tennis, the sculptures also have a vast video audience.  It turns out that the “god” requires that people perform some song or dance before he opens the drawer.  These are captured by the video camera that is installed at every play sculpture.  When posted to the web they are a real sensation.  So there are really two ways that this sculpture creates play – ping pong and spontaneous public theater.

Schedule

The planning and funding process will be conducted throughout 2011 with the sites selected by January 2012.  The goal is to complete the fabrication and installation process for a January 2013 opening and running for one year.

Criteria

The proposed selection of sculptures will be based on: 

•  Playfulness

What makes something playful is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but a great deal is known and understood about play.  In this case, while the general aim is to engage children, those sculptures which foster lots of interaction regardless of age will be most favored

• Design

The process by which these projects are realized should emphasize the highest level of design and aesthetics.  Participation by artists, children and students is encouraged 

• Story

The stories associated with each play sculpture should be compelling, engaging, multimedia and universal.

• Practicality

Each sculpture must be durable, safe and easy to install and remove