The classic library is a conundrum in and of itself, a building dedicated to the imaginary worlds of fiction, of curious characters from the minds of authors and playwrights, and a space where you are asked not utter a word louder than your breath, and where more angry stares hit your eyes than at a busy train station.
For us CounterPlayers the library is a valued venue, it is a space for us to explore our ideas, and moreover it’s a collaborator and friend that enables our annual festival to become a reality. My job as a volunteer was to make sure that the allocated rooms and spaces where ready for both participants and hosts, and required both a laptop in one arm and a friendly face when walking around asking students, library guests and the like to kindly leave the space open for our festival.
Luckily for me, most students seemed to understand the relevance of a debate staged in the library, others, however, had their doubts as to what a festival of play was doing, first of all in the library, and second of all, why it involved adults.
It was and still is curious to me how the users of such a vast mecca of literature and knowledge are unaware of their own need and desire to play. Are we not, as readers, part of an adventure that far exceeds ordinary life? I would even argue that the pages of non-fiction and newspaper as well as literature require us to step out of our immediate present and let words form the bridge between us and somewhere else. To learn and experience is to take a leap of faith.
Exactly this dilemma was what brought the participants and listeners to the debate in the spring. What are the possibilities of the library, and how do we change the norms adherent to it? Kindergardens, schools and organizations as well as us at CounterPlay, wish for the library to evolve into a room and community that embraces imagination not just in the written word.
Here on our blog I wish to take the question even further: how is it that the library, the home of books, adventures, fairy princesses, epic wars and deceptive murderers is a space of silence? Even the division of a children’s wing indicate a need to separate the immediate imagination and play (and noise?) of children from the seriousness of the adult reader. But I believe that just as much action is present within the mind of the adult reader, and thus the physical space of the library, the seriousness and silence seems to be in clear opposition to the realm of the inner experience.
Perhaps the library should be a place for us to explore and to play, where children are free to move around and experience narrative in their own way? Perhaps a place where old prejudices can be challenged by who knows – a laughing kid, a bubble show, a reading or performance art? Even smaller libraries without the resources for separate rooms for play or immersion might open up the space for a little less quiet and a little more laugh.
We all here at CounterPlay dare you to challenge the conventions of the home of the written word and accept, show and respect the inner need for play and imagination.
Plastic bags were sticked around their heads with different colors of tapes, some of them had capes behind their back. They were the participants of the workshop “Urban Consensus Play” by Jakob la Cour during the CounterPlay Festival ‘17. They were asked to challenge the consensus of the ownership of public space by wearing DIY masks and invading the city as if they owned the space. They provoked the passersby, they broke the rules and norms; Meanwhile, the “normal” citizens just stared at them weirdly and awkwardly. This little social experience challenges the boundary of ownership. Why did people stare at the participants and feel uncomfortable? Is it because they are acting abnormal compared to what people ought to act in the society?
Nowadays, people are too busy looking at their smartphones and they tend to take their city for granted. As a matter of fact, they forget to be playful in their busy everyday life. This issue was brought to focus at the “Playful City Roundtable” held during CounterPlay Festival ‘17.
Play is a fundamental part of being human – it is a form of expression. Therefore, we should break the norm and make our city into a playful city.
To make our city a playful city, the first step is to get people involved. When we live together with other people in a city, we have the responsibility to make room for everyone to live in it. For example, we have the responsibility to park our bikes so that they do not disturb others; We have the responsibility to buy bus tickets when we take the bus. When we have responsibility, we also have ownership of the public spaces in the city. For instance, we can sit on the bench in a park freely without permission; We can take a photo of the beautiful sunset near the harbour without license. These activities can be done because we have ownership of our own city. Yet, people tend to take these small incidents for granted and do not realise that they have responsibility and ownership of their own city. Thus, they may not be as involved as we imagined.
