Post-Occupancy Evaluation

Recently, play has become a more integral part of large public development projects, and playgrounds are no longer relegated to rectangular boxes in corners.

Unique play elements or playable public art are increasingly seen as nuclei that activate spaces. With the addition of new types of play spaces, we ask: What play designs are truly successful? How might such success be measured? And how might we use such evaluations in future play projects? To help us think through these questions, Earthscape has developed a new post-occupancy evaluation program (POE).

POEs aimed at assessing and documenting the performance and impact of built projects are familiar to Landscape Architects. Our program includes research into equipment functionality and is used to assess maintenance and longevity. Materials and details are evaluated for performance. Traditional playground POEs tend to focus on physical activities or, more generally, child development standards by counting and quantifying.

We believe that play asks us to think beyond standardized measurements and look for stories and experiences, moments and journeys that come not only from children, but from and for wider communities.

The Earthscape POE program assesses how a playground design supports various types of play and inclusive interactions, focusing on both the ‘childscale’ efforts of playground analysis and adult/family-led activities. The goal of the POE program is not to determine the ‘right’ way to play (the existence of which we unreservedly deny), but rather to reflect upon and capture the richness of play experiences. This is not a comparative program; we are not looking to find how one playground is better than another. Instead, we focus on the relationships unfolding in each space so that the analysis of those observations can inform future design decisions.

Our commitment to consistently partake in a POE program also speaks to a particular culture: a culture of paying attention to users and of never forgetting that the design is not for the satisfaction of its creator, but for those using it.

The POE program is a responsive dialogue with the client and, to some extent, with the past–the decisions made, the solutions chosen–so that we can gather information for the future. It is used to make the next step. It does not rely on blind design intuition, but on experiences shared with us. So, while the practice of POE is a business decision that stems from commitment to quality assurance, it is equally an ethical obligation that is rooted in the vision for a practice that commits to building a better shared world.