Designing public playgrounds for inclusion: a scoping review of grey literature guidelines for Universal Design

ABSTRACT

Universal Design (UD) is promoted internationally for the design of public playgrounds that support outdoor play, social participation, and inclusion. Despite this international recognition of UD, there is a lack of research evidence concerning the applicability of UD for playground design. Instead, municipalities need to rely on best practice guidelines to inform the design of public playgrounds for inclusion. Internationally, numerous grey literature guidelines have been produced for designing public playgrounds for inclusion, resulting in a lack of consensus on core principles for applying UD. Thus, this scoping review study aimed to synthesise findings from a review of international grey literature guidelines to strengthen the knowledgebase for designing public playgrounds for inclusion. Three themes were identified that characterise core considerations for good design: (1) design approaches, (2) design principles and (3) design recommendations. Although UD is recognised as having potential to support the design of public playgrounds, inconsistent design approaches, principles, and recommendations, were communicated within these guideline documents. Still, the core concept of inclusion underpinned all guideline documents and a tailored application of UD dominated. Consequently, to fully realise the design of public playgrounds for inclusion, UD may need to be tailored for play; however, further research is required.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• playground
• playground design
• inclusive design
• universal design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to the reviewers for their important feedback during the review process. The first author’s PhD research is funded by an Irish Research Council award; the second and third authors supervise this PhD research.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any human or animal participants.

Additional information

Funding

The research conducted in this publication was funded by the Irish Research Council under award number GOIPG/2019/3861.