by Susan Glass and Jay Gluckman
A note from Susan Glass: Although this accessible park project is currently confined to the San Francisco Bay Area, we feature it in the BC in hopes that other communities will be inspired to create similar local parks.
If you're in the mood for some outdoor recreation this fall, and you either play with kids or are a big kid yourself, there's a playground in Palo Alto that is designed especially for you. It's called the Magical Bridge Playground, and it's nestled in the southwest corner of Mitchell Park (the official address is 600 E Meadow Road, Palo Alto, CA 94306, but if you use paratransit the best address is 3864 Middlefield Rd, Palo Alto, CA 94303). Magical Bridge Playground was designed to be highly accessible (their word is inclusive) to people of all abilities and ages. More Magical Bridge parks are being planned for Redwood City, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Morgan Hill.
Magical Bridge Playground is divided into play zones, and the equipment found in each one has been specially created with children of varying abilities in mind, and a focus on autistic children in particular. The equipment helps these children develop their proprioceptive or spatial awareness, as well as their sense of balance. It comes as no surprise that developing proprioceptive awareness is also crucial for blind children. The grouping of the equipment into play zones is helpful for those with visual impairments. If you are in the Spin Zone, you know that all the equipment will spin. If you are in the Swing and Sway Zone, you know that this is the only place in the playground that the equipment swings and sways. The summit of Slide Mound is the only place to enter the slides at the playground.
Navigating the park with a white cane is easy. You walk on an aggregate pathway that parallels the play areas, the surfaces of which are a springy textured rubber. It's easy to detect surfacing differences with your cane tip, and as long as you stay on the aggregate path, you're safe from exuberant swingers, swayers, sliders, spinners, and climbers.
I especially enjoyed the play equipment in the Spin Zone. One piece called the Net Spinner is like a jungle gym with a ladder that you climb to a platform where you rest your hands. You hang on while standing, and someone on the ground spins you round and round. Another delight is Disk Spinner, which is a saucer where you spin around while lying on your back. I also enjoyed a piece of equipment called the Roller Table, which is a narrow bed of metal cylinders that can rotate. I enjoyed lying on my back and pulling myself along the rollers using overhead metal bars.
Other attractions in the park include a wheelchair-accessible playhouse with a pretend hardware store complete with hammers and screwdrivers carved out of wood, plus a cafe with a toy cash register. There are boat swings, bucket swings, and slides. Three of the play zones have a Cozy Cocoon, a metal nest particularly for those with autism and other folks prone to sensory overload, to hang out in when active play feels overwhelming. The cocoon is a large sphere with openings, and provides a calming place to sit and regroup before emerging to re-engage in active play.
On Friday, August 17, 2018, I had the pleasure of being invited by Mr. Jay Gluckman, who is Director of Education at Magical Bridge Foundation, to a personal preview of some prototypes for a Magical Bridge Foundation project called Visual Magic. These prototypes are part of a plan in the works to make the new Magical Bridge Playground under construction in Redwood City friendly to people with visual impairments. Magical Bridge Foundation was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Bernard Newcomb Foundation to support the work of the Visual Magic Project's installations at the forthcoming Redwood City Playground. (Bernard Newcomb was one of the co-founders of EininTRADE, and is currently a philanthropist. Newcomb himself happens to be visually impaired.)
For the personalized preview, I had the pleasure of meeting the entire Visual Magic Project team that worked over the summer to refine the prototypes that I was shown. The team included: Rachel Wallstrom, a design and engineering intern from Stanford University; Cathy Tran, a volunteer for Magical Bridge Foundation and a design researcher by profession; and Nikki Dadlani, a blind high school student who has provided invaluable input to Magical Bridge Foundation to create a roadmap for how to make public playgrounds accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Also present at the playground that evening were several members of the Mid-Peninsula Guide Dog Puppy Foundation who were invited there to give playground visitors an opportunity to learn about guide dogs, and for the puppies to have an opportunity to acclimate to a busy playground environment.
So for the Visual Magic preview, I was shown two prototypes of what the team calls Zone Entry Monuments. The idea is to greet visitors to each playground zone with a place that provides information about the equipment found in that play zone. So that the design is universal, the prototypes of zone monuments had text for those with low vision, a brailled map, and two- and three-dimensional models of the equipment found there. In addition, detailed information about the playground equipment will be available online. I was sent some of the drafts of the online information about the equipment, and it gave a good idea of what I could expect for my visit to the playground.
The Visual Magic team had the two- and three-dimensional models ready to show Nikki and me on August 17, and the team was eager to learn which models (the two-dimensional or three-dimensional) we thought would suit the needs of blind people. Hands down, we both preferred the three-dimensional models. Each model is a scaled miniature of a piece of the playground equipment, the purpose of which would allow us as blind people to experience the entire shape of the play equipment that we are about to encounter, and recognize the real thing immediately when we touch it. Two- dimensional models cannot deliver this immediate recognition.
Jay Gluckman and the Visual Magic Team at Magical Bridge would love more input and feedback from members of the visually impaired community. If you want to learn more, schedule a presentation of the Visual Magic prototypes, or arrange a personalized tour of the Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto, contact Jay Gluckman by email at jay@magicalbridge.org, or call him at 650-793-5009.
In closing, I would like to thank SVCB chapter Member Abby Tamara for putting me in touch with Jay Gluckman, for letting me know about the Magical Bridge Foundation Playgrounds, and for the opportunity for all of us with visual impairments to visit them and enjoy them as well as to give feedback to their designers to make their future playground more inclusive and fun for people in our community.
