Playgrounds as the Materialization of Care: The Technology, Ethics, and Social Functions of Children's Play Facilities
- yuxi
- Aug 20
- 14 min read
Introduction
At the end of 2023, while hosting my podcast Rainmaking Sound, I was invited to collaborate with the Playground Without Walls team to produce an episode. That was my first encounter with the project. At the time, they were experimenting with an “open playground without walls” in an urban village in southern China, seeking to respond to spatial exclusion and the absence of care within social structures. After the collaboration, I gradually became more deeply involved in the project. With the birth of HappyPower, I officially joined the team as COO, where I now work on design, public relations, international communication, and strategic co-building.
This article was initially framed around Playground Without Walls as a case study. As my role shifted from observer to practitioner, I began to realize that the project’s potential goes far beyond being a mere symbol of spatial justice. It proposes a systemic structural hypothesis: if children’s physical activity and play can be reimagined as a form of public energy production—then could play itself become a basis for reconfiguring infrastructural logics, mechanisms of benefit-sharing, and even ethics of care? In other words, HappyPower is not only a design solution for play facilities but also an attempt at ethical reconstruction concerning energy, power, and participatory society.
Therefore, this paper treats the “playground” as a device that materializes care, examining its technical, ethical, and social embedment. From the perspective of a “behavioral energy economy,” it reconsiders how children’s play can be transformed into productivity, integrated into urban infrastructures, and generate a non-confrontational yet agentic public sphere.
I. Caring about
“Caring about involves recognizing a need for care. It requires attentiveness to the needs of others and the willingness to consider their well-being as significant.” (Tronto, 1993)
According to Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993), “care” as an ongoing process can be broken down into four distinct yet interconnected phases: caring about, taking care of, caregiving, and care receiving. This article traces the evolution of Playground Without Walls and later HappyPower through these four phases.
“Caring about” entails recognizing neglected groups and their needs. This stage involves identifying who and what requires care, with particular attentiveness to marginalized or overlooked populations—for example, children in post-disaster contexts or children of migrant families.
Who, then, are the neglected or marginalized groups that require attention? Before addressing this question, it is important to revisit the concept of the “urban village” (城中村, chengzhongcun).
An urban village refers to a traditional rural settlement that remains enclosed within the boundaries of a rapidly modernizing city—a phenomenon specific to the urbanization process in mainland China (Wikipedia link). In the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of the Reform and Opening-up policy, major economic regions such as the Pearl River Delta, municipalities, and provincial capitals experienced accelerated urban development. As cities expanded, many villages located at the urban peripheries were incorporated into the metropolitan territory, gradually becoming surrounded by high-rise buildings and transformed into “urban villages.”
In major cities such as Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, the challenges associated with urban villages are particularly visible. Due to the lack of unified planning and management, infrastructure is often inadequate, yet housing costs remain low. As a result, low-income groups and migrant laborers frequently choose to reside in these areas. In some cities, a phenomenon of “population inversion” emerges—where the number of migrant workers living in the urban village far exceeds that of the original local villagers.
Accompanying these migrant workers are their children, often referred to as “migrant children” (流动儿童). Because of China’s household registration (hukou) system, these children, whose place of residence differs from their registered hometown, face significant barriers in accessing equal educational opportunities in the city. Many of them are eventually compelled to return to their place of hukou registration, thus becoming what are known as “left-behind children” (留守儿童).
For those migrant children who remain in the cities, life is also marked by vulnerability. Due to limited family economic resources and the inadequate facilities within urban villages, many of these children lack parental care and family support after school hours. Their communities often provide no alternative spaces for learning or play.
According to the Report on the Needs of Chinese Children for Charitable Assistance (2012) published by the China Children and Teenagers’ Fund on October 30, 2012, data from the 2005 1% National Population Sample Survey indicated that children under the age of 14 accounted for 12.44% of all migrant workers in China. Based on the total number of migrant workers at the time (147.35 million), the population of migrant children under 14 was estimated to be as high as 18.33 million.
The lives, education, growth, and play of these children have since become central concerns for many community-based initiatives, as well as for artists and collectives engaged in socially engaged practice.
It was precisely in response to this situation that Playground Without Walls first emerged. The project was founded on the hope that even in communities lacking formal playgrounds, children could still be provided with a space of their own for play.
II. Taking care of
“Rather than simply focusing on the need of the other person, taking care of involves the recognition that one can act to address these unmet needs. If one believes that nothing can be done about a problem, then there is no appropriate ‘taking care of.’” (Tronto, 1993)
Within the framework of care ethics, taking care of goes beyond merely recognizing the needs of others—it requires concrete action to respond to those needs. In other words, care should not remain at the level of awareness or diagnosis of social problems; it must be translated into tangible interventions. For any individual, organization, institution, or government, the primary task when confronted with social issues is not to position oneself as a powerless bystander, but to recognize one’s place in the world and one’s capacity to act and to care. Care is not an optional act of benevolence; it is an inherent responsibility within the ecology of social coexistence.
