The playground project is a collaboration between INDA, AmCham, and Su Rau Keo, a Mosque-run community school in the Bang Bua Thong area of Nonthaburi province. Over an 8 week period in summer 2007, lead by instructors Eden Price Reif and Sirintra Vanno,14 students spent about 64 hours engaging local playgrounds to examine positive and negative playground equipment precedents, studying texts and international guidelines, visiting the Su Rau Keo site to interview the stakeholders and user groups to discern their needs and desires, and documenting the site’s local context to better understand the community. After an intense design period, a solution was reached and students hired the contractor in implementing the design while living on-site for 5 days during the month of July, 2008.
Komthat Syamananda
Ekaluck Staporntonapat
Related Projects:
Ephemeral Events
This design-build project focused on the production of a single pop-up event held in the Nang Loeng district. Students became both designers and organizers, curating a public event and the infrastructure needed to support that event, such as urban furniture, market stalls, public amenities, and artist installations. During the development of the project, students conducted a series of community engagement meetings and mapping workshops, understanding the identity and values embedded in the neighborhood. Taking on the role of festival organizers, the students independently coordinated the design and promotion of media content, met with the district office and police to establish site permissions, and prepared the site for all of its potential infrastructural needs. Throughout the month-long process, students worked directly with community leaders, market vendors, arts and crafts specialists, and local cultural hubs to curate a series of interactive workshops, where the public was invited to learn about the identity of Nang Loeng through participatory events. These workshops included desserts made from banana leaves, sewing methods with Ban Narasilp, dancing workshops with Khon performers and ballroom instructors, Thai chess instructions with local champions, and other food-related crafts. During the opening, the public was invited to participate in a live “memory wall” where responses to a series of questions on the past, present, and future of Nang Loeng were displayed for collective reflection.
Toolcraft: Clay 3D Printer
The exploration of 3D printing was the centre of the summer workshop. The workshop was initiated by building an open-source clay 3D printer from scratch. Through the act of 'tool-building', firsthand experience of how 3D printing technologies work and the constraints and possibilities of the machine was gained by the students. Through adapting several open-source 3D printing designs, students went through a process of modifying and ‘hacking’ the 3D printer design, adding their own features and addons which could improve the machines efficiency and its possible printing techniques. Along with designing and building a 3d printer, the students' toolkit was further supplemented with digital tools primarily focusing on Grasshopper, where they learnt parametric design which generated custom g-code which sent tailored instructions and controls to the machine, allowing for a constant feedback loop between design development and testing.