War or Peace

Recently, I posted the photo below on PlayGroundology FB commenting that I thought the tank had found a better purpose than for what it was originally intended. One of my regular readers didn’t agree. She thinks war machinery has no place in kids’ playgrounds.

A couple of days later I came across articles in the San Francisco Chronicle about a fighter plane that had been a play structure fixture for more than three decades in San Francisco’s Larsen Park. It got me thinking, would I allow our three young kids to play on a tank, or in a fighter jet?

Monstrum playscape in Nørrebroparken, Copenhagen. Photo credit – Jan Ingemansen. License – (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Back in the mid-1960s as a young lad in grade school getting the bi-monthly short back and sides at the barbers, I was an avid after school and weekend warrior. I lived in Toronto then and our apartment block bordered on a 10 to 15 acre green space. The hills were dotted with unmanicured shrubs and a valley plain served as a soccer and baseball field, bike rodeo and a gathering place for war games. It was a green oasis but no pastoral idyll. On the other side of a six foot high Frost fence at the southern extremity of our play zone, the 12-lane 401 highway roared by. Our activities continually played out to the droning buzz of fast flow traffic.

Along with sports and playgrounding, war games were a recurring part of our play menu. Even though real life conflicts in Vietnam and Biafra raged on newscasts we chose our recreations from contemporary pop culture. Sgt. Rock, who seemingly single-handedly won the World War II for the allies, was one of our primary inspirations for mid-century warfare. James Bond was of course our role model in the world of spylike skullduggery against our Cold War foes. A number of us were packing the 007 spy attaché case.

Reaching further back in time, we pretended we were fighting in the American Civil War. There wasn’t much left to the imagination from the scenes depicted in the Topps Civil War News card set. Then there was also the Hollywood fueled reenactments of epic Cowboy and Indian clashes. No matter the historical period, we had the rifles, machine guns, helmets, knives, canteens, grenades and other necessary accoutrements to vanquish the enemy whoever that might be.

Topps Civil War News Trading Card, 1962

We played regularly taking turns being the ‘bad’ guys. We were killed, resurrected and played on. There was one family of five brothers whose parents’ religious convictions had them attending an evangelical church. There only stricture was no war games on Sundays. At the time, it was the only opposition I was aware of to our grade school warrior play.

About 15 years later I was back in Toronto working in the peace movement organizing short term international youth exchanges focused on volunteer activities with a social justice twist. The early 1980s was a time of demonstrations in Toronto trying to raise awareness about conflicts in Central and South America, South Africa and about militarism in our own backyard such as work being done in support of the Cruise Missile. At the time I was an ardent and righteous anti-war toys guy and pro ‘arms are for hugging’.

Not a lot has changed for me since then except perhaps that the certainty of black and white solutions has become more grey. I’m as passionate as ever about arms being for hugging. I’ve never bought toy guns for any of our kids and never will. Regardless the kids fabricate them with different materials – sticks, blocks, lego. Just yesterday, Noah and Nellie were scooting around the house ‘shooting’ at each other. When I gave them my one minute exposition on what guns do to people, Noah quipped, “these are pretend water guns papa”.

The war toys debate has been on for decades. Though not toys per se, these pieces of decommissioned military hardware in playgrounds are seen as birds of a feather. Here is a young David Halton on Canada’s CBC TV in December 1965 reporting on a Voice of Women campaign.

xxxlCBC TV, December 1965 – Voice of Women Campaign

It was easier when I was a kid. I was embroiled in the moment and the ethos of the times. I loved my Daisy air rifle and my Hong Kong machine gun that made the noise and sported a facsimile flame of red plastic at the barrel tip. I don’t think I was desensitized. I would argue in fact that many of today’s video games are far more graphic and violent than anything we experienced as kids.

If an old CF-18 dropped into our neighbourhood playground tomorrow, I’d let the kids play on it. I’d also let them know what kind of machine it was. In a way, I think we’d be beating swords into ploughshares. What are your thoughts?

The British Columbia Teacher’s Federation has produced an excellent resource – War Toys to Peace Art – that you can download here.

