Learning sufficiency through play: A participatory playground transformation with children in Gothenburg

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Examensarbete för masterexamen
Master's Thesis

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Environmental crises have become a defining challenge of our time. While technological efficiency is often the first solution that comes to mind, sufficiency, the practice of consciously reducing resource use, is crucial for achieving true sustainability. Addressing sufficient behavior is essential for a long-term sustainable future. Moreover, cultivating this mindset among future generations, particularly children, can have a lasting impact. Experiential learning, which emphasizes direct interaction, experimentation, and reflection, provides an effective way for children to internalize sufficiency as a lived practice rather than abstract knowledge. Play, as a powerful learning tool for children, makes it a meaningful approach to engage them in understanding sufficiency.Thus, This thesis explores how the transformation of playgrounds can help children learn sufficiency through experiential learning. The research investigates how playgrounds can go beyond recreation to become tools for teaching sufficiency principles. Through different play experiences, children can face resource constraints and learn to make thoughtful decisions about energy use and material consumption. The focus is on engaging children with the concept of sufficiency, emphasizing learning through experience rather than formal instruction. To understand how sufficiency is currently incorporated into public initiatives in Gothenburg, an interview with the municipality was conducted. The findings highlighted the importance of focusing on Gothenburg due to Sweden’s high consumption rates. While there are plans addressing the technical aspects of sufficiency, the social dimensions remain underexplored, making this research both timely and significant. Literature studies on sufficiency principles, experiential learning, and playground design formed the thesis’s theoretical foundation. Reference project analysis also contributed to the data collection. The findings demonstrate that play-based public spaces can effectively introduce children to sufficiency principles through low-tech, interactive features that require physical engagement and decision-making. The thesis argues that embedding sufficiency into playgrounds can complement formal education by offering hands-on learning environments. An initial round of participatory workshops with children was conducted to gather insights into how children of different ages perceive sufficiency. Collage techniques and storyboards were used to communicate with students in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades. To better understand how children engage with resources and learning, interviews with teachers were conducted. These confirmed that children engage more deeply when learning is hands-on, interactive, and rooted in real-life experiences. A second workshop was organized to co-design the playground with the children, allowing them to take an active role in shaping their play environment. The goal was to explore how sufficiency principles could be integrated into play spaces from the children's perspectives. Finally, this thesis develops design strategies for transforming playgrounds through a participatory design process grounded in sufficiency principles. It emphasizes how involving children in the creation of their own play environment becomes a form of experiential learning. Rather than offering a fixed design, the outcome is a flexible, replicable model that allows communities to adapt and co-create based on local materials and needs. Ultimately, this project contributes to both sustainability discourse and participatory design by showing how sufficiency can be made tangible, engaging, and transformative through play.

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Sustainable future, Sufficency, Children, participatory approach, experiential learning

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