Architecture for Kids podcast: How To Design Public Play That Feels Thrilling with Mike Hewson

Perfectly safe play can be a quiet kind of harm because it teaches children that the world is predictable. I am joined by civil engineer and artist Mike Hewson to explore what happens when we design parks that feel thrilling, surprising, and a little bit dangerous, while still being carefully thought through and responsibly built.

Mike shares how he moved from engineering and marine construction into large-scale public art, then discovered that a sculpture could also be a playground. That shift opens up a bigger idea: play infrastructure can fund ambitious public artwork, and the best measure of success might be whether a space becomes the go-to spot for children’s birthday parties. We talk about rural freedom, urban constraint, and why kids need chances to test judgement, climb, wobble, and recover without adults flattening every edge of experience.

We also get practical about how “risky-looking” design can sit inside real-world safety standards. Mike explains the choices behind open climbing structures, the tension between the risk management matrix and his “dullness matrix”, and why cognitive challenge matters for development and for adults too. From his Rocks on Wheels project in Melbourne to gallery works you can actually touch and play with, we keep coming back to the same question: are bureaucracy and fear of litigation shrinking public life, and do we want cities shaped that way?

If you care about child-friendly cities, intergenerational public space, inclusive park design, and public art that people can truly use, you will get plenty to take away. Subscribe to Architecture for Kids, share the episode with a friend, and leave a rating and review so more people can find the conversation. 

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, Antonio Coblone. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Mike Ewson. Mike is a civil engineer and artist practicing in Australia and New Zealand, and he is well known for designing a risky playground, which have received both praise and criticism from parents. Mike's motto is Embracing Risk is Embracing Life. His award-winning projects are pioneer new ways to merge conceptualized projects into the public realm. He works to prove we can, in fact, do things that are considered unattainable in a public setting. Each project aims to catalyze a fresh conversation about how the bureaucratic and managerial aspects of power are shaping our public life, asking if we like that shape or if we'd like to consider other options. He has completed five large-scale public art commissions in Australia. Many of them

From Arts To Engineering To Art

SPEAKER_00 1:45

are sculpture park and playgrounds. Mike, thank you for your time to talk to me today, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, lovely to be here. What subjects were you good at school, and what subjects did you excel if they were different?

SPEAKER_01 2:00

I was very interested in the arts. My grandmother was an artist, but I also really enjoyed the sciences. I didn't like my art teacher at school, so I quit that and then uh went through all those sort of engineering type topics, which is really where I spent my early 20s working in marine construction. But the whole time I was really curious about the arts and creative life. And I would, you know, take periods of time off from my job and do these self-funded art projects, which increased

Turning Sculptures Into Playgrounds

SPEAKER_01 2:25

in scale gradually. And then I went back to art school and I got a large commission doing my first big public project. And as a part of that, there being this playground that had been removed from basically the town square, and I thought perhaps I should just replace that with a new sculpture that is also a playground. I didn't think about that too much until afterwards, and we won an award for playground of the year. It was basically just three large boulders, and one of the boulders had a for like 20 ton that we carved and we poked palm tree through one of them. So it caught a hole through. It was a very simple thing: three rocks and a palm tree and a swing going off one of the rocks. That's where I realized there's so much potential within that format for making artworks. From there, I was like, man, I need to try and this is a great way for funding art projects because people don't like spending money on the arts. So my next proposal when I got invited to do a project was to do just a straight playground. And councils were very resistant to allowing an artist to move into this kind of infrastructure space where yeah, I guess they just didn't think an artist would be up for the job. And I eventually convinced them, and that project Vincent Peters in Sydney was in this area where the government had been sort of progressively taking houses or like land from people for large infrastructure projects. There was a big highway tunnel system that was built in the suburban St. Peter's, and these homes kind of like just yeah, lost and disrupted the community. So my proposal for this small park right next to where these houses had been broken down was to rebuild their front fences, sort of from like archive images. It basically became like a fence playground, but it was carefully arranged to function really well as a playground and pass all of the standards and health and safety code requirements and other sorts of public saggy things. And that was really the start of what I'm doing now, which is using something people need, where people want to go. Like that my parks have become a sort of great place for children's birthday parties. And I think it's a pretty nice idea for the goal of an artwork is to be great for a kid's birthday party. Just these are kind of strange measuring tools for what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

What is your inspiration when you designing your parts, as well as what is your um interest or or intent perhaps in your design?