Sculpting Play – Freezing Time

I love to see joyful kids at play immortalized in public art. The frozen in time playfulness in sculpted forms can put a spring in our steps and a smile on our faces like this barefoot piggy back race.

Singapore Botanic Gardens. Photo Credit – Choo Yut Shing. License – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sifting through the flickr world of images, it seems that sculptures of playing kids are particularly popular in the United States. In the Sculpture of Play flickr gallery, public art from Bangladesh, Japan, Italy and Canada is also represented.

Dendermonde, Belgium. Photo credit – egonwegh. License – CC BY-NC 2.0.

I like to imagine that these posed stances are momentarily released from their immobility each time a child plays in their vicinity or an adult pauses to wistfully reminisce about days of play in years gone by.

Hats off to flickr photographers who allow others to curate and share their work. Click Sculptures of Play for the lightbox version of the gallery.

I have yet to come across any public art depicting play in my hometown of Halifax, Canada. I have been wondering though if, in communities that have commissioned art that depicts play, there is a corresponding commitment to providing public play spaces.

If you have any photos of public art depicting play, drop us a line and we’ll post to PlayGroundoloy FB.

PLAY WORK BUILD – The Back Story

If you’re in Washington, D.C. between now and November 18, 2014, drop in to the National Building Museum. PLAY WORK BUILD is a new exhibition that explores connections and interrelationships between these three powerful imperatives.

The Rockwell Group’s Barry Richards and the musueum’s Cathy Crane Frankel tell it like this:

In addition to numerous building toys, the hands on Imagination Playground is an integral part of the exhibition.

Click PLAY WORK BUILD for more information.

This would certainly appeal to all those who have mad builder kids in their midst like my young lad Noah-David who dreams in Lego blocks. Parents, maybe you’re fondly remembering your days of building prowess with Tinker Toy, Mecanno and the like. Oh, and did I mention the unbridled fun of Imagination Playground – slideshow here.

Treasure Maps and Playground Pirates

In North America, it’s the season to see bands of pint-sized pirates, cowboys, astronauts, superheroes, Mario Brothers and others out and about in the streets in preparation for the annual Hallowe’en pilgrimmage. Our Nellie-Rose took on a swashbuckling persona at a recent visit to a community centre party. She makes for a very fetching pirate captain I think – eat your heart out Johnny.

By serendipitous happenstance, at the same time Nellie-Rose was suiting up for her arrgh me maties moments, my inbox goes ping with a London’s calling treasure. It’s a great email from Verônica telling me all about the new venture she’s embarked on with her partner Rodrigo – mapping the playgrounds of the world.

Map View – London

Following an afternoon in downtown London, these transplanted Brazilians were looking for a playground break for their daughter who was beyond bored after a shopping expedition. There was nothing in sight and when they used their mobile devices to look for something all that came up were Thai Restaurants and Sex Shops – not the fare they were interested in.

That experience inspired Verônica and Rodrigo to get mapping. They are setting sail and inviting playground lovers to join the crew. While adventuring, they will locate and mark treasure troves with an ‘X’, well okay, with a swing icon actually.

It’s early days for Our Treasure Map, its companion blog and Facebook Page so the number of sites are limited and concentrated primarily in London, UK. The plan is to reach out and incorporate already available information and track down new data.

Map View Brasilia

Our Treasure Map’s Brazilian friends have been busy loading up the platform with playgrounds from Brasilia, Rio and Sao Paulo. There’s plenty of room for adding more playgrounds and other child engaging activities and places. The site has a mobile version and the couple are working on developing an app too.

Rocket Playground at Ana Lidai Park in Brasilia.

When the sky is the limit, there’s lots to do and plenty of room to fly. I tried the ‘add a playground’ feature – it’s totally painless. Our Treasure Map now has its first entry from Nova Scotia a few kilometres from our home and not far from a popular swimming beach. Add something yourself and don’t forget the photos. They can make all the difference.

Verônica and Rodrigo are looking for feedback on Our Treasure Map 1.0 and will make changes and introduce new elements based on what they hear from users. So do drop into the Facebook Page and let them know what’s working for you and what you might like to see added. My parting comment – I love the little pirate guy, reminds me of our Noah-David.

