Adult Design, Child Experience

By Audrey Treece

This is the working abstract and my poster proposal for my design thesis. I am
focusing on early childhood environments and how architecture can play a role.

According to the U.S. Census conducted in 2008, there are nearly fifteen million children under the age of six that need child care as parents work. The need for enrollment in child care has
become customary due to the social and economic trends that have changed throughout the last several decades. Early childhood programs are slowly gaining recognition, but it is still not viewed as an imperative societal issue that it demands. Today, children under the age of six that are enrolled in child care spend an average of ten hours a day, five days a week, and fifty
weeks of the year in early childhood centers. The environment for raising children has shifted from the home to underdeveloped environments that are designed for adult productivity and are profit driven but do not address the needs of what is best for children. Neurological research proves that children are born to learn, while absorbing every aspect of their environment. The first three years of life are the most critical to the neurological development of a child. Child care in the United States has been viewed as a domestic responsibility rather than a basic component of a community’s infrastructure and there has been limited concern for the impact of
institutional settings on children’s development.

How can architecture play a role in child care development? Child care centers are a new building type in search of a model. As the demand for child care increases, there will be more exploration on the need for universal early childhood centers. Adult Design, Child Experience is a graduate design thesis that sets out to create an environment that addresses the relationship between children and architecture. The building model will foster experiential learning
while helping children learn, discover and use creative thinking to promote early childhood development. This project is an investigation into how early childhood design can be rethought, redefining a child care center as an education facility model in which children learn through interactions and experiences, stemming from the built environment.