Using Speculative Design to Deliver A Future Perspective on Play
Brief
How might we help ensure the survival of play, playgrounds and play related services as spaces for further social interaction and cohesion in cities?
Executive Summary
A Future Perspective on Play is a speculative design project that aims to inspire our project partners and champion the child’s perspective on play over the typical adult perspective. Our intervention is set in the not-so-distant future of 2032, where a fictitious Ministry of Play is formed in response to the surfacing of deep cracks in educational and social systems. Under the umbrella of the fictitious Ministry of Play, we explore a future where play is integrated into the daily lives of children. Here, in addition to being used as a way to explore the practical implications of their learning, it also serves as a tool for children to deepen their connection to each other, their surroundings, and themselves.
This project was very well received by our project partners and the play community as a whole. Organisations like LondonPlay face many daily challenges just to be able to provide their services, making it impossible to look beyond what is in front of them. By framing this speculative future on our partner’s current capabilities, we set a new aspirational vision that will act as a Northstar to all business and strategic decision making while also inspiring and invigorating staff at all levels. This project is due to be presented as part of the 23rd Annual Play Conference in Glasgow, Scotland in June 2023.
The Royal College of Art x LondonPlay
2022 -2023
Pending
Speculative design, design futures, informal interviews, system analysis,
Client
Year
Grade
Methods
Background
Play is Under Attack
Play is an essential aspect of life. Even more so for children, for whom play is the lens they understand and interact with the people and world around them.
From a functional perspective, it is a vital component of a child’s ability to develop core life skills like confidence, communication, creativity and critical thinking. These abilities are also crucial to their wellbeing once they enter the adult world.
However, play is under attack. The same siloed thinking that dominated the 20th century has warped our understanding of play. Nowadays play is seen as an activity or reward that has its own time allocated to it, like homework, dinner and sleep time. And a less important one at that – in our increasingly busy lives it is often play that ends up being shortened or cut out all together.
Space
Space for Play refers to the public places such as playground, parks and streets that are disappearing or becoming more hostile to play due to building developments and car traffic.
Freedom
Freedom to Play refers to the shift in culture around play: parents are less likely to let their children play independently in public places due to perceptions of risk and fear.
Time
Time for Play addresses the fall in time for unstructured play as it becomes encroached by other activities such as homework, organised events and screen-based activities.
Funding
Funding for Play refers to the fall in funds dedicated to public play spaces and activities.
No community can infringe a child’s right to play without doing enduring harm to the minds and bodies of its citizens.
- David Lloyd George,
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Our Partner
LondonPlay is a charity dedicated to providing free, high-quality play opportunities for every child in London, conveniently located in their own neighbourhoods. They run playgrounds and adventure playgrounds and have many initiatives to create a welcoming environment for play. In collaboration with LondonPlay and the RCA Future Services Lab, we were presented with the following brief:
How might we help to ensure the survival of play, playgrounds and play related services as spaces for further social interaction and cohesion in cities and reimagine playgrounds as city services?
With this brief in mind, we set out to plan our research phases. We decided to start at the very beginning and aimed to have a full understanding of the history of play and playgrounds, as well as their roles within the modern built environment before engaging with our stakeholders. We also wanted to build a relationship with the Play Worker who was responsible for the playground we would be basing our research in. Not only would this give us valuable insight into the management of the playground but would make it clear that we were trusted within the playground, hopefully making the children more comfortable with our presence.
Our initial research plan included two phases: Exploratory research and Primary research.
Research
Exploratory research
Our exploratory research helped us understand the background and context of the current play landscape and the role of playgrounds within it. By digging into the history and social science of play, we discovered that playgrounds are a modern invention, only a little older than the London Underground. They were built in response to the context of the mid 19th century as a product of rapid urbanisation, child labour and industrialisation to provide a safe area for children to socialise (and get strong for manual labour).
However, playgrounds remain largely unchanged and have failed to adapt to the current context and social needs.
Primary research
Our field research helped us discover the true value of the playground for children, parents, and the wider community. Before setting out to observe and talk to children at the playground, we were very aware of how our adult presence would influence the way they behaved. Because of this, we decided to sit on bench within the playground to allow them to adapt to pour presence instead of approaching the children directly. This approach proved worthwhile: we built a strong relationship with them over multiple visits, leading to new discoveries and inspiration for further research.
