Conference Agenda

The ludic space exists both within and beyond reality as a parallel world. While play design has been explored through rules, experiences, and systems, the role of play materials as mediators between lived and ludic space remains under-discussed. This paper examines how play materials invite players into, operate within, and emerge from the ludic space, shaping gameplay and learning. Using a practice-based approach, the Between Worlds (BW) framework was developed and empirically grounded through classroom projects involving over 130 undergraduate students at BITS Design School. The framework identifies four qualities of play materials that enable transitions between lived and ludic space: player engagement, translation, functionality, and emergent outcomes. The study contributes to game-based learning and design pedagogy by repositioning play materials as active mediators of meaning-making, demonstrating how they can support participatory, generative learning experiences and deeper engagement with complex real-world systems.

This paper introduces transversal play as a material, experiential, and relational mode of playful inquiry and connection that traverses disciplinary, institutional, and cultural worlds in pedagogy and education. Drawing on design philosophical, posthumanist, and play theoretical perspectives, transversal play is framed as a situated, collaborative, and world-travelling practice of interbeing, where difference becomes a generative site for collective experimentation, care, and transformation. Through four design-based research examples, the paper explores how transversal play emerges in tangible engagements with materials, experiences, and agencies. These examples illustrate how transversal play can reconfigure roles, soften boundaries, and support speculative, caring, and ethical pedagogical exploration and innovation. The paper contributes a conceptual framework and a practical ethos, along with a set of design orientations for transversal play, to cultivate openness, creativity, and relationality in educational design.

Playful encounters at the intersection of familiar consumer materials and place-based natural matter are fertile terrain for speculative play world-building. This paper introduces bio-collaborative play, a design paradigm where materials and organisms are recognized as active collaborators and kin. This shifts play design away from the manipulation of objects toward a sustained dialogue with living systems. Grounded in Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) principles of pilina (reciprocal care) and kuleana (privileged responsibility), this framework reimagines speculative play as an act of communal care spanning biological scales and generational time. By treating plants, microbes, and everyday materials as co-authors, this approach analyzes how play transcending human/non-human binaries attunes players to multispecies engagement. Findings suggest that granting materials permission to grow, decay, and respond facilitates ecological connections. Ultimately, centering materials as collaborators honors the interdependence of ecological and cultural systems, broadens access to speculative futuring, and transforms play into reciprocal stewardship.

This paper repositions speculative design artefacts as semiotic riddles, where materiality operates not merely as a carrier of speculation but as a vehicle for play. Drawing on Peircean semiotics and narrative theory, we extend Auger’s notion of the ‘perceptual bridge’ to show how speculative artefacts invite audiences into riddle-solving, assembling ‘fabula’ worlds from incomplete ‘syuzhet’ clues. Methodologically, we propose that speculative design can be understood as the crafting of riddles: designing with ambiguity, incompleteness, and interpretive openness. Through three design projects, we illustrate distinct ways in which designers structure the clues of semiotic riddles, whether singular artefacts, fragmented constellations or embodied scenarios and show how these sustain ambiguity and engagement differently. By treating materials and audiences as collaborators in play, this paper contributes to design research an approach that repositions speculation as a relational, playful, and material practice of meaning-making.

While design for play has shown how materials invite and shape engagement, less attention has been given to how material encounters may hold participation over time. This article examines how participation is sustained through material–affective dynamics in early childhood play. Drawing on Spinoza’s (1985) concept of potentia, Ahmed’s (2004a, 2010a, 2010b) notion of stickiness, and Slaby et al.’s (2019) affective arrangements, the study explores how capacities and orientations unfold in situated encounters. Based on design-based research in Danish daycare, the analysis centers on a vignette in which a child remains in shared play through engagement with tape. The analysis shows how materials can sustain participation by gathering attention and holding relations long enough for new forms of engagement to emerge. The article contributes a more precise account of how materials participate in sustaining play and introduces “sticky vitalities” as a sensitizing term.