How can designers produce meaningful play spaces from the abstracted perspective of child affordances? This summer, our office has been exploring the perceptions within the act of playing. With our current work in K-12 schools, we are interested in the ways that children explore, understand, regulate and adapt to the landscape. Recently, we read Karen Joyce’s “Co designing Outdoor Play Spaces with Children,” understanding affordances as possibilities for action rather than prescribed function in play. We discussed how children and adolescents have unique capacities for movement, exploration, and imagination, all of which are often lost in adulthood.

Our team practiced some of Joyce’s exercises through studying elements of movement, interaction, and experience. Using sticky notes, responses were diagrammed and compared, revealing how different interpretations of play emerge through action, imagination, and possibility rather than form.

Click here to read Joyce’s full article.