Through primary research, we uncovered the truth behind Adventure Playgrounds: they are all about the relationships made in them, not the physical act of playing or the space it occurs in. By replacing our adult-centric point-of-veiw of play with the child-centric point-of-view, we began to envision a myriad of ways in which the values transmitted through play could be heightened and distributed more effectively and equitably.
Key insights
We can summarise our findings from our research as the following three key points:
1. Past a threshold, play structures are almost irrelevant. Beyond needing a place that feels appropriate for their age, children to not go to Adventure Playground for the physical challenge. Instead, they go to socialise and to be in a space that feels co-created by themselves and their friends.
2. The Adventure Playground is all about self-organised and self-directed play, initiated entirely by children. Parents are not present in the playground, almost as if it were an unwritten rule. Outside of specific events and activities, the role of the Play Worker is one of mediation and resolution should there be a conflict or issue.
3. Play is not banded by ages and physical size, but takes place in a community that embraces diversity and fosters mutual learning and interaction. The older children act as mentors and siblings to the younger ones. This creates a warm and family-like environment which many children lack in their homes.
Speculative Service Design
Speculative Design doesn’t aim to predict the future, it depicts a future vision that shapes the current conversations
From the early days of this project we were acutely aware of the resources LondonPlay was dedicating to maintaining its current position. Of course, this is energy well spent: challenges such as facility maintenance and repair are essential and urgent. However, this urgency ultimately was limiting our stakeholders’ perspectives and resources to immediate problem solving and “putting out fires”.
Our team wanted to discover the potential and values of children's playgrounds and play, and draw a more influential and sustainable vision for LondonPlay, unhinged from the current daily problems. Our project’s purpose is to present new perspectives and possibilities, breaking away from existing problem definitions and solutions. We worked on this project with the belief that through radically new perspectives and visions we could inspire to make children's play and play environments more meaningful and sustainable in the lives of all members of society. To achieve this, we used speculative design techniques (also called design futures).
Speculative design identifies and debates crucial issues that might happen in the future by building a product or service within a future context. This context is neither utopia nor dystopia, but a blend of both to form a believable future vision. Within this context, the aim is not to present commercially driven design proposals but to design proposals that identify and debate crucial issues that might happen in the future.
It explores future scenarios and innovative design propositions for tackling grand challenges, and develop and prototype future service offerings for relevant verticals in the private and public sectors inspired by the big shifts that shape new ways of living.
Having already found the key values through our prior research, our next step as to envision the future.
Our Future Signals
Through our prior research phase, we acquired invaluable insights into Adventure Playgrounds, which serve as the foundation for our project. As a next step, we needed to understand and clearly depict the future landscape beyond playgrounds in order to present a new perspective on play as a service.
We collected information about future trends and signals in six main areas: City, Housing, Work, Parenting, Education, and Entertainment. These insights were filtered through our team's lens, relationships, derived from our previous research, to reinterpret the direction of future society in relation to playgrounds, children, and play. This enabled us to develop more compelling future narratives and personas, aligning and connecting the core values of today's adventure playgrounds with future signals.
City
London continues to grow to keep up with the population and becomes incredibly complex. This complexity is managed by technology networks that streamline all of the city's components. It is even more efficient to get where you want, but there is less need to leave your neighbourhood, and you can get most of what you need locally.
Housing
As our cities grow, so do our urban lifestyles. Our lifestyles become more sustainable and optimised for individuals. Depending on individual lifestyles, the structure and function of the house changes. For example, you do not need to cook? Then the kitchen in the house disappears.
Work
The working environment has become more polarised. As many jobs have been eliminated and replaced by robotics or AI programs, the concept and role of labor have changed. Some are engaged in extremely human labor-intensive work all their lives, while others rely on Universal Income to lead a minimal life.
Parenting
Parents no longer have to engage in labour-intensive, repetitive parenting activities. Robotics and IT services have replaced most of those parenting jobs and made it more accessible, for a price. Parents now have more choices than ever regarding how much time they want to spend raising their children. It's all down to personal choice.
Education
Children no longer have to physically go to school every day, and will receive a high level of personalised education. By providing students with customised educational programs and tasks based on their individual tendencies and achievement levels, they can receive a more comprehensive and effective educational experience. The use of AI tutors allows for a more individualised approach to education, catering to the unique needs and learning styles of each student.
