Experimental Playgrounds, Loose Parts, and The Everyday Aesthetics of Play

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This article draws together discourses around children’s playgrounds in Northern Europe and North America from the early twentieth century onwards, and the work of the British design pedagogue Simon Nicholson, whose theory of “loose parts” from the 1970s, was inf luenced by the experimental playground movement that emerged after 1945. These experimental playgrounds, often referred to as junk-playgrounds and adventure playgrounds, encouraged city children to build their own shacks and dens on areas of rough ground, just as children living in rural areas might build dens. This activity of imaginative place making should be seen as a fundamental and everyday aesthetic activity that children take part in whether within a playground or outside one. Whether play is an imitative or an intuitive activity such placemaking would constitute a basic orientation towards design. As such the experimental playground could be treated as a crucial element of design culture.