Designing Play
- Yadan Luo
- Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design
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Curricular Support Grant
Designing Play is an advanced arts-based design course in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania that explores play as a cultural, spatial, and social force. The course examines how play shapes learning, creativity, risk-taking, and social interaction, and how playgrounds and playgrounds and playscapes function as civic infrastructure and inclusive public space. Students study the history and theory of play, observe how people engage with play environments, and develop site-specific design proposals through hands-on experimentation. Sachs Program funding will support a series of arts-based activities that significantly enhance the course by deepening its emphasis on physical making, material exploration, and experiential learning. These activities include iterative physical model-making, experimental prototyping inspired by biophilic systems and natural processes, and the development of small-scale, real-world pilot play installations. Through these processes, students engage play not only as a design subject but as a creative methodology embedded in the act of making.
https://www.design.upenn.edu/people/yadan-luo
www.yhlab.design