One job that has always sounded super fun is playground designer. Playgrounds can be fun, exciting, inspiring places, full of color, creative design, and above all inspire play. Some of the different playground designs from around Sweden got the spotlight recently on Flickr.
[Last week], @megrosker shared a link to Swedish Aesthetic, a gallery featuring colorful and very creative Swedish playground designs and play structures… be sure to visit the gallery for all photos curated by PlayGroundology.
view the gallery via Swedish playground design « Flickr Blog. PlayGroundology’s photostream includes photos from Canada and other adventures around the world.
Flickr has quite a few different playground designs scattered throughout the Flickrverse:
I even got so inspired I started my own Playground gallery on Flickr. Check it out, and if you have any photos you’d like to contribute, let me know.
“the thinking behind and the implementation of the Design Your Own Park (DYOP) Competition, a collaborative project of a university, a city, and a fund-raising organization to empower neighborhoods and restore outdoor play citywide in Binghamton, New York. The city makes vacant lots and other neglected spaces available for neighborhoods to turn into parks that residents design and build with the assistance of faculty and students from Binghamton University’s Binghamton Neighborhood Project.
The Design Your Own Park Competition (DYOP), launched in 2010, is a collaborative effort … to enhance opportunities for unstructured play on a citywide scale by empowering neighborhoods to create parks of their own design.
Neighborhoods typically are not well suited for collective action. From the richest gated communities to the poorest ghettos, most people scarcely know their neighbors. But there is nothing like a common goal such as creating a neighborhood park to bring people together.
The city of Seattle, WA, proposed a similar project, although it fizzled out somewhat after initial interest from various organizations (does anybody remember the name of that project? If so, leave it in the comments below, thanks!).
Check out some of the other articles published in the Spring edition of the American Journal of Play. They deal with some really interesting issues of play, child devleopment, and overall health.
Hajiyeva Aysha, a volunteer from Harborview Medical Center, foreground, and Keith Harrison help paint a whale mural near Graham Hill Elementary School on Sunday. The mural is meant to improve walking conditions for child pedestrians in the Graham Hill Community. Photo credit Ellen Banner. Seattle Times.
Flashing lights or a “Slow Children” sign are common sights around schools, but now a local school has put in a “a huge, round, sea-themed mural right smack in the middle of South Graham Street in South Seattle,” to alert drivers to pint-sized pedestrians:
Some of the kids who had helped earlier talked about what the painting was supposed to accomplish.”It’s there so people will notice it and think they should really, really slow down so they don’t get into accidents,” said Maya Garcia, 8, one of the students the mural is meant to protect at nearby Graham Elementary School.Her friend Lilly King, 9, had another concern. “I hope they don’t crash into each other when they’re slowing down.”
The mural, part of the Safe Kids Seattle project installed this weekend in the 5100 block, is thought to be the fourth in the city and the first south of Interstate 90, according to Graham Elementary Principal Christina Morningstar. Each year, according to officials, more than 244 children under the age of 14 are killed in pedestrian accidents in the nation. All the Safe Kids projects are designed to alert drivers to the presence of children in school zones.
In addition to the mural, which features a whale and several fish, organizers installed speed bumps and school-warning signs using $35,000 in grant money from FedEx and the Seattle Department of Transportation.
I read this story in the office lounge while I was waiting for my leftovers to warm up in the microwave, and immediately thought this was a good idea not just for schools, but for any place that pedestrians frequent. Often cities will put in colored bricks or tiles at busy crosswalks, but for areas with less options and/or funds to renovate, this is a great solution!
I just wanted to share a nice article from Technology Review discussing some of the different ways that people are adapting the typical work environment. The way we work is changing, so why not the way our workplace looks? I used to work in a cube with poor lighting and no view of the sun, so BOY let me tell you how important a good work environment can be.
The quick expansion of social and mobile technologies is creating a widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices more sporadically, some companies and design firms are testing radically new—and more efficient—configurations for physical offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.
A project at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, for example, overthrows decades-old conventions about office space. Called Connected Workplace, it replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups, not individuals; personal belongings are largely confined to lockers.
There are no PCs at the desks, because the employees who use the space use mobile technologies, including the Cius tablet, which Cisco recently began selling to businesses. Rick Hutley, a Cisco vice president, chooses his desk according to which colleagues are present and what’s on the day’s agenda. Then he docks his Cius to a port on the desk that includes a phone handset. The tablet handles voice and video calls whether it’s docked or mobile, and it can be used to share documents at meetings.
