<story><title>Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/well/family/adventure-playgrounds-junk-playgrounds.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>magicalhippo</author><text>A friend of mine designs playgrounds for kids, and is very good at it (his designs win 90+% of the competitive bids he enters).&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s also worked hard to put in place a playground safety inspector certification system over here.&lt;p&gt;One of his core ideas is that there are two types of safety: subjective safety and objective safety.&lt;p&gt;For example, kids quickly learn that falling from a height is painful, and experiences such as that teaches them how to evaluate their own safety when say climbing. This is the subjective safety.&lt;p&gt;However they&amp;#x27;re usually not going to be able to correctly evaluate the safety of climbing a playhouse where they might get their head stuck between two planks because the opening between the planks were just right for their heads to fit, but not their bodies. Or that the hood drawstring in their jacket can get stuck in small wedges and openings, especially dangerous near slides. Such issues go under the objective safety.&lt;p&gt;Now, his point is that you can make playgrounds which are &lt;i&gt;objectively&lt;/i&gt; very safe, without making them any less exciting. Part of the excitement comes from allowing the kids to explore their &lt;i&gt;subjective&lt;/i&gt; safety boundaries, but a lot comes from the design itself.&lt;p&gt;He often works with one of the major suppliers of playground equipment on their new designs, but a large part of his secret sauce is how he places that equipment on the playground. Many playground designers (which at least here are mostly landscape architects) seem to just put one piece there and another over there, without giving much thought to facilitating the flow of spontaneous play from one piece of equipment to the next.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, he could explain this a lot better than me. I just help him out with some presentations and such every now and then.</text></item><item><author>devchix</author><text>A recent episode of 99% Invisible: Play Mountain looked at how the playground got to be safe and boring.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A two-year-old boy named Frank Nelson was climbing a 12-foot-tall slide in a Chicago park when he slipped through a railing and hit his head so hard that it caused permanent brain damage. The park system of Chicago was sued and had to pay out millions of dollars to Nelson’s family.&lt;p&gt;At that time, in the late 70s, there were no laws, or real industry standards when it came to the safety of playground equipment. Frank Nelson’s fall was one of a number of lawsuits that led the Consumer Product Safety Commission to publish the Handbook for Public Playground Safety in 1981. Then another standards organization, the ASTM, published its own guidelines. Pretty soon these rulebooks were in the hands of insurance companies and parks departments and school boards across the United States. To this day, almost all playgrounds have to be approved by a certified playground safety inspector.&lt;p&gt;And safety inspectors look for places where kids could fall, or get pinched, poked, or trapped. As you might imagine, all of these rules and regulations make the job of playground designers a lot harder. This is the reason why the playgrounds that you see everywhere all look more or less the same. A majority of playgrounds are “post and deck” systems with standard swings, slides, and monkey bars in one piece of equipment.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&amp;#x2F;episode&amp;#x2F;play-mountain&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&amp;#x2F;episode&amp;#x2F;play-mountain&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hexane360</author><text>This seems really similar to techniques I&amp;#x27;ve heard about in road design. A lot of safety improvements are pretty well compensated by changes in people&amp;#x27;s behavior. For example, if you make shoulders and lanes wider, people will feel like they&amp;#x27;re going slower and speed up to compensate. Even with things you wouldn&amp;#x27;t expect, like the dedicated&amp;#x2F;third brake light made mandatory for cars in 1986, there were significant changes in behavior (decreased following time) to compensate. However, there are many safety improvements that are more or less invisible to the end user. The best example is rumble strips -- they&amp;#x27;re never noticed until they do their job.</text></comment>
<story><title>Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/well/family/adventure-playgrounds-junk-playgrounds.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>magicalhippo</author><text>A friend of mine designs playgrounds for kids, and is very good at it (his designs win 90+% of the competitive bids he enters).&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s also worked hard to put in place a playground safety inspector certification system over here.&lt;p&gt;One of his core ideas is that there are two types of safety: subjective safety and objective safety.&lt;p&gt;For example, kids quickly learn that falling from a height is painful, and experiences such as that teaches them how to evaluate their own safety when say climbing. This is the subjective safety.&lt;p&gt;However they&amp;#x27;re usually not going to be able to correctly evaluate the safety of climbing a playhouse where they might get their head stuck between two planks because the opening between the planks were just right for their heads to fit, but not their bodies. Or that the hood drawstring in their jacket can get stuck in small wedges and openings, especially dangerous near slides. Such issues go under the objective safety.&lt;p&gt;Now, his point is that you can make playgrounds which are &lt;i&gt;objectively&lt;/i&gt; very safe, without making them any less exciting. Part of the excitement comes from allowing the kids to explore their &lt;i&gt;subjective&lt;/i&gt; safety boundaries, but a lot comes from the design itself.&lt;p&gt;He often works with one of the major suppliers of playground equipment on their new designs, but a large part of his secret sauce is how he places that equipment on the playground. Many playground designers (which at least here are mostly landscape architects) seem to just put one piece there and another over there, without giving much thought to facilitating the flow of spontaneous play from one piece of equipment to the next.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, he could explain this a lot better than me. I just help him out with some presentations and such every now and then.</text></item><item><author>devchix</author><text>A recent episode of 99% Invisible: Play Mountain looked at how the playground got to be safe and boring.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A two-year-old boy named Frank Nelson was climbing a 12-foot-tall slide in a Chicago park when he slipped through a railing and hit his head so hard that it caused permanent brain damage. The park system of Chicago was sued and had to pay out millions of dollars to Nelson’s family.&lt;p&gt;At that time, in the late 70s, there were no laws, or real industry standards when it came to the safety of playground equipment. Frank Nelson’s fall was one of a number of lawsuits that led the Consumer Product Safety Commission to publish the Handbook for Public Playground Safety in 1981. Then another standards organization, the ASTM, published its own guidelines. Pretty soon these rulebooks were in the hands of insurance companies and parks departments and school boards across the United States. To this day, almost all playgrounds have to be approved by a certified playground safety inspector.&lt;p&gt;And safety inspectors look for places where kids could fall, or get pinched, poked, or trapped. As you might imagine, all of these rules and regulations make the job of playground designers a lot harder. This is the reason why the playgrounds that you see everywhere all look more or less the same. A majority of playgrounds are “post and deck” systems with standard swings, slides, and monkey bars in one piece of equipment.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&amp;#x2F;episode&amp;#x2F;play-mountain&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&amp;#x2F;episode&amp;#x2F;play-mountain&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>natdempk</author><text>This is a really good take on safety and tooling that can be applied to a lot of things. Thanks for explaining this!&lt;p&gt;Do you have an example of a playground that he’s designed that highlights these principles?</text></comment>