Norm creative interior for play and learning in preschools

This project focuses on the environment layout and design and the goal is to find innovative ways to promote inclusive, norm- breaking play. The innovation is to develop new ways of gender sensitive educational work through norm critical architectural design. Research clearly shows how the indoor environment affects children s learning and play. Few have translated this into a systematic work in practice. For example, in older preschool built in the 60s, it is not unusual that the rooms hinder communication and interaction, restrict certain types of play to some rooms and makes toys or spatial practices not conducive to the curriculum for the preschool. All children do not have access to rooms for creative play.

By combining the knowledge and experience from education, architecture, norm critical work and design, the project has the potential to achieve innovation through new knowledge combinations, with an interactive approach and through the city of Västerås that is willing to synthesize the knowledge from the project. The project aims to build new preschool physical spaces together with pre-school staff and children in a learning process that examines, understand and alter the standards at the preschool that prevent all children from equal play. Children s voices will especially be a focus in the innovation process. The target groups for different types of tools and knowledge developed in the project is a preschool teacher students, preschool teachers and other preschool staff, school principals, architects, designers, urban planners and managers in preschool.