Playability Workshop

January is a busy month for me. Below are details about a workshop I’m organising…

 Playability: exploring material connections

The click of two Lego pieces together. The vibrations of a games console handset. The softness of a teddy’s fur. The spring in a playground’s matting. How do these aspects of a toy’s materiality matter? How do they shape the bodily connections in our play?

                               

Playability is a one-off workshop to explore the role of material connections in play, specifically those between children and traditional/digital toys and games. In order to inform future practice and research, Playability will address two key challenges: 1) how to produce ‘good’ and/or successful play-related products; 2) how to understand the role of material connections in play if we are to use play as a force for wider social good.

Questions of material and bodily relations are at the forefront of recent concerns about children’s play. For example, ‘play deprivation’ (a lack of physical, explorative, experiential play due in large part to a shift towards screen-based play), child safety in relation to manufactured goods and environments, and decreasing integrity of play products through practices such as ‘label-slapping’. These questions are echoed in ongoing debates about the relative merit of different materials for play products (i.e. wood versus plastic). Playability will explore the relevance of material and bodily relations to those involved in the production of play products and the provision of play.

Studies have suggested that children share a more ‘intuitive’ and tactile relationship with objects and environments than adults. Rather than accepting the given meaning of things, children get to know objects by manipulating them and using them creatively, releasing ‘new possibilities of meaning’. Whilst developmental theorists have perceived this relationship as a sign of naivety and inability to be gradually overcome, others have celebrated it as an incisive, masterful way of knowing. Interest in play, as a fundamental experience across the life course and a force for social good, is growing. The role of material connections in play sit at the heart of these concerns as it is the ‘felt’ intensity and tactile creativity of play that are signalled in these engagements. The toy/games industry and play sector have a great deal to offer in furthering academic understanding of the important role of material connections in play. Playability brings these communities together for the first time.

• Who should attend? Play practitioners, play and toy industry representatives, games designers and academics.

• Where and when will it take place? Northcote House, University of Exeter on Tuesday 31st January 2012. Please see the dedicated website: http://exploringplayability.wordpress.com