Children's acting senses in place-making : mapping and analysing children's reflective individual and collective sensepointscapes in a primary school playground renewal co-design project with architecture students

Children's preferences for place-responsive architecture and place-making are not easy to explain. Conversing effectively about these subjects is also a challenge, not just for children but also design professionals and the general public more broadly. This thesis represents an in-depth enquiry into how children, aged between 7 to 12 years, viewed and interpreted some design proposals for their school play area. These proposals had been obtained in a previous co-design process involving 35 primary school children, aged between 4 to 12 years, and 25 stage-three architecture students based in the North East of Scotland. The originality and contribution of this thesis are found in the extent of analysis and interpretation of children's perceptions of the redesigning possibilities of their school play space and their ability to connect various spatial opportunities, manifested through various design attributes proposed during collaboration with the architecture design students. In order to document the children's perspectives, images produced by the students during the initial co-design process were gathered through open-ended questionnaires involving 148 primary school children in total, aged between 7 to 12 years, allowing them to generate self-narrated commentaries and drawings on the images produced by the architecture. The thesis culminates in the development of a tool to visualise the complex perception of space, the SENSEPOINTSCAPE, composed of the particular attributes perceived by the children and the +ABILITYSCAPE vocabulary, offering a route through which they can be incorporated in each particular design process and practice. Both tools have the potential to open up the debate around spatial interventions design with greater precision. A little final notation reminds us of the fun of unpredictability, Alea.