Community Building Tip: Ask Kids

[ysabetwordsmith]

For my current set of tips, I'm using the list "101 Small Ways You Can Improve Your City.

37. Ask kids to help design their own playgrounds. Participatory design shouldn’t have an age limit. Involving children in the creative process for local parks and playgrounds not only guarantees the end results will be more engaging to the end user, but also it fosters an early appreciation for design. Firms such as Public Workshop are renowned for working with a much younger set of client when making play spaces a reality.

This is a brilliant idea.  Always ask the users what they want.  Not all of it may be practical, but at least you can usually avoid things that they don't  want, such as sandboxes is a perpetually rainy place.

Comments

[fianna9]

When I was little my parents moved into a house that had a sandbox made out of an old tractor tire...underneath a fir tree. Not really the best place for it.

Cleaning out fir needles from the sand was basically impossible and the sand clumped from water raining into it. We wound up never using it. We made more use of the enormous spruce that happened to have a hole in the branches in the yard though. Crawling in there was an adventure although we weren't dumb enough to try to climb the thin branches.

I really think all home sandboxes should have lids or at least a roof of some kind. Keeps out rain, leaves, cats, raccoons.... A non-covered sandbox is a potential health hazard. Even as kids we didn't like playing in a dirty sandbox.

It's kinda like the jokes about the old metal slides. In summer those could be so hot when you touched them.

[pronker]

Kids know what they want and we as adults can filter it, great idea here. I had one idea for those kids at home a lot or even just a little, although it's late in the year to begin it: grow a stand of corn in any available space, maybe 100 square feet. The kids get to help it grow and when it gets over their heads, they can play hide and seek or make a kid shed in it ... in the fall, its dried out state is another sort of attraction as it whispers in the winds ... plus they can eat the corn.

Also ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Once you cut the stalks, you can use them to make corn tipis.