Designing Surprise And Urban Adventure

SPEAKER_01 4:34

I guess creating places that are very surprising, it's it's difficult to be really surprised in public space because it is such a difficult environment to I guess make things in a way that the public will interact with in a way that's safe. So the logistics and the engineering required to be something that's a bit different is is difficult. So I guess I could talk a little bit. I I grew up in like a country school like in rural New Zealand. It was one of those back in the day stories where there was sheep in the back paddock and chase and ride them and climb trees and throw mud clods at each other and had stick fights. And it was this kind of very adventurous early memory as a child of really being able to just roam and wander and yeah, really follow your uh your curiosities in in the world and what was around you. And I guess I just try and bring that kind of thing into cities at the moment because that's where the infrastructure spending is, and also that's where children often don't get the opportunity to explore in that way where it's like feels a little bit risky, like something could could go wrong, or you're really pushing your own boundaries and providing places for the exploration to to happen where you my projects do look a bit dangerous. They're actually quite sort of trying to do both. They're both providing that opportunity for risky type behavior, but that's all also carefully designed.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yes, your motto is embracing risk, is embracing life. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah, well, I guess I just think the reality of of life is that it it is uncertain, and we kind of sometimes are led to believe that things should be a particular way or that things are going to be safe in some way, but the world's just not like that. And if we're gonna prepare future generations for the life ahead, and you know, we're in a very tense and tenuous time at the moment, and it providing opportunities for children to navigate novel environments is a great way to prepare them for the uncertainty of the future. And I think when you, as designers, if we make things that are so carefully confined, you're not really providing those opportunities, and it's also not very truthful in a way, because it misleads people that life does have this kind of like certainty and that you're going to be okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

I mean, I hope we will be okay, but the two spectrums, you can't find out what's one or what's the other.

Risk Matrix Versus Dullness Matrix

SPEAKER_00 6:45

So you have to have the risk and the non-risk in a way.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah. The risk management model, you know, the matrix that people do when they do a risk assessment. On one axis, there's the the consequence of something happening, low outcome to catastrophic death or or some big environmental disaster. And on the other axis, there's the likelihood of it happening from rare up to likely. And the most responsible way to make a decision from the framework of that risk management matrix is you need to push towards something being a low likelihood and low consequence. That governs a lot of decision making for organizations and government. But the goal of that isn't to make life more interesting or adventurous. But then in our personal lives, we do seek out risk in a way. We climb mountains, we go partying, we do all sorts of things to, I guess, stimulate ourselves or have fun. And if you were to make a matrix that would define that thing, I I mean I've called it the dullness matrix, where you go on one axis, you say, about how interesting something is and also how dodgy it is. And I guess the idea of the dullness matrix is trying to eliminate boring ideas. And but you find in that that in order to have a more interesting and exciting experience, you actually need to increase kind of uncertainty. And it needs to be novel. It can't be sort of predictable. So we have these like competing things in life where we you have to almost the best way to probably make decisions for well, this is I guess what I'm proposing, is you have both the risk management matrix, but you also have this dullness matrix and recognizing that they're both really important things in life because that's just how we live. We do seek safety, but we also seek adventure, and you have to hold those things in tension when you're making decisions.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

And I think uh it's how evolved as well as auspicious, is to seeking that risk. You were speaking, I was thinking about the 1500s, people going at sea and finding out new places or going from Europe and the way they traveled and the perils that they did. It was seeking adventures, seeking risk, and seeking finding out more. But I think the risk is always something that you can't erase. It's part of life, and it's how makes it a simple.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

I agree. I I think the I guess that the in the small part of the thing that I'm doing is just trying to provide these couraging opportunities. It's to say, look at this is the reality of life. And I'm not talking about being reckless. I don't think there's anything endaring about being dismissive of different groups of people and different needs, like but I do try and do it all. Like you try and think about like accessibility and inclusion in your design, but then they don't become that's not the only thing that's important.

