Designing with children

This is the first in a regular column on issues in architecture and design as they intersect with an architect’s practice.

They say you should never work with animals or children, as an architect you rarely get the chance but last year I had the opportunity to do the later.

I was part of a project run by Regional Arts Victoria called ‘Eco Cubby’. It aims to increase awareness of design in primary school children by embedding architects in schools. The architect introduces children to the principles of design and sustainability through a project, in this case designing an eco cubby.

My involvement was with my daughter’s kindergarten. So how do you go about discussing design principles with a 3yo? I started with a long winded discussion about the ideas of site, blank uncomprehending eyes were soon watching me. Fortunately Anne Ferguson (the visual arts teacher) and Rachel Giansiracusa (the class teacher) came to my rescue. Introduce an idea and then structure the learning process around play. We ran activities based around simple design principles, documenting the children’s responses to the task.

So where to site the cubby? In a tree was popular, as was under the water tank but always attached to objects not to open space. One child was keen to put a lead on the cubby and drag it around the playground. The idea of shelter was introduced by making lots of little cubbies from found materials, the playground turned into a city of cubby’s. Material and construction were discussed through making mini mud bricks, using them to make walls and eventually to construct lego like models stuck together with mud.

Form was defined by the children’s first attempts to draw circles and squares, a plan was drawn in the playground tanbark with a stick encircling the class to make sure we could all fit in. Milk cartons were placed on the line to mark out the plan. Cartons were removed to locate doors on natural circulation paths, for windows to line up with the angle of the sun to capture morning and afternoon light, and to take advantage of the breeze we could feel. Finally a mock up of the form was made out of bamboo to see how our design would relate to the scale of the playground.

Having to freeze the design at a point to let the other parts of the building process occur has temporarily taken it away from the children, but they will get it back. The cubby being built by the builders will be one in a series for them, not the final one. Once finished and the protection fences come down, they will take it over, and the design will start to evolve again. From a cubby to a palace, from palace to a rocket ship and so on. In the meantime they’re having fun using the scale model we built as a doll’s house.

What I observed is that children’s ability to conceive and re-conceive their environments is the natural consequence of play; and that there was little distinction between conception and building, or building and playing. The pile of bricks stacked up intended for use in the building are as much in play as the walls to the cubby they will become. What the children have learnt time will tell, but I noticed that my daughter and friends have included the role of architect and drawing designs into the lexicon of games alongside mummy’s and daddy’s, doctors and nurses, and playing school. There’s also been an increase in the number of tool belts being worn in the playground.

Scale models from the other schools involved in last year’s program were recently exhibited at Artplay. It was interesting seeing the different approaches from the older primary school children. Generally the designs followed one of either two approaches. The first was the sprawling composition or assemblage, recycled building materials and car tyres sprawling across a playground to form play areas, equipment, gardens, and cubby holes. They have a striking resemblance to the fortress refinery in Mad Max 2, raw and instinctive, mutating as the children reconfigured their own landscapes to better fit with the changing nature of the games they played. A constant process of recycling, reuse, and stockpiling. Maintenance staff will be tearing their hair out, and insurers raising premiums. The second approach followed the educational models, simple sheds ornamented with the kit of sustainability; water tanks, solar panels, worm bins, roof gardens, and chook sheds. The children will no doubt soon be lecturing parents on the benefits of buckets in the shower to water the garden, and recycling vegetable scraps in compost bins.

You can see more of the eco cubby projects at: http://www.eco-cubby.typepad.com/