Pages

▼

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Playgrounds in 2024?


I'm late getting to this one, but WIRED magazine featured "The Future of Playgrounds" as a speculative scenario in its FOUND series last month.  The winning design team members were Anonymous, Ryan Flake, jgombarcik, and Scott. Aaron Rowe was the writer, Daniel Salo the photographer and Joel McKendry designed the blueprint.   They seem to see the future as a magnified version of today:  safety signage has morphed into a full legal disclamer, the playground is thoroughly 'branded', including at the required sterilization dip tank and the increasing sedentary grown-ups have consigned their strollers to an autonomous track.  A grim vision (though tongue-in-cheek, I know).  What's yours?  Where will playgrounds be in 2024? 
at

3 comments:

  1. cyngenSeptember 2, 2010 at 4:51 AM

    Thanks so much for posting this. How did I miss it? A true horror story...a fear-based playground. That's the way things are going if we're not careful. If you don't mind the plug, may I say that this is exactly what we are trying to prevent from happening with Playable10 International Design Competition http://www.PlayableDesign.org
    If this kind of thing comes to pass (and they are really trying hard for it to be real) it will do an enormous disservice to our children.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Play for LifeSeptember 5, 2010 at 4:59 AM

    In 2024 I hope my 'grandchildren' will be playing in the beautiful parks and gardens that Melbourne has been famous for for years and years. The same parks and gardens full of ponds and trees and green rolling hills that my children grew up playing in ... I hope we won't have to sign any disclaimer before we play either ... Then again they thought by the year 2000 we'd be traveling around in spaceships instead of cars so I'm not too worried things will change ... will they?!
    Donna :) :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownSeptember 5, 2010 at 11:49 AM

    great blog! sorry to post this as a comment, but i couldn't find any contact info on your site....

    we recently completed Geometry Playground, a museum exhibition-cum-playground focused on geometry. exhibits span from artifacts in vitrines, through tabletop interactives all the way up to full-scale playground climbers, all with a focus on geometry.

    http://exploratorium.edu/geometryplayground/

    wish we had found your site earlier, there's a lot of great observations on what playgrounds are and could be that would have benefitted our development and thinking. thanks for this!

    ReplyDelete