It’s starting to be State Fair time around the U.S., so what better time to talk about interesting parks, particularly those made from rehabbed structures?
Over the past few years we’ve seen some very creative minds transform urban ruins into spectacular parks for us to enjoy. If you can brave an abandoned nuclear plant turned into an amusement park, head to Germany – or see how old train tracks can be transformed into beautiful and fun parks in New York City and Lima.
What does it take to make a city “smart”? Not intellectual, but make traffic lights respond to traffic, have buses alert people if they’re running a few minutes behind, and large corporate buildings comfortable for all its occupants. Journalist Phil Patton offers a nice review of the takeaways from National Building Museum‘s “Intelligent Cities” symposium which looked at these questions and more in order to design a better, smarter future city; among the many takeways:
What is critical in making cities “smart” is not just data, it seems, but clear, accessible data that is often used for purposes government may never have dreamed of. Early in the symposium, Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said that information to make cities smart was about “making it easier to do the right thing.”
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Once-utopian ideas are now feasible, such as notions dreamed up at the MITSmart Cities program, formerly headed by the late William Mitchell, author of City of Bits. “Smart parking places” that are RF-tagged could cut the energy wasted by circling vehicles. And systems that allow for hailing taxis and jitneys by mobile phone can provide “infill” transportation between private car and mass transit.
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At the same time, there is concern about data that can make cities smart: fear of information used to justify policies imposed in a top-down way, and fear of loss of privacy.
I’ve covered smart meters and “smart” monitoring of bridges and in cars before, so I’ve always thought of this kind of municipal monitoring exclusive to roadways or utilities.That last takeaway brought up a tough question for me: What data are you comfortable sharing with a municipality in order get a better experience navigating through and functioning in your community?
Just a great reminder that solar power doesn’t have to include high tech!
Prague-based DaM Architects recently completed a tenement housing project in the center of their city that takes advantage of passive solar design, glazing, ventilation and green materials to give it a high degree of energy efficiency. The firm organized the social housing project by stacking a series of brick-shaped apartments modules in a way that maximizes space, light, natural ventilation, and circulation. They also focused on keeping the project’s overall cost down through the use of inexpensive materials, however they still managed to maintain a high level of quality through precise workmanship.
More ways to make social responsibility fun! I love the idea of turning the act of throwing away your trash into a game.
To discourage residents tossing their empty cups and wrappers on the streets and sidewalks, the city of Lucerne launched its “Lucerne Shines” program, which rolled out mazes, hopscotch boxes, and three point lines to make the act of trash disposal more fun. The project appeals to kids and is a great nostalgic throwback for adults alike — kudos to the Swiss town for this creative idea!
I am an aggressive (yet polite!) reuser/recycler, and always on the hunt for effective ways to encourage people to divide and conquer their trash, so to speak. This looks like a great idea.
The Pratt Institute for Design is known for its phenomenal furniture design students as well as architects, artists, graphic designers, but for trash can designers? Yes, that’s right, recent graduate Nicole Howell turned her ‘Toss With Care’ trash can design thesis project into a full on mission to better understand homelessness in New York City, and along the way, she became fascinated with trash divers. Her project, Toss with Care, which developed out of her initial experiment the trashpoline, was design to not only act as a traditional trash receptacle, but also a recycling can and a place for edible leftovers for street dwellers in search of food.
During her years in the field, Sanghvi observed numerous instances in which people developing public health solutions overlooked contextual factors that were contributing to the problem. In clinics, for example, she saw how redesigning ventilation systems, retrofitting inefficient lighting, or choosing different building materials could improve
treatment conditions and accessibility, but these things were rarely addressed. Likewise, in supermarkets, features like store layout and air temperature can influence purchasing decisions, but food access initiatives often stop short of such nuances of structural design.
“Standard supermarkets are designed to promote consumption of foods that are high in sugar and preservatives,” explains Sanghvi, “because those are the high-margin items that maximize profit.” According to current guidelines, in an average 10,000-square-foot supermarket, only 500 square feet must be utilized for fresh produce. If the U.S. spends millions to build supermarkets according to the conventional mold, she argues, we may see some improvement in public health simply as a result of increased access to food, but we stand to achieve far better outcomes if we first reconsider supermarket design itself.
This is a great point being made about how our environment has a huge impact on our behavior, as well as corporate responsibility for health and wellness, and not just profits. This seems especially important for food stores, and I’m glad to see somebody taking up the cause.
Mental Flowers 