Help chart the course of play and share your playground riches on Our Treasure Map. Happy Hallowe’en…

Readers Put PlayGroundology on the Map

Back in February, WordPress introduced a ‘views by country’ feature. On a daily basis bloggers can check in and see where readers are located down to the country level. Yesterday, readers dropped in from the US, Canada, Turkey, Singapore, UK, Australia, Poland, Malaysia, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Chile and France.

The map captures cumulative readers since the feature was introduced. The grey shaded areas represent ‘readerless’ countries for PlayGroundology. I’m happy and somewhat surprised to see that the blog has attracted readers from all other countries shaded orange and red on the map.

I check in a few times every week to see readers’ origins tagged by their country’s flag. It’s pure exotica for me as I sit in our small study close to the shores of Halifax Harbour and wonder about the state of play in places for which I have little or no knowledge.

PlayGroundology has just passed the 200,000 page views mark. Thanks everyone for dropping in. If you like what you see, tell your friends, families and colleagues.

I’m always interested in story ideas, guest posts, photos, movies – just drop a line to playgroundology@gmail.com.

To paraphrase Mister Bob – One Love, One World, One Play….

Source: Association des ludothèques françaises. Illustrator: Éric Brossier

Proxy Playgrounds

Occasionally, intrepid photographers comb the planet looking for playgrounds to immortalize digitally for PlayGroundology readers. Truth is, that’s me in my Walter Mitty moments, dreaming wildly of a posse of professional playground shooters on assignment and sharing their best shots here.

In fact, what’s happening is that I am sometimes able to cajole traveling friends and family to take a few snaps for me of interesting playgrounds they happen across. These folks become my proxies taking me, and by extension those of you who tune in here, to playgrounds I have never visited before.

Near Loch Lomond, Scotland

Thanks to my septuagenarian parents, PlayGroundology has snagged some photos of Scottish, Swedish and Dutch playgrounds. The Scottish shots are in the vicinities of Loch Lomond, Strone and Inverkip, familiar places full of memories reaching back nearly 60 years for them.

I don’t remember much in the way of playgrounds when I first went Clydeside as a 5-year-old. I was a kindergarten kid at Larkfield School in Greenock for a couple of months and remember playing in the schoolyard but don’t recall any equipment.

Near Loch Lomond, Scotland

On another visit in the late ’60s, I remember a playground up behind the shops close by my granma’s place on Auchmead Rd. I also recall the most grueling ‘game’ I ever played. In the backyard of the Council houses, I had to run a gauntlet between two lines of 15 kids per line who whaled away at me with their feet, fists and knees as I ran through as quickly as I could. Following this medieval-like ordeal I did get a grudging acceptance from the local kids. It was the rite of passage for the Canadian boy on the block.

Near Loch Lomond, Scotland

For more Loch Lomond playground photos from my parents’ excellent playground adventure, check PlayGroundology FB. Addiitonal photos will be posted to PlayGroundology FaceBook over the coming days.

Before you go, take a wee listen to Runrig’s rendition of a song long associated with Scotland, Loch Lomond. It’s a tune, a place and a playground.

You may also like these posts with photos provided by friends.

In the Name of Play – On Assignment, Dateline Atlanta

Paris Playgrounds a la Carte

Play Faces

Kids look awesome when they’re playing, having fun. The movements, gestures and sounds are a universal language. Here are a few photos to share through the generosity of flickr members who use Creative Commons licenses for their work. I hope you’ll enjoy these faces of play.

Click images to enlarge.

Happy Face – Playing in the Fields; Photo credit – Joseph Andie R Lamug; Source; Creative Commons .
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Child Play – Madagascar, child playing with a automobile made of carrot and other vegetables; Photo credit – Michele Molinari; Source; Creative Commons.

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On the Run – Bangalore, India; Photo credit- Syed Nabil Aljunid; Source; Creative Commons.

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Just having fun… – Guizhou, China; Photo credit – Sung Ming Whang; Source; Creative Commons

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Superman and friends playing with bubbles – Seattle, USA; Photo credit – wonderlane; Source; Creative Commons

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Boys Playing Stickball, Havana, Cuba, 1999; Photo credit – Cliff; Source; Creative Commons.

