Conference Agenda

This project introduces tools that involve teenagers, with relevant lived experiences, in co-creating a social-purpose advertising campaign as a way of meaningfully engaging young audiences.

Many co-creation methods rely on direct, text-based, or individual spoken contribution methods. These disregard young people’s unconscious knowledges and collective ways of knowing.

The research was conducted through ethnographic methods alongside semi-structured interviews with the participants of a co-created campaign workshop.

The result is a suite of novel playful tools which generate collective insight and creative ideas by engaging teenagers’ collective, embodied and imaginative ways of knowing. The key concept of ‘enchantment’ is used to make sense of the overall process in combination with three key insights, pertaining to saying “the unsayable”, seeing with an expanded perceptive range, and attunement to collective knowledges.

Despite the benefits of playful learning experiences to increase students’ motivation and learning, traditional classrooms lack opportunities to learn through play. Virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool to bring rich, playful contexts into classrooms, but designing instructional models that make the most of its affordances remains challenging. This paper describes a multi-year design process implementing VR field trips in high school engineering classrooms to highlight the benefits and challenges of using VR to promote playful learning in schools. In both remote and in-person classes we developed virtual field trip lessons using immersive videos and videogame-like environments. Over time, learning goals, activities, and assessments were adjusted to meet students’ needs as part of an iterative design process. The benefits of VR for playful learning are discussed, along with the importance of post-VR reflection and discussion, and the persistent challenges of educational content and class time.

This paper considers designers’ embodied engagements while designing for play from the lens of “care.” We consider such engagements as socio-material rela-tions of care, following recent theorizations of care within care studies. Relying on observations from a variety of activities undertaken by students during a two-week design workshop on embodied play design, we present a theoretical model that identifies two orders of care in design activities: First order, “care through,” indexes the immediate objects that designers attend to in the here-and-now while implementing procedures, practices and tools provided by diverse design methods. Second order, “care forward,” indicates the future beneficiaries of de-signed things, who are typically, though not necessarily, the projected users of design. The paper contributes to design literature by providing a model for in-vestigating the affective and practical relations of care in design practice, with implications for how specific design activities and methods frame care.

This paper explores the imaginative borderland of speculative design, often re-ferred to as 'preposterous futures,' and presents a framework for playful specula-tive design building upon carnivalesque play theory. To operationalize the framework, the concept of ‘playful tensions’ employs three continuums of rele-vance: Firstly, designers should address the ‘purpose’ by navigating the interplay between 'concern and provocation.’ Secondly, the ‘concept’ should be crafted to straddle the boundary between the 'serious and ridiculous,' and thirdly, integrat-ing both 'believable and absurd' elements to scaffold the ‘formgiving’ process. To demonstrate the practical efficacy of the framework, three projects by estab-lished artists and designers are analyzed and discussed. The paper contends that playful speculative design not only nurtures the broader field of speculative de-sign, but also serves as a valuable analytical tool for discerning the playful quali-ties embedded in speculative designs, and finally, contributes to qualifying the transformative power of play design research.