Children's definiton of aesthetic in experiencing their everyday landscape: a fieldwork

Abstract

This paper explores whether aesthetic qualities are involved during children's play activities in their everyday landscape. It is based on fieldwork conducted on young children aged 8 to 12 years old in a low cost housing area in Johor Bharu, Malaysia. Direct participatory observations are used to elicit how they choose the everyday landscape's element in their play. In addition, an in-depth interview was also conducted among children after they were playing and they were asking personally on their view and reasons in choosing the elements. Through content analysis, it is found that the children define aesthetic based on what they like which is favouritism and suggested that children also took account on aesthetic qualities which are form, colour, size and combination of the qualities as one of the factors in choosing elements during their play.