E- flyer!

Introducing PLAYWORKS

This week the ICA asked me to put together some text and an image for their website to advertise the programme of workshops I am holding there. The programme will be called "PLAYWORKS", of which first workshops series will be called "Play, Invent & BUILD".

This is it:


28 - 29 Nov 2009, 9 Jan 2010

Playworks is a series of free family workshops at the ICA where children can invent their own environments for play. Together with architectural designer Erin Byrne, student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, participants will be able to draw and build on their own creations.

The initial series of family workshops is called " Play, Invent & build". The first of which will take place on Saturday 28 & Sunday 29 November 2009. Children will be able to explore and experiment with their ideas about places for play - both real and imagined.

In the final workshop on Saturday 9 January 2010, children will try out their ideas by constructing a full-scale playscape of dens and playthings in the ICA Theatre. Then together we can test it, play on it and hide in it...

Suitable for children aged 5-11 years, accompanied by an adult.

Free

Please call the box office on 020 7930 3647 to reserve your tickets.

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"PLAYWORKS" programme

I decided to come up with a title for the 'brand' or enterprise behind my family workshops programme. I wanted it to give the impression that the workshops would provide a sort of 'lab for making and playing'. I wanted to evoke the idea that Fox Reading Room would temporarily transformed into a facility for exploring ideas that have arisen during his project, but also for generating new ideas.

The workshops will provide a forum for children to externalise their own ideas through 'making' and visual processes (drawing, modelling & building). 'Invention' and 'experimentation' were the key themes I wanted to capture, as the programme is speculative and serendipitous.

Thus, I came up with the name PLAYWORKS for the overall workshop series, so that it sounds almost like a factory or facility. 'Works' was supposed to give the feeling of 'work in progress' or production/ industry- that we all will be working together for a shared goal.

"Play, Invent & Build" workshop series

I also thought on the day we could call the Fox Reading Room the 'PLAYWORKS Shop' as a pun on the word workshop, but also suggesting that 'PLAYWORKS' is a larger entity and that the 'Play, Invent & Build" workshops are a franchise of it.

The name of the I wanted to highlight the word BUILD because that is one of the unique characteristics of the workshop, that we will be testing our ideas at real scale. I used a yellow background so it will jump out against the other family workshops on the website.

Fun feedback!

Vicky, Evi and I also discussed 'evaluation' and measurable outcomes in research projects and working with children. I asked what the ICA protocol was for gathering feedback for their children's workshops. They said that they hadn't developed a system yet because they thought 'tick box sheets' had limited value for children and were difficult to implement.

I suggested that I would like to develop some kind of written or drawn 'fun feedback', that would be integrated into each session and could perhaps be developed into a model for other ICA Learning workshops.

PLAYWORKS: a speculative research project

I had a meeting on Friday with Vicky and Evi who work in the Learning department at the ICA. We discussed the idea of 'free play' and how the most rewarding children's activites have a very simple concept that sows the seed of an idea, allowing the children find their own answers. We also talked about how sometimes a strong pedagogical agenda and desire for 'measurable outcomes' can stifle fun and learning. Also that relinquishing a desire to 'stick to the original plan' can be very rewarding when working with children.

We discussed the influence of this approach on my attitude toward this project, which I view as 'speculative'. By hosting it in a gallery, I am aligning the project with Fine Art. I think art provides fascinating alternative models for the design or research process based on the speculative interplay of ideas and objects, with a more open minded approach to serendipitous outcomes (influenced by the notion of 'free play'), and less of an emphasis on a proscribed agenda (such as the need for a 'new building' or 'manual') which is often found in architectural research.


Coinciding with the PLAYWORKS Shops, the ICA is hosting an exhibition by acclaimed international group exhibition "For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there" which starts from the premise that confusion lies at the heart of wisdom, and aims to celebrate the speculative nature of knowledge, through artworks which imply that curiosity matters more than understanding. Arranged around the premise that the world--and art--is not a code that needs cracking, the works in the exhibition center on the fruitfulness of not-knowing, un-learning, and productive confusion.

"A mathematician is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there."

Attributed to Charles Darwin

Street Play

The rise of the use of motorised vehicles and increase in parental anxiety has made the cityscape more adult centric, and less friendly for children to play than it has been for previous generations.

Street training

At the Glasshouse Young Spacemaker Workshop, I met Lottie Child. She devises urban explorations and produces guides for active engagement with urban places exchanging expertise and knowledge on the notions of freedom of movement and anti social behavior, in increasingly sanitized and controlled urban places.

"Street Training develops your own proactive strategies around inhabiting urban streets."

Urban exploration involves Research and Intervention:
Research is wandering, talking, looking, thinking, and Intervention might include talking to strangers, drumming on street furniture, climbing trees, visiting people, being asked to leave shops, lighting a fire, sitting around, tracing magic symbols on the ground, looking out for the dog with one eye, kissing, foraging for fallen fruits, listening to the sounds of the night, shouting and smelling flowers.