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Playing; Photo credit – Michel Di Feliciantonio; Source; Creative Commons.

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J.O.Y. B.O.Y.; Photo credit – Vinoth Chandar; Source; Creative Commons.

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Woooo…; Photo credit – Mads Bødker; Source; Creative Commons.

Share a play face or two, or three within your social networks. Grab one from here – they all have creative commons licenses – or take one of your own images and share it around. Play faces are infectious, they make people smile.

Remember – Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard

Words can never capture the terror of Hiroshima’s fiery destruction.

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Even in the aftermath of such fear, pain and loss, the heart and spirit are boundless in their ability to forgive. Within a couple of years of the firebomb sweeping through their city, children from a Hiroshima school sent a series of pictures to the congregation of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. as a thank you for the gifts the parishioners had sent them.

Source: Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard

Play, beauty and joy are recurring themes in the nearly 50 pictures that were uncovered in a congregation member’s home in 1996. The documentary film, Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard, by director Bryan Reichhardt tells the story of these timeless drawings full of light and life.

Source: Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard

If you’re in the vicinity of UCLA Berkley, the pictures are on exhibit at the Institute of East Asian Studies until September 12, 2012 – In the Shadow of Hiroshima: Childrens’ Visions of Life. The documentary will be screened there on August 10 at 4:30 p.m. in conjunction with an observance of the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Hug your kids today, get out and play.

Postscript to The Science of Play in Today’s Parent

Today’s Parent, a Canadian magazine, ran a feature in their June issue on playground trends and designs – The Science of Play. Sarah Lazarovic’s article provides an excellent overview of some of the current thoughts and perspectives on the world of playgrounds. She draws on a number of knowledgeable people in Europe and North America to illustrate the story. As founder of the blog PlayGroundology, and a novitiate playgroundologist, I was very pleased to be asked to contribute a few comments.

When Sarah and I spoke, I prattled on and on and on. Her questions provided some airtime to share thoughts on a topic I’ve become passionate about. I now have a modest couple of years under my belt researching and conducting interviews that eventually wind up as posts in this blog. My kids and I have also racked up some practical experience putting close to 100 playgrounds in five provinces through their paces. Just today, my son Noah-David piped up to me en route to one of our current local favourites, “Papa, we’re playground explorers, aren’t we?” Our hometown adventures, captured since the summer of 2009 in Halifax Plays, are just about to get underway for this year.

Home on the Range – Halifax

The Science of Play hits all the high notes on its whirlwind tour. Sarah does a tremendous job of connecting the dots on a story where the subject matter defies stereotyping or pigeonholing. There is no one size fits all when it comes to public playspaces. Sarah’s interview for the Today’s Parent story was a chance to share some of the playground knowledge I’ve acquired in the recent past. More importantly, the story presents a significant opportunity to build on Canadian conversations about what goes on behind the scenes of playground planning and development – discussions around policy considerations, design and financing models for example.

It’s in that spirit that I offer this postscript to Sarah’s article in order to expand on a couple of the points and provide some context around one of my comments.

Comparatively speaking, from what I have seen in eastern Canada, there is a lack of creativity when it comes to playground design in this country. All we have to do is look overseas to Denmark, Germany, the UK, Sweden and Finland where design is flourishing. Their towns and cities have not been overtaken by the march of composite plastics and prefab metal posts and beams.

Although creative design is not a hallmark of the Canadian playground ethos, it is not totally absent from the landscape. There are bright spots well worth a look. Nestled on the Mountain in downtown Montreal is Salamander Playground – green grass, grand trees and a water orb. In the nation’s capital, Strathcona’s Folly is a time capsule playspace made from architectural bric à brac, a treasure of form and texture.

Water Orb – Montreal’s Salamander Playground. Click here for Original Designs slideshow.

The Magdalen Islands’ Boats are anchored safely ashore as they crash and crest through imaginary seas. And as home port to Canada’s East Coast Navy, maritime traditions run deep in Halifax and now kids can pretend they’re on a diving adventure à la Jules Verne on their own orange submarine. In Winnipeg, there’s Assiniboine Park Playground opened in the spring of 2011 that puts nature front and center. I’m hoping someday to get out to Richmond, B.C., just to test and tour that funked up Garden City Park Playground.

