Two Cornell University interior design classes didn't just build scale models, but the real thing - indoor play zones for child-care centers.

The undergraduates planned, designed and built four child-care learning and play activity centers, or mini-playgrounds, that will become available to participating area child-care providers. The designs include "magnetic mania," where children play with magnet shavings that are under a plexiglass floor panel, a "fabric jungle," in which strips of brightly colored fabric attached to poles can be interwoven; and a "star wall," a dark corner with flashing lights meant to resemble a spaceship. Each play zone focuses on a different developmental need of young children, including cognitive; manipulative; art, music and fantasy; and motor skills.

Lucy and Emma Marshall try out the rice play and "rainmaker" stick, which are part of the manipulative play area, designed and built by students in a College of Human Ecology course.

The projects were based on collaborations between two classes in design and environmental analysis: Associate Professor Paul Eshelman's Intermediate Interior Design and Professor Gary Evans' Environmental and Social Behavior. The students in Evans' class researched the social, behavioral and psychological needs of young children in day care and developed design guidelines from which the design students developed their play zones. In addition, the student teams collaborated with about eight day-care providers, brought together by Lita Remsen, who was the training coordinator at the Day Care and Child Development Council of Tompkins County, and Shared Journeys, a nonprofit organization committed to improving the quality of care-giving relationships, including both paid professional and unpaid familial care.

"Shared Journeys promotes everyday practices, policies and environments which support quality care," says the organization's co-founder and vice president Eric Clay, a 1981 Cornell graduate and now a doctoral student in city and regional planning at Cornell. "Shared Journeys' role is to ignite a passion for innovative and loyal relationships at work, home and the wider community."

For the past five years, Shared Journeys has been a catalyst for developing collaborative work with Eshelman and Evans, faculty members in the Cornell's Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, and local day-care and healthcare providers. This year produced the most fully developed and constructed designs to date. Clay and his Shared Journeys co-founder, Joseph Duggan, serve as advisers, facilitators and sponsors of the projects.

In recent years, the interior design class workshops developed residential spaces for persons with Alzheimer's disease living with their spouses and shared-use spaces for people with dementia residing in an assisted-living facility.

This year the Cornell design and social science students spent a semester on their junior-level project on child day care. "Intellectual growth occurs when we have personally meaningful reasons to learn," explains Eshelman. "With real clients and real problems, we provide the props, processes and procedures to support and direct each student toward achieving the learning goals set out for them."

Eshelman and Evans designed the course projects based on an educational model called "scaffolding," which is based on "providing structures and processes that enable learners to work at the outer limits of current competencies," says Evans.

The project involved four phases: predesign, in which the interior design students learned about building materials, hardware, tool use and how to achieve structural integrity; design, which was based on design guidelines developed by human factors/facilities planning and management students working closely with Eshelman's design students; model construction, which included ordering materials, planning tasks that involved students from both classes and building in the woodshop; and presentation. The participating day-care providers and the social science students provided feedback on the design concepts and early working drawings.

"This project really helped us to think beyond the conceptual phase of the design process," says Elaine Hwa, Hum Ec '01, an interior design major from Dallas, who worked on the manipulative skill development area. "We thought about how our designs can be implemented by looking at structural, economic and safety issues. It's easy to say something is going to work, but when you get down to constructing it, you realize a lot of things don't work together the way you had expected."

Says Elyse Kantrowitz, a senior human development major from New City, N.Y., who worked on the cognitive skill development area: "This project provided a great chance to experience all aspects of the design process, from the initial research on how children learn and play, to the physical construction of the space. This unique opportunity to apply our new knowledge to a real project for the community enabled us to see firsthand how our research and creativity could impact others. Since this was a team effort throughout, we were able to expand on each other's ideas to create the best space possible. I was continually impressed by the quality of the work at each phase -- from the students' ideas to the organizers' ability to coordinate such a meaningful educational experience."

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