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Designing for Play (continued) Adults and Children: Playing Together Often, a child's richest play occurs when an adult is involved, and the best museum exhibits encourage adult-child interaction. The adult can encourage the child when she has a problem, make suggestions for new scripts or plans when the child has exhausted her own repertoire, join the child as a playmate, and reflectively talk about what the child has done, translating actions into words.  Adult-child interaction enriches the experience for both, and helps build strong emotional bonds.Group dynamics within families using museum interactives can be wonderfully complex and multi-layered. Subtly different messages can be communicated at a variety of cognitive levels. Carefully written labels can enhance intergenerational communication. For example, a label with simple, open-ended questions can be positioned for accompanying adults to read to the children, often leading to discussion. Important messages can be communicated directly to adults. For example, The Minnesota Children's Museum has video "signs" in its Habitot toddler space. Adults can select a specific age group and see a video sequence of babies and toddlers playing, with an explanatory voice-over. At the Great Explorations Science Center in Liverpool, England, signs on the perimeter of a central space invited adult visitors to observe different kinds of behavior: children collaborating, children discussing, children standing alone deep in thought - or over-eager adults trying to control everything their children were doing. Helping adults to understand the world of children is as important a goal of children's museum exhibits as helping children to understand the world of adults. The Environment The environment provides inspiration, motivation, materials and the very framework for play. A child-scaled environment immediately sends the message "I fit here! Things are my size!" When children feel this place is for them, they are ready to make confident explorations and joyful discoveries.  The whole environment needs to be friendly and non-intimidating. Soft materials, soft shapes, soft colors and soft sounds all have a calming influence. When children feel secure in a calm environment, they interact more thoughtfully.Acoustics are an important consideration. Noise feeds on noise and a space can become intolerable because of uncontrolled feedback. Noise tends to be associated with gross motor activity, so some exhibit components need to be positioned carefully. Inhibiting noise with a partitioned layout encourages a stronger sense of curiosity and exploration. However, it can also present supervision problems - a real trade-off. Placement of components within exhibits requires careful consideration of the whole environment. For example, an exhibit component that requires quiet thought and concentration would not work well in a heavy-traffic passageway, or near a really lively activity. A useful strategy in the creation of a quiet reflective area is to provide stools. Simply encourage participants to sit down. Exploration  "What do the things here do?" children wonder, and then, in play, they begin to poke, prod, pour, pound, pinch, and explore the possibilities. No matter how young, children enter the museum with some knowledge of how the world operates. As they play freely, they use what they already know and augment it, challenge it, build on it, and reaffirm it. As they rebuild their knowledge, they reaffirm themselves.Some interactives obviously conceal unseen and potentially surprising things. Who can walk past an array of flip-up panels or feely-holes without investigating at least one? The rest will be examined if the experience at the first one is sufficiently rewarding. Popular interactives, such as a ball hovering above an air blower, invite exploration, change, experimentation, hypothesis. And all of these processes occur while visitors are judging how the interactive is responding to them. A good exhibit offers multiple degrees of freedom to explore. Simply Complex The subtle but important shift from wondering "what do the things here do?" to pondering "what can I do with these things?" takes the child to new levels of playful learning. There seems to be a kind of play-competence spiral: learning leads to more sophisticated play, and play provides a kind of mastery that leads to more learning, which leads to more sophisticated play, and so forth (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1979, 23). Children's museums can offer children the resources to play their way to deeper understandings, as materials, environments, and people are used to create and construct new learning. Informal but intense play in the museum provides the underpinnings for more formal, structured learning in other parts of their lives. How many of us have given an expensive present to a young child, only to see it tossed aside while they play with the box? How many designers' hearts have sunk as they realize that their complicated new interactive is doomed to be ignored with scarcely a glance from passersby? Can a designer be sure that any exhibit component will capture people's attention amid all the surrounding sensory overload? Children often "bounce" from component to component in an exhibit, pressing something here and spinning something there without pausing to observe or consider. This kind of experience lacks depth. A good interactive holds a person's attention after successfully attracting it. This is partly due to the range of exploratory experiences it offers, partly to subtle, indefinable aspects of its innate appeal, and partly to the extent to which the child can shape the experience for himself. It is a "rule of thumb" that complex toys engender simple play, while simple toys inspire complex play. This can be applied equally well to exhibits. The simpler and more open-ended the exhibit components, the more likely they will inspire high-level problem solving, creativity, and divergent thinking. Page 1 > Page 2 > Page 3 |
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