Building Risky Looking Play Within Codes

SPEAKER_00 9:10

So give us an example of a risky situation in one of your playgrounds.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Well, I mean, finally, I don't think my playgrounds are that risky. I think they just present as that. I mean, a lot of the playgrounds specifically are are sort of open climbing structures, so there's no handrails. Occasionally there is at the entrance to a slide. But I basically avoided within the the playground code, if you don't have a flat platform, or put it the other way, if you have a flat platform, it's considered for stairs. They need to have handrails and edges, like you know, the the barriers around the edge. So I just said, how about I just don't have any stairs and no platforms, and therefore I didn't need to have handrails. So everything becomes a sort of open climbing structure. And if you're thinking about providing a big outcome for community if in terms of spending, if the whole object can be climbed or like, you know, played on, you get a lot more value for money as well. Like some sort of tower structure that has some handrails, it's a lot of spending, and you don't get much for it. You're not meant to hang around on the outside of the guardrail, for example.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

From all the projects you've done so far, which is the one that just incorporates your ideas more thoroughly

Rocks On Wheels And Child Confidence

SPEAKER_00 10:15

or more potently in a way?

SPEAKER_01 10:16

The most recent project that I completed in South Bank in Melbourne, it's um a project called Rocks on Wheels. You can look it up. That project for other people really galvanised my previous project. Seemed like people really understood what I was doing in that project. It's these large blue stone boulders with flat bottoms, about 330 ton of stone, and I put them on these little domestic scale furniture dolly that you might move your piano or cupboards with. And it looks like these large stone units have just been rolled into place in this public courtyard, and then I strung like ladders and ropes between these boulders. So it looks like this kind of very hazard backyard project. And I guess these big stone units that look like they could topple, but then also with kids sort of scrambling madly over the whole lot. There's something in that image that I guess could people help them understand my other projects. You see a four-year-old three meters in the air, sitting on top of a ladder having a drink of water. It's just this powerful image where you if you can provide an opportunity for a child to feel powerful and they've overcome some sort of that's a very special thing that you could give, a very generous thing for a kid to feel they've got what it takes to kind of navigate

Parks For Everyone Across Ages

SPEAKER_01 11:27

life.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

And another element that is quite strong in your design is the intergenerational aspect. And uh, how do you see that within the other components of your design, sort of the risk element or the playfulness?

