Playground Pulse
In the midst of Covid-19 pandemic, playgrounds in New York City have been closed. The hope is that they will reopen one day, but how do we prepare ourselves for the reopening? For every individual, social distancing will end differently. As an urban planner, I was thinking about what kind of information would the public needs to reform their trust in these public spaces. This urban sensing project focuses on detecting public movement using a human presence sensor. At the playground level, the project’s audience is children. Playful LED displays will stay engaged and interact with kids, Presenting a sense of wonder. At the city level, information collected from this sensor will be aggregated and provided to the public. For example, parents could use such information to understand whether a playground is busy and whether to bring their kids to the playground during certain hours of the day. The information would also be helpful to the Department of Park and Recreation to allocate resources in maintaining these parks.
Playground Pulse, a name and a project inspired by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room, translates analog to digital and facilitates the public activities on children’s playgrounds.
In thinking of the most fun way to interact with kids and provide meaningful interaction. I originally sketched a gnome house with LED light responding to different motions for a park nearby — the dinosaur playground, in Riverside Park. The playground features dinosaur sculptures that kids can interact with. While the LED display is interesting, having a gnome house in the dinosaur park doesn’t make much sense.
I started to think more about how each playground sensor should really fit its environment. In short, the form factors of the sensor need to be site-specific. For example, it makes sense to have a dinosaur egg in the dinosaur playground. A dinosaur egg that gradients soft lights in a rhythm when there are no movements detected. However, if it detects the motion, the light will dime and the buzz inside of the egg will be triggered and starts to make a buzzing noise. I spent some time prototyping what that would be like using lilypad and sewed together some LED light and a light sensor.
The data collected will be movements on the playground. This graph on the left shows people walking in Riverside Park and passing by the sensors within 5 minutes. Deploying this sensor on the playground can provide a general idea of whether the equipment was used and during what time of the day. There may not be accurate headcounts, but if a playground was crowded, the sensor data would be able to show that.
Relating that to the current situation and a possibly prolonged social distancing policy. I think the information uncovered by this project would be particularly useful for parents to chose which playgrounds to go to and when to visit these playgrounds in order to avoid the crowd. For example, having an online platform where this information is presented to show that when each park is busy and how busy it is. Like a blinking dinosaur egg, each unique playground could be presented by a unique symbol. The symbol will blink in a frequency that is related to the busyness of the playground.