In Halifax, we are well served by the number of playgrounds – over 300 – and by high maintenance standards. But with the exception of our orange submarine, we’re kind of sparse on the discovering new design frontiers department. As parents, if we’re not satisfied with the current state of playground design then we have a responsibility to band together and engage our municipal governments and/or school boards to bring about change. This is not change just for the sake of it. It’s about creating enticing spaces with public funds that will help to break the pall of physical inactivity which is becoming endemic. It’s about valuing creativity in our children and local designers and fashioning space that calls out for imaginative play.

Canada could benefit from a voluntary sector organization that focuses exclusively on advocating for play on behalf of kids. These organizations exist in Europe and Australasia. I’m thinking here of Play England and its independent sister organizations such as Play Wales which hosted the 2011 International Play Association World Conference.

These groups conduct research, develop policy guidelines, compile and curate online resources, work with and challenge government, deliver programming and fulfill an important role in the public promotion of play. They are a non-commercial voice of sanity. In the US the social entrepreneur group KaBOOM! does similar work promoting play through Playful Cities USA in addition to spearheading playground builds with local communities.

On the question of costs, customized designs local or otherwise, can be more expensive but this is certainly not always the case. If there are no requests for alternative playground designs being made of a municipality then the path of least resistance is a trip to the numerous manufacturers who provide tried and true professional service that does not deviate from code and embodies more of the same old, same old. With price tags running anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000 they’re certainly not in the ‘cheap’ category. Playgrounds are big business.

Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO with Sinking Ship Productions has co-produced the first season of a show that’s all about do-it-yourself improvements and renos to local playgrounds by the kids who use them. Each project comes in at $10,000 cash with additional donations and volunteer labour. It’s an interesting model that might catch on. Read about it soon here in PlayGroundology.

Thanks to the editors at Today’s Parent for assigning this article. This is a conversation that should continue to grow. There is more to this universe of play and playgrounds than meets the eye. I don’t have any sophisticated media monitoring tools at my disposal but I sense there is an uptick in Canada’s mainstream media on coverage that focuses on play and playgrounds. I’ve seen stories on TVO, heard them on CBC Radio and read them in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Calgary Herald and The Vancouver Sun to name some that come immediately to mind.

Keep the play movin’.

View this document on Scribd

Sir Ken of TEDalot on Play and Learning

Earlier this spring, Sir Ken (Robinson) shared his views on education with an appreciative audience in Halifax, Nova Scotia – home of PlayGroundology. I was one of the 1,000 in attendance who enjoyed an accomplished and entertaining critic of conventional wisdom about education and creativity. No props, no notes, plenty of humourous asides and always an à propos anecdote.

Source: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

Now that I’ve seen and heard him in the flesh, I feel I can get away with just Sir Ken. I’m sure there are tens of millions who have seen his TEDTalks via YouTube who feel this at a remove intimacy the same way I do. The afternoon in question, I managed to get myself in the front row no more than 5 metres from Sir Ken. It was a piece of dumb luck happenstance that occurred because I arrived late and those who had the reserved front row arrived even later or not at all.

At the conclusion of the 90 minute story that held the crowd rapt, there was time for a couple of questions. I piped up and got first at bats for myself and the readers of PlayGroundology with this one I had been eager to ask:

How important is the role of play in learning?

For the next five minutes or so, Sir Ken spoke to a question that he had likely heard and certainly considered previously. What follows is the minimally edited response. Thanks Sir Ken, may millions more be inspired by your experience and informed by your passion.

Source: TEDTalks via YouTube.

It’s fundamental. I talk a lot as you know about creativity. I didn’t want to get into all that again today particularly because of the nature of this conference. There are three key terms when we come to think about play. The first is imagination, the second is creativity and the third is innovation.

