The Anthill Playground, Daly City

The Anthill proposal reimagines a children’s playground at Glen Park Elementary in Daly City through biophilic and sustainable design. Developed in collaboration with Professor Rebeca Méndez at CounterForce Lab, the project engages with the urgent realities of climate change in the San Francisco Bay Area, transforming play spaces into living classrooms.

Vision and Philosophy

In line with CounterForce Lab’s mission to address the global ecological crisis through art and design, Anthill seeks to foster children’s awareness of climate change by embedding natural systems into their daily environment.

The design integrates biomimicry as both an educational and aesthetic framework, allowing students to engage directly with water cycles, plant life, and daylight.

Addressing Issues in Traditional Classrooms

A) Low physical engagement → Countered with interactive, sensory-rich play structures.

B) Disconnect from nature → Resolved through views of greenery, precipitation monitoring, and natural materials.

C) Distractions and fatigue → Mitigated with natural daylight and calming visual rhythms to support attention and circadian health.

Design Approach

The playground is structured around zones of engagement:

Interactive topographies shaped to channel water flow, giving children hands-on encounters with ecological processes.

Plant-integrated learning areas to enhance focus and cognition, drawing on research showing 10–14% performance gains in biophilic classrooms.

Daylit play spaces designed to boost learning rates by up to 26% compared to traditional shaded environments.

Climbing and tactile installations using wood, stone, and natural textures to stimulate movement and sensory curiosity.

Early site diagrams explored circulation, sun exposure, and visual connections, ensuring that students’ experiences with nature were continuous and multi-sensory.

Future State: Water Channel Flows

Looking ahead, the Anthill playground design envisions an expanded system of interactive water channels that respond directly to changing precipitation patterns in Daly City. These channels would guide rainwater through the playground, allowing students to trace its journey across varied terrains and observe its collection in bioswales and retention basins.

By manipulating flow gates and redirecting streams, children could simulate scenarios of flooding, drought, and water conservation, gaining firsthand insight into the dynamics of climate adaptation. Integrated measurement markers would help track rainfall intensity over time, turning the playground into both a play space and a living dataset.

This future-state vision situates Anthill at the intersection of education and environmental stewardship: a place where water, one of the Bay Area’s most pressing ecological challenges, becomes both a design element and a teaching tool.

Anticipated Impact

The Anthill aims to serve as a prototype for biophilic schoolyard design. By embedding climate-responsive systems into everyday play, it enables students to connect with environmental processes while improving academic performance and well-being. The project demonstrates how play spaces can become dynamic laboratories, fostering both curiosity and resilience in the face of ecological change.

More than a design proposal, Anthill reimagines how children interact with their surroundings — transforming the schoolyard into an extension of the classroom, where the cycles of water, light, and growth become teachers in their own right. This approach positions Glen Park Elementary as a pioneer in climate-conscious education and creates a model that could be adapted to schools across the Bay Area and beyond.

Personal Reflection

Prior to Anthill, much of my work existed as conceptual explorations of form, ecology, and community space. This project marked a pivotal step forward: it allowed me to translate theory into an actionable proposal, bridging the gap between speculative design and real-world application.

Working alongside Professor Rebeca Méndez and CounterForce Lab, I had the opportunity to bring these ideas before the Glen Park Elementary school board, underscoring the importance of rethinking children’s play environments through the lens of climate change. Advocating for the project required me not only to design but to articulate its value to educators, administrators, and community members — an experience that strengthened my ability to connect design thinking with public impact.This process reshaped my practice. I began to see design not merely as an act of creating spaces but as a platform to translate ecological urgency into accessible, community-centered experiences. Personally, it deepened my commitment to biophilic design and gave me confidence in the role designers can play in shaping civic dialogue and long-term resilience.

Anshuman Sharma

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