Dunedin-born designer bringing danger back to play

Boulders balancing on small wheels, palm trees hanging five metres in the air and monkey bars at odd angles - NZ designer Mike Hewson creates some gnarly spaces.

Hewson, an artist, engineer, and playground designer, can trace his healthy appetite for risk and play to the 12-student rural school he attended in Otago.

Sheep roamed the playground, which was really a paddock. A typical game for the kids was slinging mud at each other. When it flooded, they were allowed to wade out into the water (which is perhaps too risky and not something recommended by emergency services in the current era).

However, serving that level of risk in playground design for today’s world requires a great deal of thought, expert opinion, and, at times, convincing the overseeing authority to take on the risk themselves by greenlighting the project.

“...it becomes so much about your duty to provide an environment that is safe and ready for people to interact with,” Hewson told RNZ’s Nights. “It distracts from creating environments for adventure or incentivising people to design spaces where people feel free to adventure.”

The Dunedin-born, Australia-based Hewson is known for his art projects that masquerade as playgrounds where boulders balance on what look like impossibly small wheels, palm trees hang five metres in the air, and kids latch on to slack lines suspended above the ground.

His latest installation is tucked four storeys down, inside a former World War II oil tank deep beneath Sydney, and includes a milk tank transformed into a steam room and sauna with the non-kids in mind.

“Let's not worry about the kids. The kids will own the space. Let’s worry about the carers, the people who get dragged to these, creating some spaces of freedom for them.”

The project was a challenging pitch and “the gallery was terrified right up until opening...” says Hewson, using the installation as an example of how his designs typically push the boundaries of what risk caregivers and authorities will tolerate.

“If you zoom back from the individual, we have an obligation to as a whole, whatever that unit is, to provide an environment where people can learn to be adaptable, learn to be nimble, and the only way you can do that is by designing places that are a safe environment to experience fear, to experience risk.”

I took my son and daughter - they were five and two at the time - to the Hewson-designed playground in Melbourne city call Rocks on Wheels. The playground had the vibe of a recently abandoned construction site.

At first glance, it is borderline outrageous. Monkey bars at odd angles and three metres above the ground connected kids to a series of large jagged rocks. Taut slacklines were criss-crossing in different directions.

The rocks were balanced on moving dollies with wheels (they were stationary, so it was more a look than a play thing). Slides came down from the top of some of the rocks, and there were handles and holds for rock climbing. Hewson’s signature palm tree was there, its roots above the ground wrapped in a tarp like it was just dumped off a truck.

But forget about what I saw and thought. The kids loved it. No one got hurt. I had to periodically assist someone off a giant rock or talk a two-year-old down from some monkey bars. They seemed to manage just fine with what appeared to be a playground with heightened risk and challenges.

And that’s Hewson’s argument. Kids can manage a lot of risk.

“When I work with children to come up with playgrounds, there’s always a lava pit, like a spike pit, there is acid in there. There is this understanding kids have of where the danger lies.

“It is not the height of the monkey bars - ‘Oh, 2.5 metre monkey bars over bark chips.’ There is this sense that we know what we need to learn, and good designers can observe children or adults.

“We do things that are not good for us... being out of our comfort zones because we need it to be alive.”