Imagination, I believe, is what fundamentally sets us apart from the rest of life on earth – very little does truthfully. I think we overplay the differences between ourselves and everything else. Our life is short and organic like everything else. We come into groovy buildings like this and persuade ourselves we’re different but we’re not. But we are in this respect. Human beings have powerful imaginations. By imagination I mean the ability to bring into mind things that aren’t present to our senses.

So with imagination you can revisit the past, you can enter into other peoples’ consciousness empathetically – you can imagine what it would be like to be them – and you can anticipate the future. It’s what it is for everything that counts as distinctively human. It’s not a single power, it’s a mix of all different powers that come together and we call it such. But the thing is you can be imaginative all day long and never do anything.

To be creative you have to do something. Creativity is very practical. I think of it as applied imagination, putting your imagination to work.

There are lots of misconceptions about that and we can talk about that. My point is that the power to imagine and the impulse to create, to make things is the birthright of humanity. It’s why we are as we are. It’s why we don’t just live in buildings we’ve made, we inhabit conceptual structures that we’ve evolved.

We’ve evolved differently, we see the world from different perspectives and points of view because our experience of the world isn’t just direct it’s mediated through the ideas and values we frame and share with other people as a culture. To me it’s the most fundamental part of our way of being in the world.

Play for young people is actually essential. It’s a way in which they literally flex their muscles.

It amazes me how quickly and how often we forget that we are embodied, that we see the world the way do because we live in these bodies. If we were all 18′ tall with eyes at the sides of our head it would look very different to us. Dogs hear different frequencies and birds smell things we don’t smell. We see the world as it is because we’re built the way we are. We are embodied, we’re not just brains on a stick.

Our children go to school in their bodies. Play is one of the ways they flex them, explore them, understand them, connect to other people. We also live in virtual worlds that are the result of our imaginations. They need the ability to exercise that too. You see you can’t get to all the things we value – creativity in business, in work, in social systems, in the arts and the sciences if your imagination has atrophied.

It’s the same, the exact analogy for me with athletics. The Olympics are happening this year. If you want to take part in the Olympics then you better practice. There’s no point in saying I want to take part in the 100 metres and I won’t do anything in the meantime – I’ll just show up. I have high hopes. Well good luck with that. If you’re going to be an athlete, you have to exercise your body. If you want to be creative you have to exercise your mind, your consciousness, your spirit. It’s fundamental to me.

Play, there’s different ways of defining it but broadly speaking play is an end in itself. It’s not directed to a larger purpose.

I don’t want a system of playing schools where you get 15 minutes to do it then we test for a score. You just play because it’s interesting, enjoyable and pleasurable. You do it for that reason and no other reason. And it’s no coincidence that we go on to talk about playing sports, playing instruments because at the heart of it there’s this possibility of creative fulfillment that lies at the centre. I see it is a fundamental. It strikes me as a disaster that we’re excluding it from kindergartens, from elementary school and from high schools and colleges too.

For some reason we’ve forgotten our own humanity and we’ve come to assume that play is some kind of disposable, part time leisure activity that we can do without so we can be more serious.

I quote in the book a guy called Richard Feynman who won the Nobel Prize, a physicist. He’s a brilliant man and also a great jazz bongo player. He got the Nobel Prize for work he did in particle physics.

Photo credit – Tom Harvey.

He started he said when he was sitting in Cornell University in the dining hall and a student fell over with a plateful of food. The thing just went up in the air. And Richard Feynman his eye was attracted by the plate, it was spinning and wobbling. The Cornell logo was on it and he said he watched it going round. He said he got fascinated by it.

Interesting of course, he didn’t rush to help the student. He thought, no, this is an interesting piece of physics right here now. He started to think about the laws of motion that were affecting the wobble in the plate. He jotted down some equations on his napkin and then went on about his business.

A few days later he found this napkin and it reminded him and he started playing with it. He said it reminded him that it connected to things he was working on in particle physics. He said that over the next few weeks all these equations started to rush out of him like champagne out of a bottle. He said, ‘but all I was doing was playing with it for the fun of it’. But he said it led to the equation that went on to be the basis of him winning the Nobel Prize.

Very often our greatest achievements come from our most playful activities.

There is more here – Sir Ken’s page, TED search results, Animation – Changing Education Paradigms.