Child's Perspective: Treehouse Office Pods

Go to any children's museum and you will see a remarkable sight: adults playing. With the alibi of playing with their kids, adults will climb on imaginative playscapes, solve puzzles on how to most efficiently fill up ball pits, and create dams to protect sand castles. Play is essential in childhood development and in encouraging mental plasticity. Unfortunately, many abandon play as they progress into adulthood, and it has long been assumed that our creative abilities and mental plasticity decline with age. Recent research, however, supports the idea that adults can unlock neurological centers that lead to a greater capacity for learning and imagining if they return to the very thing that taught them to imagine in the first place: play. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5646690/, "Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain")

A particular feature of this design is how the design process allowed and encouraged us to engage with the ideas of play and work imbued in the competition prompt. The use of a 3D LEGO design tool, BrickLink Studio, engaged my 6-year-old son's interest and made the project exciting and playful for both of us to work on. It also provided a shared vocabulary by which we could communicate design ideas to each other. Throughout the development of our proposal, I encouraged my son to build ideas with his physical LEGO bricks while I was away at work so I could then incorporate them into the digital LEGO model later on.

While this provided a great format for playful exploration, I found that I needed to steer the design process and at times insist on parameters of what needed to be done (or else our project would have consisted solely of LEGO vehicles and no building). By the same token, I ended up needing to take direction from my son and get out of my 21st-century-workplace-driven habits of focusing solely on how to be efficient and complete the design. I had to slow down and embrace putting time into the playful little details that my son wanted to focus on (like making sure the workers were amply supplied with different colors of ice cream in the meeting rooms).

Our experience of the design process has lessons in the context of the competition brief: playfulness in a working environment can be a powerful force when paired with appropriate boundaries that define what needs to be done. The balance is to allow and encourage play but provide enough guidance and restriction to still accomplish the end goal. This idea can be conceived of as a river: the banks of the river direct the water without inhibiting its flow. Our office design aims to provide ample breadth for creative energy, harnessing that energy for a workplace that is both productive and fun.

Design Process Notes - including suggestions from 6-year-old team member:

Lego app to model? Bricklink studio. Scale marker = 4-er lego piece

Stream with a bridge over it

pool to swim in

Garden that people can dig in

treehouse office pods

Work tables around the perimeter, play tables in the center (ice hockey, pool, lego table)

Large outdoor roof patio with grills, shade umbrellas