How can landscape enhance the aesthetic appeal of children's playgrounds?

Children's playgrounds are inherently a part of landscape spaces. Today, we would like to explore how some landscape design techniques can make children's playgrounds more aesthetically pleasing in terms of visual presentation and experience. In a general sense, landscape refers to a discipline that uses artistic means to handle the complex relationships between people, architecture, and the environment. Ancient China did not have the concept of landscape; it was a concept introduced from the West later on. What is closer to the concept of landscape in China is the Chinese garden. Children's playgrounds are designed based on children's characteristics, combining scientifically in three dimensions to form a new generation of children's activity centers that integrate play, sports, puzzle-solving, and fitness. It is a novel, highly integrated venue designed primarily with children's preferences for activities such as crawling, sliding, rolling, swinging, swaying, jumping, and shaking in mind.

The beauty of space is inherently difficult to define concisely, and the perception of beauty varies from person to person. The widely recognized sense of beauty stems from two sources: one is the value judgment derived from collective training, and the other is the "empathy" towards space generated through memory, association, and identification. For children's playgrounds to achieve a sense of "empathy" with the public regarding their space, they need to employ landscape packaging to evoke a feeling of "déjà vu," which is commonly referred to as thematic packaging.

Traditional garden landscapes mainly include mountains (topography), water, plants, and buildings. In their creation, they focus on functionality, consider the relationship between mountains, water, and land in terms of form, ensure the flow of materials and information in space, and also pay attention to ergonomics and crowd psychology. After the concept of child-friendliness was introduced, children's spaces within landscape spaces have received more attention, and their proportion in terms of scale has also increased. Nowadays, we often see children's spaces in real estate, education, and commerce that are within 1000 square meters, slightly larger municipal parks range from 3000 to 5000 square meters, and comprehensive thematic children's playgrounds are over 30000 square meters.

A well-designed children's playground must offer both visual appeal and a memorable experience. Each themed park has its own unique positioning or theme. For instance, Disneyland aims to "offer visitors a dreamlike, extraordinary experience," while Universal Studios employs "high technology combined with movie scenes and special effects." To highlight their thematic characteristics, the corresponding landscape designs exhibit significant differences.

The landscape packaging of a children's playground mainly consists of plants, paving, features, and lighting. In terms of plant creation, the experience is vastly different between a dense forest with rich layers and a tropical rainforest atmosphere created by palms, and a scene created with rugged rocks and succulent plants. The sense of planting scenes with neat trimming and ecological naturalness also offers a distinct experience. In terms of paving, the presentation of naturally flowing colored paving and traditional regular paving spaces is also quite different. The most important aspect that sets the thematic degree of an entire children's playground is the extent to which features package the story, with features being diverse and including IPs, sculptures, structures, landscape walls, railings, steps, etc., serving not only as decorations but also possessing strong functional attributes. Finally, lighting is the atmosphere creator of a children's playground. Besides its basic illumination function and interactivity, a very important role is situational lighting. The enhancement of lighting can elevate the overall atmosphere at night.

In addition to creating environments and thematic scenes, it is also necessary to consider visual angles and focal points within the space. Leaving room for 'beautiful perspectives' refers to the photo spots or check-in areas we often talk about. Generally, when the outdoor viewing distance to object height ratio is 2:1, which corresponds to a viewing angle of 27°, it is the most ideal viewing distance for buildings, allowing one to easily see the top of the structure. It can be seen that the most ideal ratio of viewing distance to object height should be between 1:3. By reserving photo check-in spaces at multiple angles in children's playgrounds, the comfort of the park experience will also increase.

Landscape techniques not only provide aesthetic packaging for children's playgrounds visually but also greatly enhance the experience of the playground in terms of spatial structure. It is not only beautiful but also functional (intrinsic beauty). Roads are the skeleton of the playground. A good playground must consider the behavioral and psychological needs of the public. Typically, the roads in a playground are accessible or have a certain narrative guidance or sense of direction.

In the amusement park, social interaction between people is not only inevitable but also very necessary. Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory mentions the need for social interaction and a sense of belonging. Social needs are met through interactive performances in leisure and entertainment venues, attracting visitors to participate and gather, to satisfy the interactive needs and bring people closer together, and to create a joyful atmosphere. Therefore, in the planning, it is necessary to design squares, stages, and interactive spaces.

A sense of belonging emphasizes the distinction between different groups, with the core being to design landscapes targeting the main service audience of the area. For example, "age segmentation," and differences in functional attributes. Common techniques include maintaining physical distances, using greenery as a barrier, or delineating clear regional boundaries with structures, colors, roads, materials, and so on.

As a public landscape, children's playgrounds cater to audiences ranging from children to the elderly, covering all age groups, with safety being the paramount rule. Due to the special nature of the playground, there are several points that require special attention when designing the landscape: