NLI Community-Based Design Process

An important part of POD, of course, is to engage teachers. And so that is usually kicked off with a collaborative workshop. The design team at NLI are more than typical designers because they have to be motivators of the process, know a little bit about child development, about how child care centers work, the regulations. These are centers that typically are serving underserved communities. They don't have much in the way of resources, so we've become quite clever in finding low-cost ways of providing high value in education and learning and play for children. Gardening is a very important part of that, which is once you've got the beds installed, it's a fairly inexpensive way of helping children learn. Designers also have to help the teachers feel comfortable. They are basically also educating teachers about how environments can be made to have predictable outcomes in terms of children's behavior. You can see an enthusiasm with many teachers when they realize that they can actually condition the environment in a way that is going to serve their educational purposes. We have a gaming kind of approach to it so that everybody feels that they are part of the cast and have a part to play. So that's the first step in ownership and feeling that they have something tangible to take back to the center to share with their colleagues. The engagement of our design team with the community also helps them understand the social conditions under which a large proportion of our community live. Designers maybe grew up in middle-class families with no real experience of low-income communities or low-resource communities, and it's a really important part of their social education. So after 10 years of POD, we understand very clearly how it has to be a community-based process. We understand that it has to be combined with professional development of teachers. So it's a vehicle for teachers to learn about how the outdoor environment can be used as a place for learning as well as joyful play of children. But learning is the focus.