Play! Ground is a proposed design for a portable and inclusive playground. This was a week-long project for RIT IdeaLab, in collaboration with Endless Highway -- an organization dedicated to provide inclusive opportunities for youth of different abilities.
Skills: Ethnographic Study - Participant Observation, Persona, Prototyping
Collaborators: Hannah Ni, Marissa Tirone (coach), and Caralie Fennessey (client expert)

Problem Description

Traditional playground installations are usually inaccessible for kids with disabilities. While some places have accessible installations, they sometimes do not have a way for differently-abled kids to play together. According to the 2017 Disability Statistics by University of New Hampshire Institute of Disability, 7.3% of children between 5-17 years old and 0.4% of those under 5 years old have a disability. They also divided different disabilities into 4 major categories: Hearing, Vision, Cognitive, and Ambulatory.

Current Play Options

To learn more about the problem, we spoke with our coach and client expert and researched currently-available outdoor playgrounds as well as an indoor play area local in Rochester, The Strong National Museum of Play. We found that lot of current playgrounds focus on large play structures that are inaccessible. Some of them include slides, seesaws, roundabouts, climbing structures, and stepping stones. While there are also interactive activity panels, they often come with painted or printed pictures that are not tactile and can fade away in time.
We also found that small changes can be added to current museum installations that will make them more accessible for youth with disabilities. These changes include:

• Adding a ramp for raised areas like steps or tables
• Widening interactive narrow spaces
• Raising storage areas and adding foldable seats for easier access of wheelchair users
• Adding braille text beside interactive buttons

Persona

After conducting some background research, we developed a primary persona to help us with the design moving forward.

Lily is a 10-year old wheelchair user who loves going outside and playing with her friends. She also enjoys puzzles and mentally stimulating games whenever she needs to take a break from being active. She gets frustrated when she can't join her friends in certain play structures like the swing or slide.

Design Considerations

Stimulating

• The game must maintain its replay value no matter how many times the user interacts with the structure

Eye-catching

• ​Kids should be enticed to play even from afar
• The installment must promote curiosity and be engaging

Safe and Versatile

• Materials should be safe, reliable, and accessible for both indoor and outdoor play

Group Play

• Collaboration and interaction among kids of different abilities must be encouraged

Low-Fidelity Prototype

We had multiple initial ideas and design sketches that were inspired by current playground installations and design considerations, as well as our childhood experiences. These include moving puzzles, interactive musical instruments that have different textures and shapes, all around architectural ramp for tables, tactile materials, among others.

We presented this idea to our coach and decided that with the time constraint, we had to narrow down our list to only a handful of ideas. We decided to create a low-fidelity prototype of one of the puzzles to show how choosing the right materials and adding a tactile element can enhance a child's play experience. The moving puzzle of a sun shown below is created with a tactile foam on top of the background. This method is better than printing the graphic directly on the material so that the users can feel the outer edges of the sun and its rays.

Aesthetic

To honor one of our main design considerations, we added inspirations for color palettes to Miro. This color representation helped guide the creation of the final high-fidelity prototype. A mix of soft and vibrant colors were added in consideration of children's stimulation capacity (i.e., some children may need less or more).

High-Fidelity Prototype

We decided on a portable installation with 5 separate and detachable interactive play pieces that include (from left to right):

• Rotational puzzle that can be enjoyed by multiple kids at a time. Each piece of the puzzle contains a triangle with 3 different pictures to increase replay value
• Interactive pipes that produce different sounds similar to a xylophone
• 2-sided numeric moving puzzle with engraved braille on the wood surface
• Textural balls of different surfaces which contain materials that can make sounds to stimulate different senses
• 2-sided graphic moving puzzle with a recognizable tactile picture

Materials

We also included a list of different potential materials and textures that are durable and weather-proof. We looked at current outdoor furnitures for inspiration as well as common materials found in playgrounds. Some of the materials that may be used are:

• Silicone
• Wood - especially for engraving purposed
• Colorful polypropylene
• Metal
• Strings
• Sponge
• PVC vinyl
• Outdoor rattan
• Sea glass for their colorful and reflective properties

Client Feedback

We presented our proposed design to RIT IdeaLab and to our coach and client expert and are very grateful for their positive responses.

I’m so happy to have been able to work with you all this past week. Hannah and Rez --- you were amazing.  Only two team members, and such well thought-out designs and empathetic responses.  I would love to see your schemes pushed to the next phase – both the panel design and the flowers (which Caralie and Dan may know less about…). 

- Marissa

I’d like to second what Marissa stated about your thoughtful design process. I’m not just saying this – your presentation really did stand out in all my years of doing this. I super appreciated the attention to detail you paid with both the user experience aspect of your design and the inclusive nature of your entire presentation. I showed the design to Rob Tortorella, Founder of Endless Highway, and he was very impressed. He uses a wheelchair for everyday mobility and when his daughter was a child it was difficult to find play spaces where he could interact with her rather than just watch. He suggested somehow elevating or cutting out enough space where someone in a wheelchair could roll right up to the panels which I thought was an interesting idea.

- Caralie