Imagination Playground

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The Concept

Imagination Playground is a new playground concept designed to prompt creativity and sensory exploration. With a focus on Loose Parts, it offers a changing array of elements that allow children to constantly build and re-build their play space, and exercise their imaginations. Imagination Playground encourages unstructured, child-directed "free play," the kind of play that experts say is critical to a child’s intellectual, social, physical and emotional development.

KaBOOM! has partnered with architect David Rockwell to help create great new playgrounds across America. By helping to distribute Rockwell's innovative Imagination Playground to communities across the country, KaBOOM! is taking a giant leap toward achieving our vision of a great place to play within walking distance of every child.

Core Elements

Manipulable Environment

Children play most creatively in settings they can manipulate. Sand and water, for example, serve as raw materials for creativity and sensory exploration. Imagination Playground provides a transformable environment that allows for many types of activities, empowering children to influence the space around them.

Loose Parts

A wide array of movable objects allows each play session to become a new experience. With Imagination Playground Loose Parts, children can create their own narratives and games; build something and tear it down; or simply play to enjoy shapes and textures. 

Play Associates

Play Associates provide an open setting in which children can direct their own play. These trained adults allow play activity to evolve by maintaining a safe and secure environment, and by renewing and varying the supply of Loose Parts. Their job is to ensure a diverse, creative play space.

The Products

	Imagination Playground in a Box is a semi-mobile kit of parts suitable for a variety of outdoor and indoor sites. It gives communities an easy-to-install, cost-effective means to enhance the way their children play. This set includes a storage unit on wheels, Imagination Playground Blocks, parts that encourage sand and water play, along with a variety of other Loose Parts. Imagination Playground in a Box can be used on its own or as an addition to an existing playspace.
	Imagination Playground Indoors can transform an indoor area into a rich environment that invites children to engage in open-ended, imaginative play. This package includes Imagination Playground Blocks and other Loose Parts including fabric, mats, crates and a wooden cart. A set of large, playful wall graphics helps organize the Loose Parts for storage against a wall.
	Imagination Playground Parks is a site-specific park concept that includes a full set of Loose Parts and a sculpted landscape, as well as sand and water installations. The Burling Slip Imagination Playground in the South Street Seaport area of New York City will be the first realization of the Imagination Playground initiative, designed in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Imagination Playground in Communities Across the Country

Imagination Playground allows children to design their own course of play, while fostering collaboration and creativity. With each play session, Loose Parts can instantly activate the space around them. Blocks, mats, wagons, fabric, and crates overflow with creative potential. A new playground is born, configured by children’s activity, evolving as the children play, dream and build.

Something as simple as a “box of stuff” can allow for endless possibilities.

If you're interested in obtaining an Imagination Playground for your community, please contact us at imaginationplayground@kaboom.org with your name, organization, contact information and any questions you may have. We will put you on our mailing list so that you can receive regular updates about this innovative concept in play.

As part of a continuing commitment to bring play to children everywhere, Rockwell Group and KaBOOM! have partnered to bring Imagination Playground to communities everywhere across the country. By marrying Imagination Playground with a network of KaBOOM! communities, opportunities for children to engage in unstructured, self-directed "free play" will spring up across the nation.