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, yeah. So I've in future projects, I think we spoke about this last time I was in London. I'm starting to call the playground just parks now, because in London, public space is at a premium and it really needs to work hard for everybody. If I was to propose a project here that was in an existing park, and then I sort of tell everyone, oh, it's just for kids now. I'm sure there's a legitimately a reason for a pushback on that. Not because kids aren't important, but why does it have to just be for kids? Can it not be for everybody, the the construction worker who wants to eat their lunch, the person walking their dog, wants to sunbathe, or or even, dare I say, older people who don't have um children in their lives to be around younger children because there is this intergenerational need, like when we have these siloed sections where this is the skate park for the teenagers and this is the area for the young professionals or the older people or children, I think they should be collapsed together because that intergenerational overlap, I think, is a very healthy thing for society. It's like the kind of I guess it's like kind of like the piazza idea of like the square that adults to the side having a meal and a glass of wine while someone's kicking the ball around and teenagers are flirting in the corner. This is a kind of image of overlapping lives. And so I think that intergenerational aspect is yeah, if you if you're gonna think about inclusion, that is a very broad topic if you really go into it. Because if you design a space that makes an adult who doesn't have a child feel alienated, I can't see how that can be sort of inclusive. So I guess there's just a lot of different needs that need to be met and looked at, and sometimes those topics are much broader than we think. Like accessibility isn't about just can a wheelchair go through a playground. There's so many more aspects about that when you when you have friends or family or you work with groups of um people with disabilities. It's a very broad spectrum. Some of them are just the the neurodivergent aspect is very broad in the needs. So I think sometimes we make these very um overly simplified views on on how to do something in an inclusive and accessible way. And I think that extends to to adults as well in terms of how it sort of overlaps. So what I try and do is just sort of make these kind of confused spaces. So it doesn't present as playground per se. There's a few clues, like there might be a swing and a slide, but the rest is just like, what the hell's going on here? It sort of looks like a kind of a half-finished kind of storage yard, but that does for children and for adults actually, curiosity is what draws people in and makes them just it helps them stay. If people think they can understand something fully when they see something, you just sort of you can just keep going. If you really can't take it all in and there's something at the larger scale as the as the whole project presents, but then zooming into the detail of this the sort of minor things on one of the projects like glued all these like little plastic animals down in various little hiding spots, which is a goofy idea. But there was something about that scale thing where it doesn't matter what where you're looking from, there's something that draws you in. And I think that that's a great uh tool for bringing people in, keeping their like attention engaged, and also adults, you know, what that park in South Bank is you know, I've seen a lot of like people in their like 70s and 80s just hang out there sitting on a swing, climbing up and going down the slide. It's a really nice image where where it's like, well, this is such a weird park. I guess I can be here too.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

And you're talking about as well as uh earlier that intriguing moment, isn't it? Something that intrigues you and that you want to discover more. Is this what what you were talking about as well?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Well, that's what I aim for, whether I get there. I think my projects just try and imitate some of the interesting things that I see in the world. But often as an artist you have these ideals, but you often fall short of of every the amazing things you see in everyday life. Often these things are just sort of a crude remake. But it's that kind of intrigue and trying to put that in your work that you can draw people in and they will

Working With Councils And Regulation

SPEAKER_01 15:25

come back to it.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

We will talk about the reaction of kid and people in general to your work, but before that, how easy it is for local authorities, for instance, to engage with your work? Or the other question would be how interested are they in your work? Put a bit more bluntly, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Well, I don't know, yeah. I think it's they're scared by it. I think a lot of been a long journey as well. These projects do at face value look quite scary and irresponsible. But that's also what intrigues them about the project. So I guess I've just had to slowly work through, you know. I do one, I did one small project. Physically and functionally has been a success, aesthetically, conceptually, it's been a success. And then I just build off that on the next project and I just pushed a little bit further. The council that I initially worked with, it was a big collaborative project, but the council didn't want to have anything to do with the delivery of my part because they're like, we don't think this is gonna work. We also won like Playground of the Year for that park, and then they saw how well thought out and well designed it all worked. And so then on the next project, they were like, they just let me go. They actually engaged me as opposed to the previous project, someone else funded and delivered it, and then council accepted it once it was proven to be okay. Built to the next project where they just yeah, they really just sort of let me go. And I think I know that I have to earn that kind of respect and trust. I've never felt disenfranchised or too much anyway, that ideas or or projects aren't immediately received. I've always accepted that if you're doing something new, you have to prove yourself. And I just have been dedicated to just slowly extending that the room to move that I'm sort of slowly creating for myself. And I think other designers, I think these pro that's I see one of my roles is this kind of making these case study great examples that people can go, well, well, Mike did it.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

How does your work sit within the discussion of creating child-friendly cities or bringing kids to the streets and after the intergenerational discussion? How do you think your work sits within all that?