To maintain the engagement of citizens’ ownership of their city, we should increase their interest in the city. In the roundtable, it was mentioned that the municipality could invite citizens to participate in projects and let them become part of these projects. By this, citizens will feel more engaged in the facilities in the city and will be willing to co-create and transform the space they live in.
When people start having a sense of engagement and ownership of the city, we can start planning the future for a more playful city. Most cities already have several playgrounds around, which encourage both children and adults to enjoy each other’s company and get the best of it through playing. Other than playgrounds, we, as citizens, can intervene and challenge the surroundings and institutions by the power of play. Slow down and notice the small details around us. Things are already there, we tend to pay less attention to them in our busy digitally-saturated everyday life.
Look around instead of looking at your phone!
In addition, the municipality may consider building changeable or transient installations around the city with multifunctional features. Features can be a combination of the field of health and play, or a creative and sustainable installation with learning purpose behind.
There are always two sides to a story, though, and there will often be a downside of all these new ideas and plans to make a city more playful. There will always be rules that stop us and hold us back from play, which will affect the development of a playful city. Besides, people take these activities and installations differently, both positively and negatively. This leads to the question of tolerance, where we have to find the balance between freedom and system. At the same time, budget and responsibility also play a major role in the development of playful city.
As a whole, to create and develop a playful city is an ongoing process, which involves different stakeholders from all segments, including the people who live in the city.
Sometimes, we simply need to be provocative and use the power of play to challenge the norms around us.
In the next few posts here on the blog, we’ll share some of the perspectives on the playful city that emerged at the recent CounterPlay festival in Leeds, UK.
Let’s begin by watching this interview with Morten Skrubbeltrang and Ane Schjødt Koch from FDF, a Danish scout-like organisation for children and youth in Denmark. The interview was recorded back in July during their national summer camp:
(Sorry about the technical issues – it was my first video with a new camera).
Back when it was summer (Danish rainy summer, that is) I happened to visit a very special place, the FDF National Camp, which takes place every fifth year outside the town of Ry, close to the lake Julsø. The camp is huge with its almost 12.000 participants, who all live in tents, prepare all meals on campfires, and generally do everything outside for the duration of the camp – 9 full days.
As if this was not playful enough, they had picked play as the central theme for the entire camp.
“Even if we play just for the sake of playing, something happens with us when we play that would not have happened otherwise. Play is not just for fun – it can be serious too. In play we meet each other in new ways, when we’re building hideouts, creating imaginary worlds or travelling to the moon. In play we are challenged on who we are and who we would like to be. When we play, we see ourselves in a new way, where the differences between us diminish and the sense of community grows” (my translation)
To frame this, they developed a narrative and a fictional kingdom, “Molevitten”, where the Fountain of Play originates (read the story – in Danish). Its energy comes from play itself, and since people are playing less and less, the fountain is drying out. If enough people come to Molevitten to play, the fountain can be saved from extinction.
I talked to the general secretary of FDF, Morten Skrubbeltrang, about the camp and the decision to give “play” such a prominent position:
“The theme is “play away” with a strong focus on play – based on the understanding that we all need the haven and space provided by play. We need places, where all we do is play, where we’re simply having fun while playing, and where we experience the community and sense of belonging, that is inherent to play. We also believe that play is being marginalized in some areas, and we would like the camp to be a place, where play has room to live and thrive”
I also had the chance to talk to Ane Schjødt Koch who was responsible for “decoration and installation” at the camp. She coordinated the development of eight “play stations” , encouraging “free play”:
“We made some dogmas for these installations. The play stations should invite people to play freely, they had to be aesthetically pleasing, there could be no rules, no instructors or should be required. Basically, they should just be ready for people to jump right in and play away.”
I heard about the project a while ago, and I was really excited to see the stations in their natural habitat, to learn more about them, and – of course – to try them out. It really shows the dedication of FDF in wanting to create as many meaningful opportunities for people to play.
