Scott Roschi, creative director at Landscape Structures, spends his days thinking about how design, play and place come together to create experiences people remember. After attending the 2026 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in Los Angeles, he shares what caught his attention on the expo floor—and what those observations might say about where playground design trends are headed.
I didn’t make it into a single education session at the 2026 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in Los Angeles. I spent the conference on the expo floor, which turned out to be a good place to read where the profession is heading when it comes to playground design trends.
Designing play for more ages
The surprise this year was age range. ASLA has traditionally featured plenty of big play for 5- to 12-year-olds. This year, more manufacturers brought playground equipment designed for children ages 2 to 5, and there was more adult fitness equipment than I remember seeing at past shows. The floor covered more ages at both ends.
By the time Karlye Emerson, president and CEO of Landscape Structures, spoke at the Opening General Session at the end of the first day, I’d been seeing that shift for hours. One line of her remarks named it: “the places we create today will serve communities for years, even generations, to come.”
Serving more ages and serving them together are different design problems. The second one is what we took on with Smart Play® Volo Pico+™, our new playstructure designed specifically for toddlers and preschoolers ages 2 to 5, which we previewed at ASLA.
What parents and kids taught us about early childhood play
Before showcasing Volo Pico+ at ASLA, we put an early prototype in front of real parents and kids and watched where the design got in their way. Then we changed it.
We removed several barrier elements around the perimeter so a parent or caregiver can get to the LSI Flexx® net and steady a child without reaching over anything. We raised the shade so an adult can stand comfortably on the deck. When the same families came back for the second prototype review, they noticed.
So did one landscape architect at our booth.
Before anyone explained anything, he walked the playground structure and started pointing things out: the spots where a parent could step in and help, the net tying the whole structure together, the fact that it has no front or back, and a height that never felt intimidating even up close.
He has designed and specified plenty of playstructures himself, so he knew what he was looking at. As soon as he left, I found Tory Roff, principal designer on Volo Pico+, and told him it was like the landscape architect had been sitting in our design meetings. He’d covered nearly everything we talked through during design and testing, and he got all of it from the structure itself.
That’s what good design should do. You shouldn’t need someone standing beside it explaining why every decision was made.
Designing for generations, not just age groups
The die-cast car track got the biggest reaction of the week. Almost everyone who stopped had a story about the cars they played with as a kid and what it’s like to hand that experience down to their own children.
One dad told me his daughter plays with die-cast cars shaped like animals. She uses them completely differently than he ever did, building a world of her own, and he gets to watch.
That’s the generational play Karlye was talking about, told by the people living it.
The 2027 PLAY Book works on the same principle at project scale. Every project featured in it was created with a specific landscape architecture firm and a specific community, and the book names them. The playground isn’t treated as something dropped into a site. It is part of a larger vision for the place.
Aaron Skogen, general manager at Aquatix®, and Heidi Stengel, sales design manager at Aquatix, made a version of the same case for splash play in their ASLA Learning Lab presentation. Universal design isn’t about designing an experience for one group of people. Done well, it creates environments that work better for everyone who shows up.
What color trends tell us about design
Then there was the pink.
More of the industry is developing its own colors now, and that’s good to see. What caught me was how many site furnishings companies arrived with the same family of pink. It felt out of left field.
Hot pink was everywhere at the World Cup this summer, showing up on boots from nearly every footwear brand and standing in sharp contrast to the green field. That convergence had a reason.
At ASLA, I’m less sure what the reason was.
When a color shows up everywhere at once, I want to know where it started—and whether it started with anyone’s site.
Curiosity as a design method
Later in the week, I spent time at San Diego Design Week, and the thing that connected both events was curiosity.
Every landscape architect and designer I met at either one was doing what I was doing: watching for what’s next and figuring out how to use it on the next project.
That curiosity is also a method.
Volo Pico+ got better because someone watched a parent struggle to reach their child and went back to change the design. That observation became a different barrier, a higher shade and a better experience for the adults and children using the space together.
Playground design trends will change. Colors will change. The equipment on the expo floor will change. But the question worth carrying into the next project is more enduring:
Who gets designed in—and who might we be unintentionally designing out?