The establishment of Playground Without Walls embodied precisely this enactment of “taking care of.” We realized that children’s play spaces should not exist only as temporary festival exhibitions, but rather as stable and sustainable structures of everyday care.
We envisioned a playground that could truly take root. Each construction process always began with fieldwork: sketching playground prototypes together with children on the grass, listening to the needs and concerns of elders, parents, and the village committee. As the bicycle carousel spun round and round, we too learned—through the practice of running the playground—to balance different expectations and to mediate among diverse needs.
Building a playground might only take two days, but sustaining its spirit requires ongoing negotiation—between people and people, people and community, people and nature—capturing a living thread that adapts to circumstances and evolves with needs. It was during Typhoon Rumbia (locally known as Mocha) that this resilience of Playground Without Walls revealed its value.
The typhoon pushed our vision further. After Mocha swept through, the urban village endured nearly two weeks without electricity. Darkness, flooding, and internet outages brought heaviness and frustration. Yet during this time, the devices we had originally built simply “for fun”—such as the bicycle carousel and pedal-powered swing—suddenly became unexpectedly useful. Adults and children instinctively gathered at the playground, where the creak of the swings offered a rhythm of reassurance, and the carousel’s inertia continued to spin joy into the air.
That moment revealed to us the deeper radius of play as care, and the expanding horizon of Happy Power. We suddenly realized that these installations were not the endpoint of play, nor the limit of care. Playground Without Walls was unfolding into a multidimensional web of care—one that simultaneously connected disaster resilience, emotional comfort, and community cohesion.
Since then, Playground Without Walls evolved into HappyPower—we began discreetly embedding small generators and storage modules into what appeared to be ordinary play equipment. The back-and-forth of a swing, the spinning of a carousel, the pedaling of a bicycle—all were transformed into stored electrical energy.
This invisible current repositioned the playground within a new coordinate system, enabling an upgrade across four dimensions:
Function: shifting from simple “fun” to a multi-layered mission of psychological comfort + community cohesion + emergency power generation;
Care: extending beyond children’s momentary joy to encompass community resilience, disaster response, and psychosocial recovery;
Character: growing from a one-off artistic residency into a sustainable social enterprise with a mission-driven business model;
Space: expanding from a single pilot in an urban village to an open-source model replicable across the nation and even globally.
In this way, the spirit of care embodied in the playground achieved a triple leap—from a temporary artistic experiment to a sustainable social enterprise (Happy Power); from focusing solely on children’s play to supporting communities with disaster resilience and holistic functions; and from a localized testbed to a globally replicable, open-source framework capable of storing light in advance and offering long-term protection.
Together, Playground Without Walls and HappyPower have created a “Care-through-Play System” in which the playground is not merely a physical site, but an ongoing, maintainable, and socially embedded project. The core of this model lies not in top-down aid, but in leveraging the four-dimensional upgrade of function, care, character, and space to refine a playground into a self-sustaining, replicable system of shared care—one capable of proliferating, taking root, and radiating light within communities, cities, and global contexts.
Beyond fostering more locally grounded care infrastructures, the playground continues to serve two crucial roles:
(1) Spreading awareness of care
It helps more people recognize the needs of children—and even of adult citizens—for play and growth, reframing care not as an isolated practice but as a shared public concern.
(2) Providing a demonstrative model
Playground Without Walls and HappyPower illustrate a low-cost, replicable model of care, offering other cities and communities a practical reference point for expansion.
In this process, the responsibility of care is no longer merely an individual moral choice, but has become institutionalized, communalized, and sustained as a form of social innovation. The case of Playground Without Walls demonstrates that care can be placed at the very heart of design thinking—transforming social infrastructures such as playgrounds into not just spaces of leisure, but inclusive environments that embody and reproduce a broader ethic of care.
III. Care-giving
“Care-giving refers to the actual practice of providing care. This stage requires not only intention but also competence and resources.” (Tronto, 1993)
This is the most embodied and complex stage of care. It is not only about doing once, but about doing continuously and adjusting repeatedly.
In Binlian New Village, a narrow alleyway was transformed into the site of the first behavioral energy-generating installations. With only 3×3 meters of available space, we were forced to compress spatial and kinetic limits to the bare minimum. The structures had to support group use simultaneously while withstanding rain and vigorous shaking. We adopted a modular assembly mechanism: as children pedaled or spun the devices, energy was stored and later used to power a community screen and charging station.