Visit www.malinky.org

The Glasshouse Young Spacemaker Workshop

During my research up until now, it seems the link between relational art practice and spatial production is often neglected. This suggests that form making and proposition is the specialist job of the architect and it is therefore the architect’s role to ‘interpret’ the intentions of the community. This perhaps underlines the key difference between consultation and participation.

This week I looked at people and organisations who are finding ways that end users can have a participatory role in the design process. The Glasshouse Young Spacemaker Workshop challenges this by attempting to furnish young people with design skills so they can have a more tangible contributory role to the design process.

One of the exercises at the workshop was about relinquishing the temptation to reject compromise and input from other people during the design process. In our group we were each given a word and a baseboard. We were asked to make 5 minute model about the word and then pass it to the person next to us so they can work on it, then the next person, until the model is returned back to you. Finally, you present/describe the model to the group.

our team:

The word I was given was, coincidentally, ‘play’. I cut the board into four and made four ‘play patches’, rectangles of different materials ‘grass’, ‘concrete’, ‘a rug’ and ‘water’. When the model came back to me the ‘patches’ had been constructed into two dens nestled in a hill with a climbable structure around it, and the whole model was covered in graffiti. The ‘patches’ (a last minute idea) had serendipitously provided a palette of materials that allowed people to construct their own idea of play, which was then personalised through construction and graffiti. Our co- authorship had fortuitously created a temporal, flexible, and (most importantly) personalisable landscape for play.



By building ‘incompleteness’ into the design, the final model had coalesced all our ideas, providing an unforeseen insight into how one could ultimately design for play in the real world.

Risky Play

A major study by Play England, part of the National Children's Bureau, found that half of all children have been stopped from climbing trees, 21 per cent have been banned from playing conkers and 17 per cent have been told they cannot take part in games of tag or chase. Some parents are going to such extreme lengths to protect their children from danger that they have even said no to hide-and-seek.

"Children are not being allowed many of the freedoms that were taken for granted when we were children. They are not enjoying the opportunities to play outside that most people would have thought of as normal when they were growing up."

Adrian Voce, director of Play England

Play England is determined to spread the message that children ought to be taking risks and that it is 'not the end of the world if a child has an accident'.

Architecture for play?

Last week I put together a research proposal suggesting that a ‘playscape’ was a physical and tangible setting for play (that could be designed by an architect).

Further investigation this week has forced me to redefine the notion of ‘playscape’ as a ‘temporal network of relationships between people, objects and places’. This is because although architecture can provide a ‘space to play’, children also need infrastructure in order to have ‘time to play’.


Objects and spaces only become ‘playscapes’ when they are animated by play. An architect can create a beautiful playground but if no one plays in it (for whatever reason) it can not be termed a ‘playscape’. Moreover, the subversive character of play makes it very hard to design for and anticipate, and thus architects and the built environment only play a partial (but interesting) role in facilitating play and the consequent creation ‘playscapes’.

It is my objective this year to explore the role that architects and the built environment has in the creation of ‘playscapes’ and what this reveals about how can we create ‘successful’ architecture that is ‘used’ and contributes to the community.

For the first part of year I will look at the pedagogic workshop or temporary playscape as a forum for exploring children’s attitudes to the construction of space, the benefits of haptic/ constructive play and to propose ‘playing’ or ‘playfulness’ as a model for the design process.

What is play?

Play can be described as the method by which children investigate their environment and realise their physical and cognitive limitations. Its definition can be ambiguous and varied but its benefits are invaluable.

What is a playscape?

In the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. Factors such as the rise in use of motorised vehicles, increased parental anxiety and less tolerance for children and young people, has caused the cityscape to become increasingly adult-centric.


Although typically a 'playground' acts as a junction point or a rendez vous for children to communicate and congregate, a playground has been traditionally seen as a separate specialised zone for playing, isolated from the public realm.

My notion of the ‘playscape’ is woven into the urban fabric, providing a stimulating but not proscriptive architecture that is

"‘Methectic rather than mimetic’, that is, more "helping out the action’ rather than a proscription of its likely character."

(Nils Norman, An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London's Adventure Playgrounds)

I propose that a ‘playscape’ is an interstitial landscape that actuates, facilitates and encourages play, galvanising children to explore the capabilities of their bodies and environment. Furthermore, empowering them by providing them with their own architectures, either in built form allowing ‘space to play’ or infrastructure that provides ‘time for play’.

Defining the Architect's role in play

A playscape is a difficult to ‘design’ as play is quite unpredictable, as it involves a response to one’s context which often involves the subversion of the original function of an object, e.g. building a ‘house of cards’ or climbing on a garden wall.

A designer can only hope to provide props and stimulants, which order in order to create a ‘playscape’ must be animated by play, i.e. a playground where children do not play cannot be described as a playscape.

Perhaps a playscape is better understood as a temporal network or constellation of relationships - an interaction between people, objects and spaces, as part of a larger context of community and geography.