Monkey bars, a slide, maybe a merry-go-round.  We will always love these trusty staleworts of the park, but now, more than ever, the scope and complexity of new kinds of structures is challenging the way we think about play. Designers and innovators are creating structures that go far beyond swings, encouraging users of different ages and abilities to customize their play experiences through experimentation and exploration. For many people, the fun lies in finding your physical limits; but what if once you reached those limits, the play structure adapted to a greater degree of difficulty? Research groups, such as Human Computer Interaction Engineering at MIT, are exploring how objects designed for play can adapt to help with skill building.  Questions like “how high can you go?” or “how long can you hang on?” turn into “can you go higher?” or “can you hang on longer?”

In this studio, students will look beyond the typical playground to design structures that can engage the full spectrum of possible users and integrate the thrill of adventure into the everyday.  In collaboration with students at Karam House in Reyhanli, Turkey, we will prototype play objects that can be installed within an existing timber-framed playground structure.  Student teams will be in direct contact with corresponding teams at Karam House throughout the entire design process through weekly virtual meetings.  In the first phase of the studio, students will create scale models of their prototypes; after midterm, teams will consolidate, and a select number of designs from both Karam and Woodstock will be built in full scale at each location.