More importantly, this process was never one of “technological imposition” but of collaborative care. Residents voiced concerns about noise at night and the risk of children falling; children, on the other hand, asked for equipment they could climb on or compete with. Our team continually adjusted the structures in response, while also introducing a community-based mechanism in which parents and teenagers participated in maintenance and helped negotiate rules of use. The result was a non-coercive yet effective everyday governance system.
Within the framework of care ethics, care-giving is not merely about “providing play spaces,” but about creating a continually evolving process. This process involves not only the construction of playground facilities, but also community participation, long-term maintenance, and even mechanisms for coping with unexpected events. The case of Playground Without Walls illustrates this: it was never just about building a physical space, but about establishing a dynamic mode of care that adapts to community needs.
(1) Construction of Play Facilities: Openness and Adaptability
“The facilities themselves are like giant building blocks, unrestricted by fixed boundaries.”
The greatest feature of Playground Without Walls and HappyPower is their openness and flexibility. Unlike traditional enclosed playgrounds, they have no surrounding walls, nor strictly designated functional zones. Instead, they blend naturally with the community’s street spaces. This design strategy aligns with the unplanned and fragmented structure of urban villages, making it easier to adapt to different environments and to meet the needs of migrant children.
The engineering of these facilities relies on simple physical principles, using forces such as wind and gravity as the basis of structural design. This not only reduces construction costs but also allows children to explore the workings of the physical world through play. Furthermore, play structures with varying levels of difficulty enable not only children but also adults in the community to participate, strengthening intergenerational interaction and making the playground a truly shared space.
(2) Child-led Community Participation
The construction of Playground Without Walls was not decided solely by adults; children themselves became active participants. Before construction began, the team invited children to draw their visions of an ideal playground on community walls, ensuring their imagination shaped the space in advance. This practice embodies the Children’s Right to Play (Hart, 1992), transforming children from passive users into co-creators.
In daily operation, children’s autonomy continued to be respected:
They could decide how facilities would be used, with play rules not fixed but freely explored and invented;
They could paint graffiti on play equipment, creating personalized play environments;
They could reconfigure areas into new forms of play, using existing structures to derive entirely new games.
This approach not only grants children greater agency but also transforms the playground into a truly shared space—not an adult-designed site for passive consumption, but a flexible arena where children actively redefine its use. Thus, care ethics at the community level goes beyond the facilities themselves, becoming a social and cultural practice that children directly experience and reshape.
IV. Care-receiving
“Care-receiving is the response of the care recipient, whose feedback determines the effectiveness of care.” —Joan Tronto, 1993
The completion of care lies not only in the act of giving, but also in the act of responding. Only when the perceptions and feedback of care recipients are seriously acknowledged and integrated into subsequent actions can the entire care process form a genuine cycle.
Across multiple HappyPower sites, we observed that children often used the facilities in ways far beyond our design expectations: they picked locks, tied ropes, organized “night battles,” and circumvented the rules to “activate” the play space in their own ways. These behaviors were not challenges to order, but acts of user re-creation, pushing us to rethink the boundaries and openness of our designs.
For this reason, we gradually came to embrace such “unintended uses” as integral to the system, establishing an open feedback mechanism that included community message boards, interactive panels, interview records, and administrator logs. Through this, care relations became genuinely dynamic—negotiated and iteratively renewed.
From this perspective, receiving care is not a silent acceptance, but an active process of expression, collaboration, and reconfiguration. What HappyPower seeks is an ethical system of space that allows complexity to emerge.
(1) System optimization through disaster feedback: the turning point of Typhoon Mocha
In the early days of Playground Without Walls, an unexpected Typhoon Mocha swept through Hainan, causing prolonged power outages in urban villages. Surprisingly, our play installations—designed for resilience—remained intact and continued to function as the only “glowing” public infrastructure at night.
This incident offered a crucial revelation:
Play facilities are not only vessels of children’s joy but can also serve as essential community infrastructure under extreme conditions.
In the aftermath, we identified three critical community needs:
Basic survival support: urban villages already had fragile infrastructure, making post-disaster recovery difficult and in urgent need of emergency resources;
Psychological care for children: children without stable spaces required play more than ever as a form of emotional comfort after the disaster;
Strengthening community resilience: a community’s ability to self-sustain directly determined the speed of recovery and the level of public trust.
To respond, we embedded power-generation modules into the installations, enabling them to function as “emergency energy units.” This design not only increased children’s awareness of renewable energy but also transformed play equipment into a new form of disaster-recovery infrastructure. In this sense, care ethics extended proactively into disaster scenarios.
(2) From Play Without Walls to Happy Power: toward institutionalization and commercialization
Through the recovery and subsequent operations, we also realized that reliance on charitable resources alone could not sustain long-term development. Thus, the team proposed the concept of HappyPower, seeking to integrate play spaces, renewable energy, and infrastructural business models into a more enduring system.
