Angela Kyle is the founder of PlayBuild, a non-profit operating out of New Orleans that provides under-served youth physical space and installations where they can engage in play and fun activities, providing different opportunities for creativity through the use of toys, PlayBuild facilitates active learning through tactile exploration. If not for PlayBuild, these experiences for fun and play would not otherwise be available in the communities the organization serves.
1) Please briefly explain what PlayBuild is for those unfamiliar with the project.
PlayBuild is a nonprofit enterprise that I founded in 2012, and it focuses on teaching kids, ages 4 to 12, about design, architecture and design-related disciplines through play.
The mechanism for that is to bring in highly analog kinds of toys that people have been playing with for over a hundred years — things like building blocks — to encourage kids to get hands-on and use their imagination.
When I started in 2012, the impetus for the project was that three entities came together — the city of New Orleans, Tulane University and a local entrepreneurship organization called Propeller — and issued an open call for “crazy” ideas to deal with all of the vacant lots and blighted properties that were still a huge challenge for New Orleans since Katrina.
2012 is seven years post-Katrina — at that time the city had between 35,000 and 40,000 vacant lots and blighted properties. A very progressive guy was brought onto the branding authority and he teamed up with Tulane. The idea was to ask people, if you have a vacant field at the end of your block or if you have a vacant lot next door to you, what could you do with it? How could you turn these spaces into something that is productive for the neighborhood and for your community?
I summarized the big idea and I submitted a one-page Word document. I was selected as one of the top 10 finalists to pitch the idea to an open audience of New Orleans community members and various stakeholders from Tulane. Ultimately, I did not win, but being a finalist opened doors. People heard the idea and got interested in it, so after the competition people started reaching out to me. Subsequently, I found a woman who wanted to really dive in and work on that concept and she did. We became co-founders.
Then a guy who owned property said I think it’s a really cool idea, how can I help? We agreed on a lease-to-own agreement. He started leasing us this vacant lot and PlayBuild was born.
Although the concept of PlayBuild is focused on education and learning through play, the origin of it is really about land use. It is about answering the question, how do you find creative solutions that meet the needs of community residents and quickly provide value to underserved neighborhoods.
2) Why is creating environments for fun and play so important for early development?
In researching this idea, I really went deep on the topic and discovered that block and construction-engineering play is a very specific kind of play. There’s been a lot of research around the skills and impact that early engagement in these kinds of building activities can have on childhood development, fostering skills around motor coordination, spatial skills, reasoning skills; foundational skills that have been proven to lay the early groundwork for STEM, for science, technology, engineering, and math.
This type of play develops the three Cs: collaboration, creativity and communication. Over the last ten years, a new breed of toy designer has started to create toys that are at a massively larger scale than traditional toys. They are meant to enable kids to design their own environments. We have two toy kits. One is called the Imagination Playground designed by an architect named David Rockwell. Rockwell is a very famous, contemporary New York-based architect and designer who has done everything from designing the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas to doing massive tech designs for Broadway. Rockwell designed this kit of toys called the Imagination Playground when his kids were little, and he identified an opportunity to share his creation with others.
We have another kit called the Rigamajig. It is a massive oversized erector set with large pieces of wood and big plastic nuts and bolts. These toys are the size of a 5-year-old, creating truly immersive experiences for these kids. They find the creativity and the capability to put these pieces together by building imaginary houses, imaginary forts, imaginary rocket ships, imaginary science labs.
You’ve got the creativity because the kids are having to stretch their creativity in an unfamiliar environment. You’ve got the collaboration because in order to use the toys you need more than one kid, right? These toys are designed to be manipulated and played within groups. And communication, “Hey, what do you want to build? I want to build a house. Well, I want to build a castle. Okay, well let’s build a house first and then we can break it down and we can build a castle next, OK?” The act of playing with these toys is fostering these kinds of communication skills.
Then there’s another layer that speaks to the mission of PlayBuild, where we started, which is starting in this neighborhood where there’s not a lot of playgrounds. There aren’t a lot of places for kids to go play. We’ve created this outdoor space and brought in all these newfangled toys. It’s creating a child-like special environment where the kids are encouraged to be outside and be active.
3) What ideas can you share with parents that they can use when creating installations and opportunities for enriching fun and play at home?
What we do can be replicated on a smaller scale. It can be replicated very easily and cheaply. The toys that we have on a large scale are not designed for consumer use. They are designed so that educational institutions can use them, but the underlining principles … you can create these environments are home with cardboard boxes.
Look at what Nirvan Mullick presented at Caine’s Arcade. Caine used cheap and cheerful material that taps into the same principles. You can do the exact same thing. There is all manner of building challenges online where people use popsicle sticks, marshmallows, and spaghetti sticks. The key is to find ways to engage in things that are tactile and analog. With kids so addicted to screens these days, I believe there’s something in the zeitgeist around a return to analog engagement for kids.
There was a really powerful article a while back in The New York Times that talked about how ten years ago everyone was worried about the socioeconomic digital divide — that rich kids are going to have all the advantages because they’ve got access to technology and they’re on the Internet, etc., etc.
Now, what seems to be happening is that at the upper echelon of the socioeconomic ladder, parents are trying to keep their kids off of screens. They’re trying to keep their kids away from technology. The front end of the spear, the tip of the spear, is happening in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area. Parents who work at Apple and Google and Microsoft know these technologies are being designed to be addictive are saying “no” to their use because it is unclear what the long-term impact of all this technology use is going to be for kids. So instead of there being a divide, the affluent are paying for their kids to have these kinds of rarefied analog experiences. PlayBuild provides these opportunities to the underserved who might not otherwise have access.
4) What have you learned about fun and play that surprised you?
We serve very low-income neighborhoods. Kids in these areas face high-stress factors: poverty, gun violence, public health issues, unemployment. It’s a very high-stress environment for some. Being able to create this space where kids can articulate their desires, their aspirations, their fears in a safe space through a neutral way of communication is powerful in ways I did not anticipate.
For example, using clay as a mode of communication for kids in high-stress environments can be extremely helpful because many don’t really have the language or the means to express themselves. Instead, they can express themselves through these highly visual and tactile hands-on modes of play.
The intergenerational aspect of play is great, too. Kids and grandparents in the neighborhood coming together. We’ll host an Easter egg hunt or a picnic in our space where it’s not just kids. It’s kids, it’s parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles, and everyone’s coming together and playing together. It creates an alternative mode of communication because the environment is different, and that can be really powerful.
5) For anyone with interest in this topic, who are three people you think they may find useful to learn from?
- There’s a woman named Jenny Gottstein at the IDEO Play Lab. She’s a great resource.
- Another person is Krystina Castella at Pasadena at Cal Arts. She has a great book, “Designing for Kids,” you should check out.
- Stephanie Garst who runs the Value of Play Conference is another thought leader in this area to follow.
