TEACHING EXPERIENCE

LARC 2413: LA Design Studio 3  

Project Title: Playful Landform + Playful Planting 

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Project Statement: 

Children’s outdoor playtime is linked with multiple developmental benefits, and a rich play and learning environment is essential to ensure children’s quality time of play and learning in contact with daylight and nature. Innovative strategies and thinking are required to improve the quality of time spent outdoors in early childhood settings where children spend most of their waking hours. One way to ensure quality outdoor time is to increase the environmental diversity of the outdoor environment. Landscape design can play a pivotal role by creating outdoor environments that accommodate diverse play (and learning) opportunities and provide room for children’s meaningful interactions with nature, other children, and teachers.  

 

Primary Goals:

Students will design the CDRC multipurpose lawn and introduce playful landforms and meaningful planting designs to create an environment that would bring more opportunities to play, learn, and interact. By learning the planting design from my workshop and lectures, students will be able to 

• Explore the potentials of planting design to enhance children’s meaningful interactions with nature. 

• Integrate playful landscape elements such as tunnels, bridges, pathways, seating, lawns, vegetation etc. with the designed landform and planting pockets for creating desirable behavioral outcomes.  

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Project Activities :

• Site visit and observation of existing plants. 

• Planting design workshop focused on ‘planting for play’. 

• Plant walk in TTU Horticulture Garden and Greenhouse Complex to identify different plants and their play values.

• Workshop on artistic planting presentation (in collaboration with Modeling and Communication). 

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Assigned Readings and Resources:

• Murphy (2016) Landscape Architecture Theory: An Ecological Approach (excerpt) 

• Herrington & Lesmeister (2006). The design of landscapes at child-care centers: Seven Cs (excerpt) 

• Akdeniz (2020) Landscape plants that can be used in the design of children’s playgrounds. In Theory and Research in Architecture, Planning and Design II. 

• Akoumianaki-Ioannidou, A., Paraskevopoulou, A. T., & Tachou, V. (2016). School grounds as a resource of green space to increase child-plant contact. Urban forestry & urban greening, 20, 375-386.