Infant Industry: Social Climber
Designer Tim Nash on the ultra-safe, super-stylish modern playground.
by Will Doig
December 4, 2006
Five-to-twelve seems like a huge age range. A five year old and a twelve year old are completely different kids.
Yeah, there's this huge coordination difference there. There's a two-to-five range and there's five-to-twelve. Typically, older than twelve and it winds up being not so much a play area as a social environment. In theory, you're not supposed to have a piece of play equipment for a smaller child next to a piece for an older child. But the likelihood of kids actually only using one. Little kids love to follow the older kids. So what it really comes down to is parental supervision.
Should urban playgrounds be built to mimic natural environments?
You know, there's always the debate about the kid who grew up in a rural environment and plays out in the river with a stick, versus the kid who grew up in an urban environment where play space is dictated. I'm not sure putting something that mimics nature and is completely naturalistic into an urban environment is the way to go. There are lots of ways you can build play equipment that, instead of saying to kids, "You should play on it this way," allows them to play on it the way they want to. You need to be clear about, "This is an area that means play," but that area doesn't need to specifically say, "You have to climb up here to get over to there to slide down that slide to climb back up to use the swing."
When you were a kid, what kind of playground equipment were you attracted to?
Honestly, I was more into the sandbox type stuff and building things. And the swings. I liked to see how far I could get thrown off the swing and stuff like that. I've had one broken bone my whole life and it was from the swings.
And yet, somehow you survived without the ultra-safe modern playground.
You know, you look at a company like Kompan, and they have a totally different product line that they sell in Europe than the one that sells here. Most places in the world have caps on liability. It's tough, because you can understand how if your kid gets hurt and he's paralyzed for life, you'd want to go and sue everybody. And true, you don't want that ever to happen. I mean, I don't even like going to the playgrounds I design because you look up and see a kid climbing up this tall thing and you're thinking to yourself, "Oh my God."
The park we worked on down in Wilsonville, there are two climbing walls that we built, and on opening day I was there for like fifteen minutes and two sixteen year olds climbed to the top of the wall and were doing back-flips off it. You can never really prepare for the stuff kids are going to end up doing. You just have to create some sort of safety around it and hope they use their brains, which isn't always going to happen. But hopefully, if he does fall, he gets his bell rung and thinks, maybe that wasn't such a smart idea.
photo courtesy Joel Benjamin
©2006 Will Doig and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Will Doig writes for all sorts of fabulous and exciting magazines. He was
raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Today he lives in Brooklyn. |
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