Entertainment
Personalisation is extended to our entertainment. Content is shaped based on the individual viewer's experience. To unwind, you watch shows where the characters are all informed by your metrics - your mood, energy levels and even the people you interacted with that day. Powered by Artificial Intelligence that uses data from your biometric tracker, a virtually limitless stream of content is created that is perfectly tailored to your liking.
The intersection of the maturation point of various technologies will change how we interact with all aspects of our life: institutions, friends, and ourselves
When applying our relationship lens to this future scenario, one thing sticks out. Shared experiences, an essential component towards building meaningful relationships with each other and their surroundings, are at risk. Extreme efficiency risks eliminating serendipitous moments, while precise personalisation risks removing the common ground between people.
Our Design Direction
The real value of the playground is not in its facilities, but int the strong relationships and bonds built there.
This truth is threatened by a variety of future signals. Most importantly, the widespread proliferation of efficient processes and personalised experiences will seriously threaten our possibilities to have shared experiences.
What does a future where these signals and technologies are put to the benefit of human connection and shared experience look like? How will institutions need to evolve to keep up with technological development, and what new institution will we need to? What is the role of data, data transparency and privacy in all of this?
We concluded that play needs and deserves to be taken as seriously as education in children's lives. Play is a way of life for children, and it can be the key to connect and integrate their life experience. In order to deliver impactful inspiration that can help LondonPlay break out of the day-to-day and standard way of thinking, we created a speculative design intervention in response to our findings.
Armed with our research findings, and future signals we were ready to set our design direction through a how might we statement.:
In a future society focused on extreme efficiency and personalised experiences,
How might we leverage technological advancement to create a play environment that can bring meaningful shared experiences to strengthen children’s relationship with their friends, society, nature and themselves?
Workshop
Alongside the brainstorming and ideation sessions within our team, we hosted a workshop with various stakeholders in order to accumulate professional insights into our project and validate our project direction. We invited faculties from LondonPlay, several playworkers from local playgrounds, architects, and LondonPlay trustees, whose diverse background and expertise enlightened us with their unique perspectives
We constructed three distinct future scenarios based on out future signals to challenge and provoke our participants. We structured the workshop so that participants were divided into various groups and were asked activity questions that were appropriate for the presented scenario and persona. Participants then engaged in ideation and discussion.
This workshop not only helped us remain focused on delivering a future vision based on our partner’s capabilities, but also helped us sow core concepts to our project into our partner’s minds. This would help ensure that our project had internal buy-in and would be actively used to inform strategic decision making.
Delivery
In the not-so-distant future of 2032, The Ministry of Play is established in response to various investigations into children’s wellbeing and community resilience. These reports concluded that:
The same technological advancements that were bringing us more efficient processes and more faithful personalisation were causing children to feel isolated due to a lack of shared experiences.
Children were feeling increasingly disconnected from their surroundings.
The school system had failed to keep up with technological change, leading to dissonance between the system and the children’s experience
The Ministry of Play is responsible for bringing together stakeholders, plan systemic learn-play-integrated curriculum, and care for children’s play experience and growth in different phases. It achieves this through two main services:
The Ministry of Play
The Open Play Curriculum
The Open Play Curriculum is the 21st century way of learning: it leverages advancements in technology to cover the check box tasks, leaving more time for children to naturally and holistically explore the subjects they are taught, the environment they are in and the relationships they form with others and with themselves
PlayWorkers
The PlayWorkers offer play-related guidance and companion throughout every aspects of one’s childhood. They act as an essential support for raising children and ensuring a high standard of children’s growth and wellbeing.
Partner Reception
Our main objective for this project was to be able to inspire and reframe the potential for Play for our project partners while helping them break out of their day-to-day challenges. We worked on this project with the belief that through radically new perspectives and visions we could make children's play and play environments more meaningful and sustainable in the lives of children and the wider society.
The Ministry of Play successfully helped LondonPlay consider alternative potential partnership and structures. Additionally, we effectively re-contextualised the transformative power of Play as a counter-force for the rapid (and often disorientating) pace of technological change. We hope that the concept of the Ministry of Play continues to be a Northstar for the LondonPlay team - at least until we get a real one!
We are honoured that this project was chosen to be shown at the 2023 International Play Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
The Report
This project was delieved as both a live presentation and a comprehensive report. If you are intersted in knowing more about this project, please check out the full report by clicking on the image below. I am also very happy to have a chat about this project or anything else that may have piqued your interest so please do not hesitate to reach out via email at brando.guerrreri@gmail.com .