As anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics will tell you, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it simply changes form. Taking this universal law and quite literally running with it, Dott Cornwall’s Serious Play project has investigated how to recapture some of the energy of playing children.
Serious Play set out to discover how to harness the kinetic energy expended by children in public playgrounds and feed it back into the electricity supply. But these would be no ordinary public playgrounds: using Dott’s co-discovery and co-design method, the children themselves would have a hand in developing the play equipment, at the same time learning about how energy is transferred from one form to another in the most efficient ways.
At the end of December 2008, play was acknowledged by the Government as a vitally important aspect of children’s lives. The Labour Government introduced the first national Play Strategy and committed £235 million to improve and develop play areas throughout the country. This ten-year national strategy was based on consultation with thousands of children, young people, parents and professionals, and put in print a number of objectives for the right to play for all children.
Although this programme has since been derailed by the coalition Government’s austerity cuts, Dott’s Serious Play has generated a wealth of ideas for how energy-harnessing, codesigned playgrounds could be created in the future. Led by Dott senior producer Mike Hawes, a partner in Falmouth-based spatial design and landscape architecture consultancy Mor Architecture, the Serious Play project was run in collaboration with Joanna Henley from SciArt Solutions, Amy Charman from Academy and 3D design consultancy Boex, as well as the Cornwall Council Play Pathfinder team.
Using the co-discovery approach, the project team built initial ideas for the play equipment centred around four energy themes – water, wind, heat/light and kinetic energy. Each idea linked play and sustainable energy production in an educational way.
Energy-capturing play equipment requires three main components – a cap (or ‘doer’), a stalk (or ‘connector’) and a root (or ‘transformer’). One co-design activity used three rows of cards, each containing different versions of the cap, stalk and root, and gave school children the opportunity to select different combinations, in a fruit machine-style shuffle, to generate ideas for workable prototypes.
Early test equipment was then developed around these themes and presented at the Royal Cornwall Show in June 2010, before heading off on a tour of various other community events around the county. ‘The tour allowed us to use test pieces with children using the co-discovery and co-design methods. The kids were able to tell us which equipment they found fun and we could discover together which were the most efficient in terms of energy production,’ says Hawes.
Through play, the children were able to see how their movement was being translated into energy that illuminated light bulbs or inflated balloons. At the same time, kids were given postcards on which they could draw their own ideas for an energy-harnessing adventure playground. Suggestions ranged from human hamster wheels to exploding bubbles to energy-generating rope swings.
Although the test pieces had no practical application, a festive demonstration of kid power took place on Lemon Quay in Truro in December last year, revealing how kinetic play could be used to power the lights on a Christmas tree. Ultimately, it is hoped that the co-designed playgrounds would actually return the energy to the National Grid.
Like all Dott projects, Serious Play addresses a range of important social issues. NHS statistics reportedly show that almost a quarter of children are classed as overweight or obese by the time they start primary school, while more than a third are when they leave, aged 11. For this reason alone, communities need appealing playgrounds so that children have somewhere to burn off energy. At the same time, renewable energy and sustainable living are high on the agenda for many individuals, as well as national governments, and the prospect of capturing energy is appealing.
And because Serious Play uses Dott’s co-design and co-build strategy, children and other community residents will take real ownership of the resulting playgrounds, which is likely to act as a deterrent to vandalism. Skills developed during the process can also be fed back into the community, embedding sustainable energy production and a design legacy in the area.
Because Serious Play uses Dott’s co-design and cobuild strategy, children and other residents will take real ownership of the resulting playgrounds, which is likely to act as a deterrent to vandalism
The future of the Play Strategy remains uncertain as the Government continues funding cuts in order to reduce the national budget deficit. And although final equipment designs had not been completed when the Serious Play project came to an end, Hawes is hoping that the knowledge and ideas generated through the co-discovery and co-design activities can be applied to new playground builds in Cornwall, perhaps when the funding climate improves.
In the long term, the Serious Play’s design ideas aim to see playtime celebrated for its part in making local energy generation accessible, educational and part of community.