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Designing agritourism facilities for families with children: a complex challenge

Many of the agritourism venues we work with are designed to attract families with children. One of the challenges when designing facilities to be used by children is to create an environment (including equipment) that produces the desired behavior and outcomes -- and deters undesirable behavior. Just as there is a gulf of misunderstanding between genders, often described with the analogy " women are from Venus; men are from Mars," likewise, there is a gulf of misunderstanding between most adult designers of children's environments and the children they're designing for.

Fortunately for our farm clients, our company has expertise and decades of experience in child development, behavior, and designing facilities , activities, and equipment for children. The following discusses the many challenges of designing agritourism facilities for children or that will have families with children as visitors.

Kids will do the darnedest and most unexpected things when interacting with the environment. If you have any doubts about this, consider this news story that appeared a few years ago. A 4-year-old boy crawled inside an arcade-type crane machine at a restaurant in Titusville, FL, and couldn't get out. When firefighters arrived, the child was sitting inside the machine among the stuffed animals. He had crawled into the small vending slot where the prizes come out while his family was seated at a table having dinner. Firefighters had to pry open the machine to free him. He emerged with his coveted prize, a stuffed football.

This story from the news is a good illustration of how children will make things in the environment that aren't meant to be interactive, interactive. And the younger the child is, the more likely this will happen. This is because of the vast differences in how children and adults look at their environment. Adults view the environment in terms of form, shapes, and structures and as background. If something like a bench is in a public place, adults will interpret it only for its socially acceptable use, for sitting upon. On the other hand, children interpret the environment holistically and evaluate it for all the ways they can interact with it. They use the environment to aid their development and improve themselves. They look for the environment's affordances -- the opportunities it affords them to do things. Also, children interpret the environment in terms of its possible function rather than its form. So, in the case of the bench, because young children haven't yet acquired the social norms for its accepted use (and aren't developmentally ready to accept social norms for behavior), they see the bench as something that affords them opportunities for sprawling out on, climbing on, and jumping on and off of. A rock, if small enough, is perceived by a child as something to grasp and throw - it affords grasping and throwing. If the rock is larger, it could afford stepping on, looking under, or climbing on.

Another simple example is a long, straight hall in a building. A child sees it as affording them a chance to run; run down the hall they will. Similarly, a wall 2-feet high is perfect for walking and balancing on. In all these cases, the child is not misbehaving. They are doing exactly what their brain is biologically wired to do, based on the environment's affordances and their developmental age. They are fulfilling what is known as their developmental tasks, one of which is to explore and interact with the environment. When a child behaves in an environment in a way that adults see as improper, it is not usually the child's fault, but, more often the adults' fault for not appropriately designing the environment for children.

Environments for children need to be designed with careful consideration of four basic environmental needs children have:

Movement

The environment needs to invite children to move within safe and tolerable limits, and every child will move to a different drummer. If too restricted, children become frustrated and fidgety, or they try to gain access to prohibited components of the environment.

Comfort

A feeling of comfort is important to children's use and exploration of the environment. There needs to be moderate and varied levels of stimulation for all the senses. Behavior is optimized at a comfort zone of stimulation, neither too little nor too much. An overload of sensory stimulation and noise will exacerbate children's discomfort and result in undesired behaviors.

Competence

Children need to feel successful in negotiating the environment. Yet the world forces them to constantly confront intimidating and frustrating experiences. Successful children's environments are designed to make children competent inhabitants and users.

Control

Children need the ability to exercise control over the environment and acquire increased levels of autonomy. Children must have experiences that allow them to experiment and make decisions.

The balance of this article explores in greater detail the elements of design required to accomplish these four goals and create successful environments for children's use.

One of the challenges in designing environments for children's use is to offer them the affordances for the desired behaviors. Through deliberate design, you can keep children from using the environment in inappropriate and unsafe ways by eliminating affordances for undesired behavior. When it comes to play areas in agritainment facilities, this is accomplished by offering children age-appropriate affordances that produce the desired outcomes. If children are drawn to the play components, they will not be drawn to inappropriate use (in an adult's eyes) of the other elements in the environment. This requires that children be challenged and not become bored. Otherwise, they will start interacting with those other elements or sometimes become aggressive. Of course, there is also the issue of eliminating affordances for the wrong behavior, such as not having throwable stones or unsafe equipment that attracts children.

Children become bored when there's a mismatch between what they have the ability to do and what they are expected or want to do. They enjoy themselves when their skills match the developmentally appropriate task at hand. They become anxious if challenged beyond their capability and often claim boredom as a defense. If not challenged enough, they're bored. In either case, a bored child will find ways to be challenged by climbing, running, or other behaviors that match their abilities. Children prefer and are most drawn to play environments with high degrees of challenge, diversity, novelty, and complexity. The type, quality, and diversity of children's play environments directly affect the type, quality, and diversity of their play.

Since children's developmental tasks and skill levels change constantly as they age, the point where boredom sets in is a moving target. Children's physical (fine and gross motor), intellectual, and social skills are constantly advancing. This means that children's environments must offer what is known as graduated challenges, a range of challenges, as even the same-age children have different levels of skills and acceptable challenges. Generally, what works for young children will not work for older children, so age-appropriate play areas must be developed for each age grouping.

Children's ability to interact with, control, and transform their environment is very important. Children want to explore, manipulate, and transform the environment. Environments that include loose parts that children can manipulate, move, and construct with are immensely more engaging than static equipment and environments.

Most young children's play centers around their incredible imaginations. The environment needs to promote and support imaginative role-play with props and loose parts. However, the environment needs to be open-ended so children can use their imaginations to develop their own play scripts. Highly scripted, structured, and overly themed environments stifle children's creativity, short-circuit extended play, and can quickly lead to boredom.

