Integrated Activity and Space Design Approach Combined with Subjective Experience Evaluation for Sustainable Children Play and Community Spaces

Children’s playground design has increasingly emphasized physical safety and equipment provision, yet often lacks a systematic understanding of children’s situated play activities and their experiential needs. Existing behavior-oriented approaches mainly rely on observation or post-use feedback, with limited integration of structured activity modeling and subjective experience evaluation. To address these limitations, this study applies Context-Based Activity Modeling (CBAM) to analyze children’s situated play activities and their associated affordances and affordance features, proposing an integrated activity and space design approach for playground design. Representative play activities have been analyzed using CBAM to identify activity structures, space elements, situated conditions, and interaction patterns. Based on the modeling results, corresponding space structure design guidelines have been developed to support children’s play activities. To complete the proposed approach in representing children’s psychological states, subjective experience evaluations framework using the Context-specific Experience Sampling and Analysis (CESA) method has been developed. This study contributes a novel space structure design methodology integrating activity modeling and experience evaluation, offering a methodological contribution for sustainable activity-centered playground and children’s space design.