This transition involved three core logics:
Children’s play as energy production: transforming pedaling, spinning, and other bodily movements into electricity, powering devices and charging stations—establishing the logic of “play generates power”;
Building a sustainable business model: moving beyond donations to self-sufficiency through device rentals, brand partnerships, and other forms of revenue generation;
Institutionalizing care: scaling and replicating the model as urban infrastructure, making care ethics a strategic approach to city planning rather than an occasional charitable intervention.
(3) The Technologization and Structuring of Care Ethics
The development of HappyPower clearly demonstrates how care ethics can be optimized through feedback and extended through technology:
Initial act of care: building an open play space friendly to migrant children;
Receiving feedback and re-cognition: realizing, through extreme events such as typhoons, that the facilities could shoulder broader responsibilities;
Structural optimization: integrating power-generation systems, constructing emergency energy units, and enhancing social functions;
Institutionalization and sustainable development: establishing commercialization strategies to enable long-term operation and wide replication.
This process shows that care is not merely a moral posture, but a fundamental logic that can be embedded into institutions and scaled to the level of cities. Care can be realized through design, optimized through feedback, and sustained through technology.
Conclusion
From the early Playground Without Walls to today’s HappyPower powered by behavioral energy, the playground has remained in a state of continual becoming. It is not tied to any fixed spatial form; rather, it translates “play”—seemingly soft, useless, and immeasurable—into a form of social energy that can be calculated, shared, negotiated, and redistributed. This is not only a new systemic proposition but also an ethical hypothesis.
By treating the playground as the materialization of care, this paper does not merely emphasize inclusivity in architectural form, but instead asks: how might responsibility for care, public participation, and future technologies be interwoven into sustainable systems of everyday life? HappyPower does not propose a mere “play product,” but a new infrastructural possibility—one that extracts an energy logic from daily behaviors, generates governance mechanisms from community interactions, and summons forces of political and ethical reconstruction from the joy of play.
In a time when energy systems are under growing strain and social structures increasingly marginalize vulnerable groups, might children’s play once again become a trigger for social care? Could bodily activity rewrite the narrative of power systems? And might designers, when confronted with such devices situated between institution and play, glimpse new models for the city of the future? These questions remain unresolved—but the attempt has already begun.
REFERENCE
Core Theories and Academic Works
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Hart, R. A. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. UNICEF.
Policies and Social Background
China Children and Teenagers’ Fund. (2012). Research report on the needs of children's charities (2012). Retrieved from https://www.cctf.org.cn
Baidu Baike. (n.d.). Migrant children (流动儿童). Retrieved February 25, 2025, from https://baike.baidu.com/item/流动儿童/4345632
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Urban villages in China (城中村). Retrieved February 25, 2025, from https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/城中村
Case Studies and Practical Applications
Hainan China Daily. (2024, April 29). Tang Haoduo’s "Playground Without Walls" Art Festival: A participatory community practice for children. Retrieved from https://hain.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202404/29/WS662f5f6ca3109f7860ddbb0b.html
Playground Without Walls Team. (2024, May). Progress update on the fundraising campaign for Playground Without Walls: What else is available in our shop? Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/oMDfe9DLy1XQ5fpHobZnjQ
Playground Without Walls Team. (2024, June). "If it disappears, everyone will keep looking for it" – The first season of Playground Without Walls officially concludes. Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FXnlbK49QwEnwj1zfbi8XA
Playground Without Walls Team. (2024, June). The last amusement park in the world: If Rome wasn't built in a day, the Playground Without Walls needs at least two. Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DMRZV1cnsRap98UanQvNsA
Technology and Innovation
Happy Power Team. (2024). What exactly is "Happy Power"? Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/yX81dZ_hIPs6W-mU7b3lqQ
Happy Power Team. (2024). The happiest clean energy: What if it could no longer be wasted? Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/aVhFUMzFyO5egbBV4ww4AQ
Image Sources
Wpcpey. (2018). Urban villages in China [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52592679
MNXANL. (2017). Migrant children in China [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49656613
Playground Without Walls Team. (2024). Playground Without Walls Project [Photograph]. Retrieved from internal documentation of the project.
Happy Power Team. (2024). Happy Power project – integrating play and renewable energy [Photograph]. Retrieved from internal documentation of the project.
Let’s stay connected!
🔗 LinkedIn: [HappyPower in LinkedIn]
📸 Instagram: [@happypowerworld]
📘 Facebook: [HappyPower in Facebook]
🌐 Website: [HappyPower]
Hey, are you trying to find the HappyPower team?
Founder: Becca Liu (贝卡)
👉WeChat: OcO_OcO_OcO
👉Email: echoffline@gmail.com
👉 Whatsapp: +44(738)8912650
Comments