This playground is a pilot project, the first in an expandable series playground, which located in a shopping mall in Shenzhen, P.R.China. Contemporary mall playgrounds in China tend to focus on various task-oriented games and individualize activities, which primarily engage and reinforce Left Hemispheric dominance. Some experts believe that LH dominance and brain imbalance may be the cause of many of the most serious social and psychological problems that humans all over the world are facing today.

According to Dr. T. Sigi Hale, an American neuroscientist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior: “We foster imagination by moving between a doing and an experience-oriented state … the interplay awakens us to our broadest sense of self, it makes us aware of the full breadth and width of our cognitive and experiential mental landscape and gives the power of multiple perspectives.  It’s what gives us the capacity for genius.”

By engaging and strengthening Right Hemispheric function, and thereby fostering healthy, balanced brains, experts also believe that we can overcome these challenges. Just like with a healthy body, it is important to lay the foundations for a healthy brain early in life. So we want to create an environment where left and right brain oriented experiences are fluidly interwoven, maximizing potentials for healthy and beneficial play. 

The concept of the Left & Right Hemispheric functions then transforms into 2 main spaces where all programmed spaces are located on ground level, representing Left Hemisphere, and the un-programmed or abstract space weaving through the entire playground as a vast netting layer, representing Right Hemisphere. Following our theoretical framework, we have created an environment that is both functionally and physically interwoven and multi-layered. This arrangement encourages children to move between a doing and experience-oriented state of mind and thereby exercise their mental flexibility and creativity as they play.