Inquiry #3

What's in This Place?

After you’ve chosen a site, you need to get oriented, and an initial mapping will give you a sense of the space, materials, and routines. Mapping begins with looking around and recording information in a systematic way, with an end goal of identifying the most important relationships in everyday patterns. The arrangement of materials and spaces can give clues as to what is valued here.

Roaming and Mapping Your Site

The the first days studying play and peer culture on a first grade school playground, I took photos to capture the physical space and began sketching and labeling the built environment, creating a rough birds-eye map of the playground landscape. Consulting the photos and my fieldnotes, I drew a map of the outdoor space, trying to place the equipment and create a sense of the scale of the large grassy space.

I used this map to note the most and least popular locations to see how locations attracted players. For example, some areas were valued because of scarcity of materials. For example, the two basketball hoops (labeled BB on the map) would allow four or more children to throw balls at a hoop simultaneously, but a school rule designed to prevent conflict enforced a capacity limit (e.g., 1 player per hoop) and controlled children’s access through playground rules.

photos by KEW

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