Traditionally playgrounds have predominantly been defined as children’s spaces and to be differentiated in time and space from other areas of life. And yet, playgrounds are much more than just child’s play — they are barometers for how play, urban spatiality and sociality are understood culturally and offer the potential to be platforms to develop creative and alternative scenarios for urban environments. In each different culture, in each different epoch, playgrounds take on diverse ideologies and offer possibilities to give meaning to and experiment with alternatives to such ideologies. Playgrounds are physical manifestations of how we do urban play and civic engagement and are as such in situ places to play with present and future scenarios.
This creative and interdisciplinary workshop will consider the possibilities of action research and co-design experiments in and around the Superilla located outside of RMIT Europe as part of Design Week. We are bringing together some of the key playable cities game designers, ethnographers, play theorists and designers to explore everyday moments for play and sociality as crucial to urban futures.
The workshop is guided by the question: What would it mean to build this notion of playground into civic life beyond our concern for childhood socialization and health?
PARTICIPANTS:
Naomi Bueno de Mesquita, Michel de Lange, Stephanie de Smale, Jill Didur, Emma Fraser, Alex Gekker, Seth Giddings, Sam Hind, Larissa Hjorth, Troy Innocent, Sybille Lammes, Tomasz Majkowski, Miguel Sicart, Bart Simon, Clancy Wilmott
Jill Didur 