Playgrounds always look fun, but they can be intimidating for some. Not everyone can climb a ladder up to a standard slide or sit on a regular swing, even if they can access the equipment. Instead, inclusive playground design considers children and adults of varied physical, intellectual, cognitive, and sensory abilities.
Making a play space accessible is mandatory. It means children of all abilities can access the park and equipment. However, it doesn’t necessarily accommodate those abilities on and between the apparatus or purposely stimulate healthy development.
Creating an inclusive playground is about adjusting the play pieces to the individual rather than expecting the child to adapt. It’s about providing a range of thoughtfully designed equipment, a welcoming, manageable, and engaging layout, and adding age-appropriate physical, mental, and social challenges and interactions. Inclusivity ensures equitable play and caregiving. At the same time, your playground must be safe within a well-secured area.
The Playworld team, working with child developmental specialists, and our innovative equipment and designs emphasize this inclusivity, flexibility, and safety. Playworld’s products and concepts embody our comprehensive philosophy, which we elaborate on below.
Playworld helps you embrace all the users of your play space, offering them entertainment, exercise, and growth. We live our philosophy so everyone in your community can live their best lives. These are the universally accepted principles of inclusive design that Playworld incorporated into our overarching inclusive design philosophy:
By universal design, you emphasize the recognition of all users, regardless of developmental level and ability, including adult caregivers. The paradigm incorporates all aspects of design based on the understanding that independence and integration promote confidence, motivation, and well-being.
We’ve developed a design guide to help your play space have the most significant impact. Integral to this guide (not rule!) book is our eight keys to inclusion.
Know which equipment most excites your users. Then, ensure this hero piece is completely inclusive so everyone can enjoy it equally.
The placement of the playground equipment should allow for cooperation and shared enjoyment by groups of children either playing together or alongside each other (parallel play).
Select play and rest pieces that present various graduated challenge levels that everyone can enjoy.
Developing zones, pods, or rooms that offer specialized activities allows children to choose where to play or rest when they feel overstimulated.
Design your layout and routes around and through the play space wide enough to accommodate everyone, including two wheelchairs. A generous allowance helps ensure safe and comfortable entry, passing, turning, and exiting.
Instead of loose surfacing, unitary surfacing allows children and caregivers in wheelchairs or using other mobility aids to reach play areas and activities conveniently and safely. A loose surface comprises separate particles like sand, wood chips, or rubber nuggets. A unitary surface is smooth and bound together by a single solid material. Examples are rubber tiles or poured-in-place rubber.
Fences are essential, especially for people with autism spectrum disorder. Please access our inclusive design guide and make creating a functional, fun, inclusive play space your reality.
You can rely on our guide to walk you through an accessible and inclusive range of playground designs. The download begins with pre-planning: defining your intent (goals) and strategy (tactical activities to achieve objectives), your committee makeup and responsibilities, the information required, and whether and what expert input you need.
The guide moves on to help you plan your layout, from entry, wayfinding, and containment to zones, gathering places, color usage, and line of sight. Landscaping is also part of your layout and is covered in the guide. It includes reach ranges, path width, and access using unitary surfaces with flush transitions.
Planning defines the number of elevated destinations, ground-level events, and the types of enriched play experiences envisaged. These can be spinning, sliding, rocking, swinging, climbing, crawling, strengthening, balancing, bouncing, jumping, walking, running, and rolling. It also involves designing physical, sensory, social, and cognitive play events and experiences for children to enjoy.
You’ll also find insight into creating cozy areas and encouraging users to interact with natural features. It defines and discusses various forms of play, including physical, sensory, imaginative, parallel, social, cooperative, symbolic, functional, and gameplay.
The guide walks you through essential support elements, such as restrooms, seating, water fountains, shade, picnic tables, signage, and service animals for user and caregiver comfort. The document advises on selecting your play equipment following the eight keys to maximize your playground’s inclusivity.
Each section ends with worksheets, probing questions, checklists, handy summaries and comparisons, technical information, and a detailed glossary to guide your layout and other inclusive playground decisions.
The engagement, inclusion, pleasure, learning, and safety of your playground users are our passion. Choose from our wide product range or liaise on customized pieces or Playworld design-led layouts and compositions.
You can count on our experienced recommendations on daycare, school age, combined designs, accredited craftsmanship, materials, embrace of innovative advances, and personalized customer service excellence.
Make a difference in the lives and communities of your users. Contact Playworld today to get a quote or speak to a representative. Here’s to playgrounds built for everyone.