Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Epperson.
Hi Ben, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
The story of TimberDoodle and my work in play and placemaking began when I got hired at the Knox County Health Department to do some community organizing and policy change work in communities that had poor health outcomes for kids. I was working with three communities, one rural, one suburban, and one urban. Each of these places had been identified as having a higher-than-normal percentage of children with childhood obesity. It was my job to speak with the community leaders and empower them to make changes to improve children’s health. I would ask parents, teachers, and elders what we should do, and every community had the same answer: we need more Places for Children. Sometimes it slowed traffic down so kids could get from the school to the park or the pool. Sometimes it was getting the drug dealers out of the park or adding a water fountain. It was harder to be a healthy kid in each of these communities. My job was to help make it easier for kids and families to be healthy.
I had peers around the country doing similar work, and I began to learn about all the innovative ways people around the world were making the places they lived healthier and happier. The real all-stars were in Northern Europe. There, people owned the streets, not cars. Neighborhoods were walkable. There were opportunities to play everywhere, and the playgrounds were incredible! I discovered natural and adventure playgrounds (where kids built the playground with scrap lumber under adult supervision). I found people making playable sculptures and installing them on city sidewalks and streets. There’s a whole universe of play, including play in every aspect of daily life, out there, and we don’t have that culture here yet.
There was one website in particular, and sadly it’s no longer up, called www.play-scapes.com. Someone, for their graduate thesis or something, gathered all of these stories about playable sculpture, natural playscapes, and urban play. I contacted the host once the site was pulled down and volunteered to rehost it, but I am still waiting to hear back. So, I discovered innovative play solutions when working at the Knox County Health Department. I even built one natural playscape myself in Vestal. Through my work, I also learned about Placemaking: the art and science of transforming a space into a place, building alive and vibrant spaces. Project for Public Spaces (PPS) coined placemaking in the 70s and 80s. Those elders wanted me to help them achieve that in their neighborhoods: they wanted to transform their spaces into places for children, families, and communities.
I went and trained under PPS and worked with them on some other projects in town. I was lucky to join Knoxville’s first Paint the Pavement project in Inskip. Knoxville’s first urban orchard. Our first mobile skate park. Our first healthy corner store. I have always been drawn to innovating. I want to wow people. I love to be surprised. I love to find wonder in the day-to-day. The natural world is filled with magic: how an estuary works, how a seed turns into a tree, the language of mushrooms, and sunlight. I want to bring that magic back into our day to day.
Would it have been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I am an English major. I studied at the University of Tennessee for 5 or 6 years before dropping out and moving to Prague for two years. Then I had some kids with my girlfriend and got a job at the health department. When I got sober in my 30s, I decided to return and finish my 16-year undergrad degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist when I was in my teens and twenties. I wanted to party and talk about philosophy and books. It has been a long and windy road from half-ass artist dropout to teacher to farmer to community organizer to placemaking expert, only to find myself back in the artist seat. It has certainly not been a smooth road, but I can see how each thing I did contribute to my learning and being prepared for the next thing. I needed to bring Beardsley Community Farm back to life to learn about community organizing and transforming places. I needed to know about policy change, government systems, school systems, and public health to discover how badly we’ve gotten play spaces wrong in our country. I have been fortunate to have bosses and peers that have encouraged me to innovate, push boundaries, and bend/break rules. But innovating looks a lot like fighting often. You can’t innovate in local government.
Not really. You can’t experiment with taxpayer dollars, especially in a fiscally conservative state and city. I got tired of fighting the system all of the time. And when my third child was born and covid hit, it was time for me to go out alone. I have been incredibly fortunate to have some bold clients who found me early on. I started TimberDoodle in the fall of 2019, just before the Covid shutdown. It has not been a smooth road, but I certainly feel like the luckiest person you’ll ever meet. Struggles: trying to change local policies to benefit children, innovate within government, bring art and non-boring play into schools, and learn how to run a business by myself.
There’s more to say here.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
TimberDoodle is a Design/Build studio focused on every aspect of play. Our team brings together experts from diverse backgrounds to build playable sculptural installations. We strive to put play everywhere to enhance the lives of young and old. Play is part of our process as well as our products. We find clients excited about innovating and bringing the spirit of play to their projects, and we make their dreams come true. Our studio of makers and innovators has built interactive electronic exhibits, tree houses, ninja warrior courses, world-class playgrounds, sculptural exhibits, and more. If you can dream it, we can build it. Play is bending the rules; Innovating; Making something new; Bringing wonder into the world. We work with you to get excited about an idea and find the right team members. We match our studio team members to the task. We prototype through 3d modeling and real-world fabrication before we start any build. By the time we are done designing, we have perfected the build. Our process starts slow and finishes fast. We prototype and perfect each project before we give a final delivery timeline. The vision grows into a final product under the guidance and excitement of our clients.
We love to hear about any fond memories you have from growing up.
The thing that always sticks out is the first treehouse that I built by myself. I grew up in Collierville, TN, a suburb of Memphis. There were fields and forests all around me when we first moved into our home, and slowly all of that got gobbled up by subdivisions. It was sad to watch the lake and woods turn into a Lakewood subdivision, but it meant that there was always a surplus of lumber and construction materials around. I would take my wagon into the growing neighborhood next door and alleviate the crews of their surplus wood and nails. Then I brought it all home and built a triangular platform in the tallest tree in my backyard. I loved the self-reliance of doing it on my own. I loved being up in the canopy and seeing the world differently. We are about to start a pretty cool treehouse project with TimberDoodle. It will be nice to complete that circle all these years later.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.timber-doodle.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timberdoodleplayscapes/
Image Credits
Ben Epperson