An important aspect of children's use of the environment is that they are more interested in the process of using the environment than in achieving an end result as adults do.

Then there are the concepts known as anthropometrics and ergonomics (sometimes referred to as human factors engineering), which means designing things to match children's physical sizes and abilities. This includes such characteristics as height, grip, reach, field of vision, etc., so that tasks can be performed with minimum stress and maximum efficiency and safety. It doesn't do any good to design equipment that doesn't fit a child's anthropometrics and skills and isn't ergonomically correct. Either they will not be able to use the equipment, or will feel incompetent trying to, and neither outcome will make them want to return. Poorly designed equipment, furniture, and environments that don't match children's anthropometrics can be dangerous. If a shelf is too high and a child wants something on it, they will often find a way to get to it -- likely in an unsafe manner, such as climbing on lower shelves that may not be designed to support a child's weight.

OK, as complicated as all this sounds, it gets even more challenging.

There's the issue of children's attention spans, which can be much shorter than that of adults. Something that at first interests a child can 10 minutes later become boring. To overcome this challenge, the environment must offer a wide variety of options. Too little of a variety of equipment and materials limits children's play options and increases boredom and aggression. Another factor that drives the need for variety is known as the multiple intelligences. The theory of multiple intelligences challenges the traditional notion that intelligence is a single, fixed commodity. Instead, it says we all possess eight distinct and somewhat autonomous intelligences to differing degrees - linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and naturalist. We tend to be most interested in activities that match our stronger intelligences. There are also distinct differences between the interests of girls and boys. Therefore, various activities must appeal to the broadest range of multiple intelligences and both genders.

The scale of the environmental space also influences children's behavior. Research shows that the more child-scaled the environmental space, the higher the quality and complexity of children's play will be, and the longer they will be preoccupied with it. In other words, a child-scaled environment increases children's interest and concentration and delays boredom. In a large space, children are encouraged through reading the environment to move about from one thing to another, whereas in small-contained areas, they are more focused. Areas for different activities need to be well defined with identifiable boundaries in ways that children can interpret. The relationship between areas and activities, what we call adjacencies andzoning, also impacts children's behavior and the quality of their activities. Children are most comfortable with residential-scale spaces.

Other factors also influence children's enjoyment of play. Outdoors, nature, and the abundant use of plants in informal settings have been shown to enhance children's concentration, reduce their stress, increase their feelings of well-being, and help them further develop imagination and a sense of wonder. Children have a strong preference to play outdoors in a natural environment, as opposed to one built indoors. This is a definite advantage that agritourism venues have.

Children can decipherer a well-designed environment. They can orient themselves, recognize how their space connects to adjoining spaces, and figure out how to get to a desired destination- a concept known as wayfinding. Children's short stature makes this incredibly challenging unless the environment is designed from a child's-eye view. Younger children don't read. So, where signs work for adults, the environment must be designed to give children equivalent non-language wayfinding communication. An important aspect of younger children's orientation is known as transitioning. Children cannot process new environments as quickly as adults. They need more time to adjust. Transitioning spaces and transparency from space to space greatly assist children with transitioning.

Safety is also a crucial consideration. The environment must be designed to prevent unsafe behavior or situations and injury and minimize injury when an incident occurs. Situations where a child cannot evaluate the risk, such as head and finger entrapments, must be avoided. However, to be interesting to children, equipment must present some risks, but risks where a child can evaluate the challenge. What are considered risks for older children can be hazards for younger children. Environments deemed appropriate and safe for older children will often be dangerous to younger children, requiring age segregation of areas. Environments with activities that are safe when children are supervised can be harmful if children are left unsupervised. Unfortunately, today, many parents fail to supervise their children when visiting agritourism facilities.

Children's familiarity with each other also affects their play and interactions with other children. A group together regularly in a childcare setting will interact differently with the environment and with each other than children who do not know each other at an agritourism venue. The same environment design won't necessarily work for both groups.

Another consideration: Children are also more sensitive to environmental hazards than adults are. This includes chemicals, VOC emissions (volatile off-gassing organic chemicals from building materials), foods allergens, and E. coli in animal areas. Good air quality is also essential. Toxicity and sanitation are especially important considerations for the youngest children, who often mouth anything they encounter. Many designers overlook selecting non-toxic outdoor vegetation in children's environments.

Accessibility for children with disabilities is another design challenge. Unfortunately, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) fails to adequately address children's accessibility, as it focuses mainly on wheelchair accessibility for adults. Even the alternative ADA children's standards fail to address the environmental challenges faced by children with non-wheelchair mobility disabilities, including walkers, leg braces, limited vision, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The other problem is that following ADA standards during the design process can often make the environment and equipment unusable by able-bodied children. The approach known as universal design is required to make environments genuinely usable by the greatest number of children. Universal design is an approach to design that honors human diversity and addresses everyone's right - from children to older adults - to use all environments, products, and information in an independent, inclusive, and equal way.

Durability and maintenance are important considerations in designing any environment for children's use. Children will give things more wear and tear than adults and get them dirtier faster. Materials need to be durable and easy to clean and maintain. Using materials and finishes that can be sanitized is essential, especially when infants and toddlers are present in the environment being designed.

Designing for children is no simple task since most adult designers have a completely different perception of the environment than the users they are designing for. If you put children in an environment not properly designed for them, all kinds of unexpected and undesirable behaviors and outcomes result. Children will use the environment in ways that their biology tells them to, so it's the responsibility of adults to design children's environments carefully to produce the desired behaviors. Positive outcomes for children's behavior in an agritourism setting will be created only when the environments have been designed with a thorough knowledge of child development, play, safety, anthropometrics, ergonomics, wayfinding, environmental psychology, and universal design.

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