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Well, I think it's just sitting to the side, providing proof that things can be interesting in this current framework of really onerous, regulatory, you know, a lot of it's governed by fear of litigation and sort of, you know, the whole insurance thing. That really governs the shape of public space. And I sort of have seen my role as pushing out and creating more room in that sort of environment. But, you know, really there's, you know, if you travel the world, there's so many different cultures that in a much more engaged and interesting and just free-flowing way let people live. And I think in the I guess to, you know, I live in a western city governing how we live. And I guess my projects are trying to push against those like the bureaucratic aspects of power that would seek to kind of shrink freedoms, but and we're not talking about freedoms, it's just about just letting people live and welcoming people and being generous to people and letting them just you know move about in a way that they wouldn't want to.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Well, absolutely, because we have been creating public spaces that are not even public, they are being controlled by a management of people that creates the develops the area. If you are sitting or if you are two or three people sitting there, someone will come and ask you, What are you doing here? Why are you here? Yeah, yeah. How is your work received by the children and people in general? And there's been kind of surprise elements in there. How does it work?

SPEAKER_01 18:34

I get pretty good reviews from my my main clients, the children. Yeah, the feedback from parents, it's a bit two-sided, it's like my kid loves it, but they don't want to leave. Which is really annoying. So I guess that's positive. That's a pat on the back. And I think it's just because it does look, you know, a lot of them look like a kind of ruin or like someone's made a mistake. But you know, those are the types of where there's like a little bit of failure or this kind of idea, things are like falling apart. That's just part of life and time, and you know, I guess entropy. And I think kids find that very curious. Adults love going to ruins, they'll do a tour of a city, but they'll just go via these old sites. And it's there's something that we really are curious about in that thing of like time and where we fit in and failure, and when that's designed into space, just acknowledging that things fall apart and bring a stasis. I think that that does draw people in as well. Yeah, I think my first project, I was mostly thinking about doing a cool sculpture, if I'm honest. And in more recent projects, I've realized that it also, if you're doing something for that presents as you know, for a playground, it needs to be really good because I've worked really hard to try and deliver on all like the kind of functional and developmental needs of sort of various groups and things. But I think the great part about when you start doing these things that are quite weird, they end up ticking a lot of the boxes that would be required in these the more bureaucratic demands of a play project because they're just so complex and they're so varied. So many different services, heights, shapes, colours that it ends up being a complex environment is the most cognitively engaging environment, which is good for development. If everything's sort of standardized and in a very predictable shape, then cognitive load on your minds to navigate that space is quite low. So as soon as you had something that's like you really can't take it in and your body can't quite predict exactly how to navigate it, that's when you're learning. And that's and also for adults, you know, it's you know, all the research around cognitive decline. The solution is learning and it's moving and it's all these like very simple things, walking. And so making these places that provide these cognitively engaged, that's how we help uh look after ourselves as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Blee and learning is very much part of your design and something that you think quite thoroughly before you win about design, especially for kids.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah, I I have to, and I I think I've just learned slowly that that's what I that's important. I think I was a yeah, yeah. I guess as I as I move through these, I've sort of noticed more about what I need to be thinking about and and my need to continually be interested in what's around me and what and other people and learning them from other groups because we're all sharing the curiosity of meeting and learning from other people, dragging down into

Galleries London Hopes And New Work

SPEAKER_01 21:10

the projects as well seeming to work quite well.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

I've seen some of your work in gallery spaces. Talk to us a little bit about what you're doing in those spaces, the interest or the need to work in a different kind of space.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

