Playgrounding: The Playground as a Symbolic Form of Society and Design Culture traces the playground from urban space to anthropological artefact, bringing together design history, image archives, and nine original proposals from leading international designers.
About This Book
The playground is rarely taken seriously as a subject of design scholarship, yet it encodes some of the most charged questions in urban culture: Who is childhood for? How does society spatialise creativity and constraint? Curator and design historian Domitilla Dardi approaches these questions by constructing a layered argument across two registers. The first is historical — a visual survey drawn from world-leading digital archives and the photographic work of Stefano Cerio and Fujio Kito. The second is speculative — nine designers, including Konstantin Grcic, matali crasset, and Studio Ossidiana, were each given a double-page spread to interpret as a plan. The result is a book that treats playground design as a lens onto broader design culture and social relations.
Key Features
- 160 pages of archival photography, design proposals, and visual essays on playground history and culture
- Contributions by Paul Cox, matali crasset, Konstantin Grcic, Martí Guixé, Lemonot, Gianluca Malgeri and Arina Endo, Studio Ossidiana, Parasite 2.0, and Olimpia Zagnoli
- Photography by Stefano Cerio and Fujio Kito, alongside archival images from world-leading libraries
- Published by Edizioni Corraini
What You'll Discover
- How the playground functions as a symbolic form that reveals the anthropological structure of social relations and the cultural construction of childhood
- Nine original playground proposals in which each designer freely interpreted a double-page spread as a plan — a formal constraint that foregrounds spatial thinking
- A visual history of playgrounds assembled from digital archives of world-leading libraries, offering a rare comparative sweep across time and geography
- How photography — from Cerio and Kito to artists working with the theme of carousels — can reframe familiar play equipment as a subject of serious aesthetic inquiry
About the Author
Domitilla Dardi is a curator and design historian whose research into playgrounds originated as an online project before expanding into the framework for this book. Her methodology combines archival image research with commissioned speculative design, positioning the playground as a legitimate subject within design culture discourse.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 160
- Dimensions: 210 × 250 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9791254930014
- Publisher: Edizioni Corraini
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Designers, urban researchers, design historians, and educators interested in the cultural politics of public space, childhood, and the intersection of speculative design with social history.