Sinsheim invites seven-year-old playground tester to job interview

A seven-year-old in Sinsheim, Baden-Württemberg, has managed to turn municipal playground maintenance into something resembling a corporate hiring pipeline. According to Der Spiegel, the child wrote to the town offering his services as a “playground tester” — and the city responded by inviting him to a formal job interview.

A public authority that can’t resist converting even a child’s spontaneous offer of help into process. But the episode is also a neat accidental field experiment in quality assurance and incentive design. Playgrounds are one of those public goods where the “customer” is obvious — children — yet feedback is typically mediated through adult complaints, compliance checklists, and periodic safety inspections. The result is predictable: risk management that optimizes for paperwork and liability optics, not for whether the equipment is actually fun, usable, or even sensibly laid out.

By acknowledging a child as the evaluator, the municipality stumbled into a radically simple feedback loop: direct user testing by the intended end-users. In product development, this is banal. In the public sector, it is treated as exotic innovation — and then promptly domesticated into bureaucracy. Hence the interview.

This matters. When a city relies on compliance frameworks, it gets measurable outputs (inspection dates, certified surfaces, documented repairs) but weak signals about lived experience (boredom, crowding, broken social dynamics, the small design flaws that make a swing set a fight club). A child-tester model, even if symbolic, shifts the signal: it privileges experiential defects over formal ones.

Academics call this “participatory design,” usually after a multi-year grant, a stakeholder workshop, and a report that no one reads. The Sinsheim version is cheaper: one motivated kid and a willingness to listen. Yet the state’s reflex is to formalize the human input into an HR ritual — as if the real danger is not a cracked climbing frame but an uncredentialed seven-year-old delivering unapproved opinions.

If Sinsheim wants the benefits of user-led QA without the farce, there’s a straightforward fix: treat the “tester” role as a standing, rotating panel of children — opt-in, informal, frequent, and tied to rapid repairs. No interview, no title inflation, no virtue-signaling press release. Just feedback, iteration, and accountability.

Instead, the municipality discovered a new way to do what governments do best: take a perfectly functional informal solution and wrap it in procedure until it resembles a parody of private-sector management — minus the competition that would punish the parody.