I started wanting to be an artist. There's a long history of artists showing in gallery spaces, and I guess that was always a goal. But I also wasn't in a hurry to get there, and not necessarily more interesting to be in a gallery space. Potentially it's less interesting. Yeah, but I did a show with uh an amazing gallery in New Zealand called um Michael Lett. Yeah, we'd been having a conversation for a while around doing what it would look like for my sort of public ground projects to have a life or for me to just work in that indoor gallery context. And yeah, for that one, they had this amazing old wooden church was a kind of half sort of amphitheatre up the top, and we decided that we'd put a big palm tree in the center of this. Little hall with this large stone basketball hoop. And this stone was translucent, so light could shine through it, and it had sort of actually looks like the sky. And that there were a few other elements that I've got inside of these like little weird drinking fountains, so they were scattered through the gallery. But the thing that was quite unique about that project is typically an art gallery is you can't touch anything and you certainly can't push anything. But as soon as there was a basketball bouncing around the space, bouncing off the sculptures, very quickly changes, or I guess it again it kind of confuses. What is this thing? Can I actually play with the basketball? And you know, can I take a drink from the fountain? Because I think there isn't a lot of that surprise in that context. And actually, even the palm tree that we put in there, I plumbed a drinking fountain into that so you could take a drink of chilled filtered water from the palm tree. And so I think that was really interesting. And I actually got some semi- no, there's some professional basketball players to come in one night and we did sort of a wasn't only performance, was just an event with people just playing. And that was kind of amazing to see. And I think even the players were confused about what was happening because they were really actually having fun without trying. And yeah, again, taking a drink from the sculptures and colours. So yeah, I am interested just to see what will come from that as well. And um when are we seeing one of your parks in London? As soon as you'll want me over here. There seems to be a lot of curiosity over here in terms of you know, people do love their parks here and they do love being out, especially in the summer. And public space is definitely at a premium here. I guess also public spending on parks is quite low. So I think but it's always surprising when the pro value of property here is so high that the offerings in the public space uh on a budget. And um, is that the right way? Um I'd love to do an example project here to kind of go, hey, should we be making this open space be doing more for us? And again, I'm talking about keeping all of the existing use of parks, whether four kids, it's four people that are just going for a walk, get some sun and people who are walking their dog. And look, I know that this is like you can't just collapse it all together and it all just immediately work. But through careful design, I think we can make things do a lot more. And are you considering any work in a art gallery here as well? I'm not no, I've not had any discussions, but just I sort of follow who's interested. Yeah, I've got a few things cooking in the next couple of years, and I think that will kind of further articulate these ideas. When the penny drops for the whichever person, then yeah, I'll probably, you know, maybe do something over here also.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

And of these things that you're working on, is there something you want to talk about now or we keep it until we we see more? We see that.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Something that won't I won't I won't talk about, but it is sort of exciting to you know move a bit more into that

Fish Market Artwork Beyond Categories

SPEAKER_01 24:35

museum space. But why project I am doing is in front of the the Sydney fish markets, and that's uh a new big Dubai app, really large, quite different from the previous fish markets. As a part of that, there was an old coal destruction, which was a kind of an old gantry crane that they invited artists to to do a heritage interpretation project, which is a kind of a pretty nah brief for an artist to celebrate something related to coal and sort of colonial industrial heritage. They're not really in topics. It's a very difficult brief, so I basically proposed to they chopped up this big gantry crane structure and left it in a pile, and you know, the artist is then meant to come and do something with it. So I just basically proposed to leave the structure in chunks, just in chopped-up chunks on the ground in the forecourt of the fish market. And then I'm sleeving through these mature rescue palm trees, which were native to the Sydney harbour. Like you know all of the valleys would have been filled with these dense groves of liverstone or australis, beautiful native palm. And you don't really see them in public space densely planted because to buy them, they're quite expensive now because they're all in native forests. So these have all been risked out of um old growth forests that have been fouled. So they go in and grab these trees and nurse them back to life before they go and clear the land. So there's these trees that are between 20 and 100 years old. So they've already had a life, they've lived through a lot of the 20th century, probably the sum of the age of the cola destruction as well. But they're growing up through kind of a plane that's crashed in the jungle. It's sort of this like leaving behind this old history, sort of respect being respectfully disrespectful to this, putting it to rest. And that is not a playground per se. And that's one of the discussions I've had that it's not, we're not gonna, I don't want it to fully comply to the playground code. Because I also think that government organizations need to be able to navigate these things that don't clearly fit within a category. So often what happens is something looks like it could be climbed, the government will go, all right, well, let's make it meet the playground code. So even these like sort of small dinky sculptures need to have the sort of soft full rubber around them. But then you walk down and you see a tree that's just growing out of the footpath, and the kid can climb that. And that doesn't need soft fall around it. So there's this irresponsible spending of public money because they're unable to deal with the complexity of something not fitting in a category. For that project, I'm wanting to go through a case-by-case first principles risk management process to do this design where kids can climb these metal structures, they can hang off the palm tree that's in the sort of it's gonna be a beautiful project, but then also not fully complied to the playbrow code because I think it's an artwork. Well, it's also just a grove of palm trees with some stuff in it. And does that really need to fit into this clear category? In reality, I think I will mostly be trying to go through all the box-ticking geometric constraints of the playground code. It's a good tool, put it that way. The code is a great tool. Don't let it be you are. And all my previous projects, I I have actually made them fit, learned the limits, and then I really pushed right up against the edge of something. And in this one, I want to just go, well, we need to have a broader conversation around how we're designing public space. There needs to be occasionally ways to move outside of that legally and without unnecessary fear of litigation, I think. But again, it comes down to being a responsible and engaged designer who is really curious and really does want to learn from observations and what's worked and hasn't worked in the past.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Is this a more visual work or is more interactive?

