Read the full essay below:

Part1: No More Fun

Having fun was a constant in our childhood realities: we didn’t have to make time or put in effort to frolic and prance and laugh. Place was never an issue since playing did not depend on where we were physically, but what we could make out of the situations we found ourselves in. Carpets invited us to set sail into their fluffy seas, while the city turned into a larger-than-life laser tag for our scrambling hands and feet.

As we evolve into adulthood in larger vertical cities, losing the bubbly feelings of childhood in the angularity of a metropolis becomes a reality. We put our headphones on and avoid eye contact as we bump along the subway and scurry down sidewalks; our labor shifts into cubicles and offices, or the privacy of our homes, and we find ourselves smushed for hours in positions and configurations that make us ache and creak in our twenties.

There blows a breeze through New York City that makes people embarrassed of having fun, and so we internalize our stress: expressing unbridled joy on the street is met with scowls. There are entire media outlets dedicated to studying the underbelly of New York performing unhinged experiments of joy on the streets and subway, and we frown in confusion at these foreign methods of amusement. We encourage such a dismal attitude towards the art of play that we pencil it into our schedules as weekend activities while we have long since lost the spark of finding emotional pleasure from our most mundane surroundings. Adulthood has taught us that being playful is something kept for our personal lives, and that we are trained to turn off our desires to frolic in professional and public spaces. And we’ve lost the touch of turning the fun back on in private. This code of conduct tells us that there are only certain parts of the city that are built for enjoyment (parks, themed bars, novelty experiences), yet if we stop and study kids at play for one minute, we’d realize it is the child’s eye that reframes everything.

Part2: Frolic in The Yard

In the heat of summer I started working at a playground and kids bounced straight into my life. This wasn’t just a sterile, plastic playground with rules and regulations, but an adventure yard where kids were allowed to make anything, break anything, and roam free.

I remember every Saturday in The Yard a little girl would come running down the hill and into the playground, no parent trailing behind, nobody to tell her to leave her water bottle. We knew her presence from miles away because she screamed at almost anything and was not shy about her vocals. I had only been at the playground for a few weeks and thought it annoying as her shrieks pierced the air as she ran from fort to fort and dodged her friends in a chase. One Saturday before the playground closed, I overheard a play-worker say that the girl’s mother worked just up the hill and she let her daughter come down and play every weekend to tire out her screams. There isn’t much space to be loud and zoom around when living in shoe box apartments, and the little girl had found an escape for her unspent energy. 

In the middle of the playground chaos lay a hand-dug trench that filled with water and mud every day. During the summer months children huddled around and soaked anything they could get their hands on in the ditch to absorb dirt and silt. I remember one sweltering day in August kids were knee-deep in water paddling like crocodiles, slinging mud at each other, and dragging themselves around with water spilling from their pockets. A few boys carried armfuls of mud and chased each other from fence to fence while dragging play-workers into their battle; unfazed by the hubbub, a quiet boy stood at the edge of the pond holding the gushing hose and testing the water pressure one little finger at a time. 

One morning while sitting at the entrance, I watched a small girl make her way to the fence while dragging a doll that was missing an arm and probably much more. The child was obviously pouting about something and whispering under her breath. When she found a secluded spot, she propped the dolly on her lap and started arguing with it, making faces, and taking her anger out on the inanimate object. After some huffing and puffing, she made her way back to the playground and left the doll somewhere along with her frustrations, and scrambled head first back into play.

Watching in silence, I found the nuances of childhood so foreign to how I experience and see the world after graduating adolescence. The dedication of children that came week after week to build plank hideouts and castles was astounding to an adult who tires of a new activity at the end of every hour. No water breaks, no need to talk, just little hands and feet hard at work putting up and taking down inspirations in the heart of The Yard.

And funniest of all were the adults. 

They would peek through the fence at their kids and holler directions to feel some sort of control. Yet as time slipped away, they would wander up to the do-it-yourself entrance and confess: “I wish I could frolic in there too…..” It just looked too fun. Even young adults and older folks gawked as they walked by, and sometimes worked up the courage to double check that they weren’t allowed in. I remember an older gentleman gave a small donation when he learned he was too old to play in The Yard. There was a gleam of envy in his eyes as he hugged his foiled inner child and walked away.

Part3: Spoon-feeding Play 

As my playground observations entered conversations outside The Yard, I noticed people were chewing their lips wishing they could have a sliver of the ‘good old days’ back.

Adults, myself included, were trying to live lives of ‘taste’ and ‘responsibility’ while our instincts of play were lodged, like a lump in the throat, somewhere deep inside. Life as a whole was not fun, and amusement so often came with price tags more frightful than enjoyable. Watching kids for an extended amount of time produced an envy in my heart. I was enjoying the grown-up autonomy of being able to eat ice cream for breakfast, but unable to reproduce the out-of-body joy kids experienced. 

Studies show that children sleep sounder and deeper, even though they are often plagued by monsters lurking in the dark, because they live more active lives of bouncing around the house or zooming down hallways at recess. Remembering our babyhood, we used to sleep best when we were wobbly toddlers because oftentimes our parents would dim the lights, tuck us into bed, and rock us into the land of dreams. 

Decades ago NASA went so far as to prove that jumping on a trampoline is healthier long term than running on a treadmill. This wasn’t just a free floating piece of data, but rather a theory often cited by parenting blogs. Children spend hours each day skipping around exploring the connection between spaces and their bodies while jiggling their little organs and stimulating their immune systems. Bouncing relies on the momentum of our gravitational pull to set our lymphatic pumps in motion and encourage our bodies to flush out toxins and rebuild energy. Children have been jumping off anything with a ledge and hopscotching down isles because it’s simply ‘fun’, while adults are left wondering why the ‘mini-mes’ are overflowing with energy. 

It Shouldn’t be a given that adult life is full of neck cramps, jittery breathing, and feeling-less guts as our bodily explorations of space diminish while we settle into sedentary lifestyles. We are active beings, yet we fill and treat the objects in our lives as stagnant dogmas. Now, after a stressful day of socializing and inhaling muggy air, we come home believing our beds can act as a personal therapist for the day to come, but we wake up groggy and restless as ever. The dilemma does not lie in the memory foam we invest in, but rather how we tuck ourselves into bed knowing the importance of a soothing lullaby.  

Part4: My Pillow My Hat

This is a year-long exploration of growing back into childhood. Children are at the heart of my findings on ‘healthy design’ because they are a constant reminder to exercise our minds, actively adjust our bodies, and find outlets for emotions through interaction with our environment. I am creating Unknown Frolic Objects as a speculative thesis, and it makes sense I should talk about duvets, stools, and trampolines since fashion, in my eyes, is evolving into our bodies’ every experience with its surroundings. There are so many instances where we walk around our homes exclusively in pajamas and underwear wrapping ourselves in blankets as we sink into a sofa: an untapped goldmine of upgrading our relationship to clothing and domestic comfort. It was never written in stone that seats shouldn’t bounce or clothing turn into massage therapy. People could relate by remembering how objects had a million possibilities in kids’ hands before being labeled with ‘one’ function. Chairs, or anything to sit on for that matter, could have sleeves, wrap around, tickle, or invigorate. Clothing therefore, would need to do more than just clothe. Looking around my room I see my bed as my night fashion, my blanket as my entire surf-the-internet outfit, and my pillows as my hats.

Designing for the zest of play and reaping the benefits of having fun is the philosophy I want to carry with me out of my college bubble. Kids have shown me a plethora of ways to reach this oasis of play, and the fuel behind playground-inspired design lies in how I, along with those willing to experiment, can relearn the indulgence of a child’s imagination.