How often do you check whether your design works?

How often do you go back and check that what you've designed actually works and does what it's supposed to? And I'm not just talking about the glitzy opening event with champagne on tap. I'm talking about when your projects are fully operational and have real actual people using them.

The reason I'm asking this is because there's a disconnect between design and function. Here's an example, my 7 year old loves exploring parks and playgrounds. So we went to explore a new one this weekend. So far so good. The playground looked good at first glance. Lots of lovely wood with bright colours so it matched the designers sketches, tick. But there was one gigantic flaw with this playground.

Everything was just a bit too high.

I have a tall 7 year old who is middle of the road when it comes to being adventurous. He found it scary when he got to the top platforms for the various slides. The only way down was to go down the super high slides. It really did make me wonder what age group the playground was designed for.

The fact that lots of unsupervised much younger kids were scaling to new heights then getting caught out and ending up in tears. Or some who were trying to crawl up the bottom of very fast slides with snacks and would have been taken right out the moment a kid came whizzing down, just added to the overall unsafe feeling.

Needless to say we moved to a safer part of the playground after I literally pulled an 18 month old out of a slide seconds before a larger child came flying down it.

This park did make me think, had the designers been to the park to see it in use on a weekend? Would they have spotted the hazards much like I did as soon as I arrived? Would they have done things differently if they were designing this space again? Have they learned for their future designs. As a design community we do have a responsibility to find out if what we've designed actually works in practice. Even if our fees don't cover it. It's the only way we'll get better and learn from what can at times be obvious mistakes.

How often do you visit your projects when they're fully operational? It's all too easy to move onto nice new shiny things once your part is complete.