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Well, I think one of the big things that I really think is that something presents as something, you should let it be that. So if it looks like it's fun to climb on, it shouldn't be fun to climb on, and just people should be able to feel like that's again, it's just being a generous and hospitable person is to allow someone to engage with something that they're curious about. And I think for me that's allowing them to whether it be like slam diaping one of our sculptures or taking a drink from it, is let the people do what they're curious to do. Obviously, there's limits to that, but I'm just doing my little bit to go make yourself at home, have a climb. When you design the public space, you have to assume there's gonna be a big gang of drunk rugby players coming home from the pub that are gonna give your thing a good workout. And if you can design it in a way that it can sort of handle that, that's great. And it's also then again low maintenance and and not so scary for Goblin to engage with. Yeah, there's a lot going on, a lot to think about.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Mike, is that a question I should have asked you that ever asked you? And what is that question? No, I think you've uh asked me quite a few questions. Yeah, nothing comes to my What does your work do to you as a designer? Why play and why intergenerational or and why risk and why children?

SPEAKER_01 28:55

I mean, I'm not really it seems like I'm very intentional in what I'm doing, but I guess there hasn't been any clear reason for it. That's obvious to me, other than I guess foremost being an artist and just being deeply interested in that the the history of art and creative practice and uh finding a way for me to to do something in that conversation that long. So I guess that's what's driven me. And in doing that, you know, say for example, sculptures seem to make the best things to climb on, like almost any sculpture you see, you you immediately want to scramble over it or touch it, or that's the impulse. You see something that's bigger than you and it really interesting to look at, you just want to touch it. And uh I guess I'm like, well, I want people to be able to do that. And also I've I guess I've come from this thing where I've not necessarily been in the early well, I guess when I started, I didn't go to art school, so I always always felt a little a little bit outside. I mean, since then I have got the art school and well part of it, but there was this thing where I did want to include people that were outside of the arts and make something that even if they don't like the concept design behind an artwork, if they find it curious enough that they want to engage with it or climb on it. That's a nice way to bring just the general public into the general public that I care so much about art to bring them in kind of conversation, interaction with the art. It's just I guess where I've ended

Final Thoughts And Subscribe

SPEAKER_01 30:09

up. Thank you very much, Mike. It was great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Nice chatter. Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids Podcast and leave your rating and the review recommend us to your friends and family and to find out more about it visit our website Antonio Kaplon Portfolio.co.uk, Buildingcenter.co dot uk, Thornton Education Trust.org, Cardiff.ac.uk and follow us on uh Instagram, arch4kids, Twitter, and Kaplun, LinkedIn and Kaplun, C P E L A O. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.