There’s this park near my house that I often go to with my 2-year-old. It has a great sand area full of toys and toddler sized play structures. In the corner, there’s a colorful plastic play kitchen. But this time, it was covered with sand.
It looked like some kids had done their best to fill every part of this play kitchen with as much sand as possible. Everything was buried, overflowing, or both.
My daughter didn’t care, she was doing her thing. So, I took the chance to get as much sand as I could off the play kitchen. My first thought was to tip it over to get the sand off, but that wasn’t possible as it was zip-tied to the fence. I then started hand-scooping out sand from the countertops, sink and stove. But I realized that any sand that I brushed off the cabinets above would just fall back onto that area. I brushed and scooped starting from the highest ledges and cabinets down till I got to the bottom of the plastic oven. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to be played with.
Little did I know… The next time we went to the park, the play kitchen was filled with sand again! Those meddling kids! Not one to give up, I repeated the process of removing sand from the play kitchen. Hopefully this situation won’t escalate further. I don’t want to start beefing with these kids, but I do want to keep the play kitchen in a good state for the toddlers.
“The life of a designer is a fight: a fight against the ugliness.”
Massimo Vignelli
Us designers are sensitive people. We get upset when 2 letters in a word are too close together or far apart. We’re offended when a form asks us to type our address more than once. And we definitely don’t tolerate playground vandalism. Ugliness is everywhere and every designer feels the need within themselves to make it better—to leave the world less ugly than they found it. Design isn’t just what I do on my computer, it’s a way of being in the world that I committed to a long time ago, and it might be too late for me to opt out now.