Sustainable Urban Play Environments

The aim was to investigate how nature-rich outdoor environments for play enhanced with digital technology work in practice for children's play, compared to play in a traditional playground and play in the forest. The project also wanted to test how children's play is affected if they are given the opportunity to enhance a nature-rich setting themselves with the help of digital components. A goal was also to prepare and validate guidelines to support urban planners in creating nature-rich play settings with high play value that are ecologically rich and to apply this knowledge by developing such places.

A number of studies with groups of children have been carried out in three municipalities, in play environments with digital features and without such features, to investigate how children's play is affected by different physical and digital play materials when these are installed in nature-rich environments. Results from these studies show how different play materials and features in the landscape together influence the character of play in different ways. Two guidelines "Lek på riktigt" and "Lekotoper" have been prepared and validated and they are now available via the internet.

The work in the project has been cross-disciplinary and knowledge from academia, industry and municipalities has contributed to the development of guidelines for planners of play environments in this project. The method used in studies of outdoor play, makes it possible to study children's play with regard to observed types of play, the children's play experience, how physically active the children are, how play contexts develop over time and which physical and digital materials and
artifacts the children use in play.

Digital Play in Nature: A Study of Digital Play Installations from a Nature Play Perspective