Modularity and multiplicity for flexibility
A key distinguishing factor of our playground from others is its flexibility to work during COVID or post-COVID, in a small middle-of-the-city park or a large empty space in the suburbs. To accomplish this flexibility, we’ve designed our playground with modularity in mind. Our playground is a collection of “islands” that can be configured and re-configured as desired on a hexogonal grid. Coupled with this idea of modularity, and intended to keep kids separated, is our other key design principle of multiplicity. By making the same experience available in multiple places, kids can share experiences from a safe distance, and not feel the need to crowd into the only space available for an activity there is to do.
The Guiding Hand Principle
Kids are chaos. They are are incredibly difficult to regulate, especially on rules about physical self-control. But the beauty of design is its subtle intentionality. We don’t have try quite as hard to enforce certain physical space rule following in a space, if we have control of how to create the space. The ‘Guiding Hand Principle’ is our philosophy for keeping kids appropriately separated by letting the flow of the space create natural separation. The space itself, not authority figures or arbitrary rules, will set up the majority of the rules.