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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 pedagogical method
Although the terms “drawing” and “sketching” are often used interchangingly (Hoffmann, 2019), I have chosen the word “sketching” as opposed to “drawing” to indicate the more traditional definition of sketching within an artistic…
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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…
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Risky play of late-liberalism
Risky play, defined generally as outdoor play with a risk of physical injury, is being encouraged from all directions. Even governmental organizations and agencies, previously reluctant to shake up the moto of utmost…
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Boy, Wind, Gilles + Félix
Extended hand, an invitation. Let’s dance! On one side, a boy and a wind, an almost-accidental capture on daily walk with a group of preschoolers. On the other, Deleuze and Guattari in the…
