July 2016 - Parks & Recreation - 16

Community Center

ed a place of adventure and challenge,
not a typical playground composed of
off-the-shelf components, " says Steven
Schuckman, superintendent of planning and design for Cincinnati Parks.
The goal was to create a playground " as
unique and grounded in the site and its
history as is the rest of the park. "
At the same time, three important private funding sources stepped forward: The
Heekin Family, PNC Bank and Proctor &
Gamble. The Heekin Family, along with
PNC Bank, donated generously toward a
playground that would inspire and challenge Cincinnati children to be physically
active. Proctor & Gamble's charitable foundation offered a grant to create a playful,
interactive space that would engage families
in explorations of cause and effect, promoting fun physical exercise. The aligned support of the park board and funders formed
a strong foundation for conceptual design.
A research-based process greatly informed the layout and specific features
of the PNC/Heekin Adventure Playscape. The design responds to six categories of risky play, as defined in a 2011
article in the journal Evolutionary Psy-

chology by Ellen Sandseter, a professor at
Queen Maud University in Trondheim,
Norway. They include great heights, rapid speeds, dangerous tools, dangerous
elements, rough and tumble, and disappearing/getting lost.
Elements like the slide, climbing walls
and bridges were designed to help kids
achieve feelings of great heights and
rapid speeds, while small nooks in the
rock outcrops and winding paths capture
a sense of mystery. All custom design
features meet the safety standards of
the Public Playground Safety Handbook, a
guide published by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The design team also sought to incorporate different types of play. Sara
Smilanski, a renowned Israeli child psychologist who trained with Jean Piaget,
developed a widely accepted theory in
the late 1960s about four types of play
that contribute to children's learning and
development. They are functional play
- physical and gross-motor activities,
constructive play - building and creating,
dramatic play - engaging imagination
and role playing and games with rules.

Sasaki researchers tracked the behaviors of people using Smale Riverfront Park to gain insight
about what parts of the park were working well and where further adjustments might be needed.
14 Parks & Recreation

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The Impact
As excitement about Smale Park grew,
designers at Sasaki became interested
in understanding and learning from the
project. They wanted to unpack how
children and families use the playscapes
and how the park was performing from a
maintenance and safety perspective.
Post-Occupancy Study
Methodology: Sasaki's research/design
team - three landscape architects and
one intrepid four-year old research assistant - traveled to Cincinnati to collect
the data. We logged more than 45 observation hours and conducted more than
100 interviews.
Our chief methods included counting,
tracking, listening and interviewing. Every 30 minutes, we conducted a full count
of the people in the playscapes, capturing
where children, adults, teens, strollers and
dogs were distributed. Tracking consisted of mapping one child's journey for 5
minutes. We tracked two to three times
every 30 minutes. We conducted interviews with both visitors and stakeholders,
including key park maintenance staff and
leadership. And key to our qualitative
data was intensive listening - we sat in
each play zone for 10 minutes at a time,
cataloging conversations.
Findings: We collected a substantial
amount of qualitative and quantitative
data, which revealed a number of key
trends:
* The playscapes at Smale have a high
level of intergenerational integration. Teens and adults can be found
climbing, sliding, splashing, balancing and jumping right alongside their
younger counterparts all throughout
the playscapes.
* Design layout has a strong effect on
patterns of movement. The PNC/
Heekin adventure playscape is designed as one fluid playscape, with

July 2016 - Parks & Recreation

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