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On the act of sweeping
This post juxtaposes two pieces of writing. On the left is a piece of pedagogical narration (also referred to as pedagogical or educational documentation), a practice inspired by the work of educational institutions…
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Misreading stories about playgrounds
Tonight, I want to take a text into a territory of purposeful misreading. I want to unname a playground, messily playing and breaking apart a construction that seem too solid in its ability…
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Beauty, aesthetics and hurt
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” ― William Goldman, William Goldman: Four Screenplays with Essays, 2000 In 2000, artist Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial was unveiled in Vienna, Austria.…
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Speculative
Within this project, the playground design was being imagined as an ongoing material-discursive practice between human and nonhuman actants. The collaborators wanted to trouble the idea that playgrounds are exclusively for humans. As…
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Pedagogy of Maintenance as Care
Bringing caring labor and the knowledge that stems from participation in it to the analysis becomes critical for a transformative program equally within science and within society. The baby socks, webs of wool,…
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Design: process, politics, aesthetics
The typical design process is linear: information is gathered, design is developed, it’s implemented and we are done. The extractive nature of this design process is colonial in nature. This is how Bryan…
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The art of broom and rust
This proposal comes from the need to address, on one hand, an anticipated maintenance concern around the sand spilling onto the concrete patio, and, on the other hand, the desire to bring an…
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Sketching as a method of pedagogical documentation
Preamble: Although the terms “drawing” and “sketching” are often used interchangingly (Hoffmann, 2019), I have chosen the word “sketching” to indicate as work preliminary to a drawing; a draft, a visualized thinking process.…
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Design as a consequence of stones
As we prepare to invite rocks into our playground, I think of the ease with which we make design decisions, following the same old patterns we’ve seen elsewhere: the semi-circle of armour stones…
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Returning to the fence line
“I started sketching what is far away but then I realized all I could see was the fence…” – Educator S. Lesley Instone (1999) invites us to consider the playground fence an active…
