The Experience Book: For Designers, Thinkers & Makers

Skatepark, Malmö, Sweden © Maria Eklind Creative commons licence

The Experience Book examines the design and making of experiences that define the spaces where we live, work and play. Landscape showcases two projects.

Adam Scott and Dave Waddell

The idea behind The Experience

Book is a simple one. With the evolution of humans as a cultural and technological species, we have become increasingly adept at putting our ideas into the world. At the same time, the word ‘experience’ has been used to sell everything from theories on a new economical era to toothbrushes to holidays to whole cities. A guide to and source of examples of the designed experience, the book is an attempt to (re)anchor ‘experience’ as being fundamental to what it means to design, for better and for worse.

On Paradise City

Skaters worldwide have brilliantly subverted the privatisation of public space. This repurposing of what the artist Nils Norman calls the ‘vernacular of terror’ is taken to its wonderfully logical endpoint in Malmö, Sweden. It’s not perfect, but it’s a prototype for how we might go about designing our public spaces from grassroots up and in the interests of all.

On Kids with hammers

Health and safety has become the designer-in-chief of what it means to be socially responsible. This is especially true of how we treat our children, who must suffer our fear for their health and their safety. The Land and other similarly risk-tolerant adventure playgrounds are a fightback in the name of today’s children, who are being denied the very things – the freedom to experiment, to be hurt, to fail, to test their bodies – that were the making of their parents and grandparents.

Paradise City

A vernacular of inclusiveness: how a city reinvented itself as a skateboarding mecca

Modern concepts of ‘public’ and ‘space’ are easily read (if we take the time to look) in the design of our public realms, whether controlled by public or private bodies or both. The escalation of defensive or hygiene programmes and hardware – mosquito alarms, anti-homeless spikes, pay-per-minute benches, pavement sprinklers, and so on – is the ‘vernacular of terror’ that the artist Nils Norman says is exercised against those we consider not us: the ‘destitute’ and the ‘anti-social’.

Children playing on the Land

© Land Plasmadoc

Children playing on the Land

© Land Plasmadoc

It’s not like this everywhere, however, and especially not in the Swedish city of Malmö. Unusually for a long-winter destination, Malmö is a skateboarding mecca, the design of the city’s skate-friendly public realm the result of a long partnership between the not-for-profit skaters’ association Bryggeriet and the municipal authorities. It wasn’t always this way – Malmö’s council was once much the same as city councils the world over, either shepherding skating into acceptable spaces or demonising it as a public nuisance. However, unable to ignore the association’s reactivation of spaces otherwise left to rack and ruin, it donated the site of a decommissioned brewery, and in doing so changed the fortunes of a city that had never fully got over the collapse of its shipbuilding industry.

Children playing on the Land

© Land Plasmadoc

The details of the role the association and skating in general played in the regeneration of Malmö are a story for another time. Suffice it to say, it has evolved considerably. At the beginning, it was all about what the city could do for skating; today, it is all about what skating can do for the city. The result: a vernacular of inclusiveness, designed by the once excluded.

Kids With Hammers

The world’s greatest playground and the department of health and safety is not invited.

The Land is a small and fenced-off piece of land in a housing estate in north Wales. You could be forgiven for mistaking it for an illegal dump. Tyres and pallets lie scattered across the site. A small stream is full of junk. A large piece of green tubing hangs from a tree. Makeshift seating and the remains of fires betray signs of human activity. It’s what you’d hope your local authority would classify as a health and safety hazard, and certainly not anywhere you’d bring the kids.

Only, it’s not a hazard; it is exactly where many of the estate’s children play, and everything you see is actually meant to be here. That’s because The Land is an adventure playground, ‘a space’, as it says on its welcome sign, ‘full of possibilities’, and which – in the hands of a band of ever-present and yet unobtrusive playworkers –is wholeheartedly devoted to the business of risky play, including lighting fires, climbing high, hammering nails, and sawing through anything except each other. It’s hardly a new concept, but still an almighty breath of fresh air in an age of stranger fear, hover parenting and internet pervasiveness.

The Land is one of a growing number of such playgrounds, all of which are descended in one way or another from Copenhagen’s wartime ‘junk playgrounds’.

The Land is one of a growing number of such playgrounds, all of which are descended in one way or another from Copenhagen’s wartime ‘junk playgrounds’. Just as the Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen was inspired by the creativity of children’s play on bombsites, so it is continually informed by its organisers’ observation of the children it serves. It’s a place of possibility, directed by children for children. Take the kids: it’s wonderfully dangerous.

The Experience Book: For Designers, Thinkers & Makers is published by Black Dog Press.