Play Garden | Build x Play

Brief: Design a play space/equipment for the open yard in HSCA Social Service Centre for the children of the Single Parents Community there.

Community Partner: HCSA Community Services

What is Play Garden?

Play Garden is a kids' friendly garden with a water-gun plant watering equipment for the kids and parents to have a meaningful time together with nature.

Accreditation: Illustration by Teammate

Proof of Concept

By attaching an LED Light to a Moisture Detector and placing in the soil of potted plants, we can create a "shoot the target!" watering game for kids.

Accreditation: Proof of Concept by Teammates

Co-Creation Festivals

Before we came out with our project idea, we headed down to the Social Service Centre to engage the beneficiaries in Participatory Design Methods for the design direction of the play space. Interacting with the parents, kids and staff was an intentional yet flexible process. The turn out was a lot smaller than we had expected, hence we switched quickly from quantitative research with the planned activities to qualitative research, asking questions about their hopes for the play space.

Reflections

Going into this project with the participatory design methodology, I was able to have a firsthand experience of how it's like not knowing the end-direction of the project. Reflecting on how the project panned out from our co-creation runs in late 2019 to pushing out our design concept in early 2020, every change in direction came from realising a certain need, want or demand of the end-user. We had to constantly imagine many use-scenarios, such as if the strong winds that kept blowing everything off our table during the festival we ran on-site would cause the plants to topple over in our shelf design.

It was only during the conversations with the staff and parents that we understood every SPIN family that HCSA engages are unique. They visit the centre at different frequencies, have different interests and some have siblings while others don’t.

Therefore conceptualising an outdoor play space that isn’t a standardised playground was a design challenge. We were careful during our concept evaluations because we were driven by the notion that the chosen concept has to engage kids during different play settings (alone, with their parent, with other children). One encouraging revelation was made during our post-festival sharing session, when all groups established that the children we met were imaginative and enjoyed “free play”. This taught us that our play equipment should not dictate rules on how the children should play.

Working with a real community changed the dynamics of this project as we had the responsibility of designing for the possibility of implementation, our work has to go beyond looking good on paper, but made with the intention of fitting into the HCSA community. Things like frequency of use, the footprint of the equipment, maintenance, retaining interest of end-users, upfront cost, project development & implementation timeline all builds to the sustainability of the design. It was truly an invaluable experience to work with people and listen to communication cues and various research methods to gather a breadth of insights regarding the project. The process required lots of thinking and attention to detail. Sometimes it prompts discussions that really questions the concepts we are working on in terms of their viability in HCSA — the unique needs of designing for a single use-case. I become encouraged to step out of my own comfort zone (working and thinking on my own) and see the value in evaluating ideas with users, stakeholders, fellow design students & even a friend out of school by discussing this project. To design for real people, it needs to be designed with real people!