De Natureluur won a big budget for creating a Nature Playground in the West of Amsterdam, where I was asked to be the designer for. I organised a Design Day for children from the neighbourhood, and joined the building team! I closed the project by organising a huge opening party with live music, hot chocolate and LOTS OF PLAY!
Kids Co-creation day
The design process started with a Children Design Day on april 13, 2022. I organised the day with activities like a warm-up for the creative mind by challenging the children to invent 10 way to carry water that were not located in a kitchen. To, start, we walked through the area all together and got in the playful mood! Then I presented a design thinking process stating that today, we do the IDEATION with intention to come up with as many ideas as possible
The group was divided into smaller groups that went to the 3 activities
- HOW CAN YOU…? with multiple partial problems to find partial solutions
- BUILD objects that you want in the playground from actual wood
- Draw your IDEAL PLAYGROUND
Constructing the playground with Stouthout
I was invited to join the building process for this intuitive way that the Nature Playground team of Stouthout builds. From cutting the big trees from local forests into slices (planks), to endless digging holes, sanding all the constructions with the angle grinder, learning to work with a Chain Saw and making beautiful colourful windows everywhere. I joined every sunny, rainy or freezing day of outside building.
OPENING PARTY
What an honour to open this beautiful new playground to the children! I drew this invitation, printed it on recycled paper and spread it through Amsterdam childcare and nature-oriented kids stores. I made delicious food and hot chocolate above the fire, invited musicians and fire performers and made sure everyone knew what to do who was helping on the day
We received about 50 children that were overly excited to show us how to play!