Walking around the camp, I was immediately impressed by the prominence of play. It was everywhere. Everybody was playing, and in so many different ways. You would see people climbing, jumping, running, constructing stuff, but also much more calm, contemplative forms of play took place. There was competition and a whole lot of collaboration. Play in all its diverse glory. This is what we’re always trying to inspire with the festival, since play is such a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. We can only hope to more comprehensively understand play if we embrace the diversity, so finding so many manifestations at the camp was a pleasant surprise.
Another remarkable thing I noticed, was how everybody played with everybody. In everyday life, many children and young people are mostly interacting with people of their own age group, and play rarely crosses these boundaries. At the camp, this happened all the time, and it didn’t feel forced, but rather like everyone was actually having fun with each other.
This was indeed a playful wonderland, where the usual barriers and reservations had been more or less completely removed, and where people didn’t seem to care much about looking silly, making mistakes, or simply having fun with friends and strangers alike.
I’m sure we can learn a lot about play from FDF, and I’m really curious to explore how we can create similar opportunities to play, also outside the context of a big camp like this.
The idea about the playground is a wonderful thing.
It shows that we care so much about play that we design spaces to create the best possible conditions for play to thrive.
Playgrounds are, in principle, a love letter to play.
At the same time, many playgrounds are really not that interesting or playful. Even a playground made of the best materials by the best designers can be less than satisfying. You probably know the feeling: is this it?
A big part of the problem is quite often related to the lack of influence given to the player. In an earlier post, I argued that play requires a degree of (real) participation, and that this sort of participation is related to agency, decision making and power.
I think this understanding can be used to explain at least part of the problems with many playgrounds: Everything is decided by someone else, and the people playing can’t really shape the space, hence they are often not really participating, but only doing what the designers or city planners or other people in power desire.
Play scholar Miguel Sicart approaches this from a similar angle, when he, in the book Play Matters, argues that any playspace should be open for “appropriation” or what we might call a “playful takeover”:
The relationship between space and play is marked by the tension between appropriation and resistance: how a space offers itself to be appropriated by play, but how that space resists some forms of play, specifically those not allowed for political, legal, moral, or cultural reasons. Play relates to space through the ways of appropriation and the constant dance between resistance and surrender.
This is a central challenge in any kind of play, and one that clearly highlights again the relationship between play, participation, agency and power.
Who decides how we play?
Sicart continues:
The way spaces are articulated for play is dependent on more than design or playful considerations. Strong norms, rules, and laws govern the use of public and private spaces, and play design must be done in accordance with them. […] In many cases, the trivialization of playground design— the overabundance of plastic-based, repetitive architectures built for safety rather than for play— which seems to have increased in the past several decades, is a result of protective laws rather than of misguided design. And the interest today in implementing digital playgrounds or computer-enhanced environments for play also comes from the normative idea that play is more secure if it is more controlled.
When play is being controlled and regulated, part of it has to do with safety concerns. We don’t want kids (or anyone else playing) to get hurt, so reduce the risk and thus the number of ways to play and to appropriate spaces for play.
In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it
The variables are what he defines as “loose parts” and are understood as any element that can be manipulated by participants or players. In other words, loose parts shows a way to open up spaces for participation and appropriation. Conversely, the lack of loose parts, then, reduces these opportunities:
It does not require much imagination to realise that most environments that do not work (i.e. do not work in terms of human interaction and involvement in the sense described) such as schools, playgrounds, hospitals, day-care centres, international airports, art galleries and museums, do not do so because they do not meet the ‘loose parts’ requirement; instead, they are clean, static and impossible to play around with
When hunting for inspiration on how to make playgrounds more playful, the tradition of “adventure / junk playgrounds” is a great place to start:
Adventure play can take a variety of forms, ranging from natural spaces with treehouses and twine forts reminiscent of Huck Finn or Pippi Longstocking, to dump-like playgrounds filled with old tires and plastic junk, to temporary arts and crafts gatherings. (Playworkers, Ph.Ds, and the Growing Adventure Playground Movement)
Adventure playgrounds typically feature a lot of loose parts, hence a lot of opportunities to shape the playground yourself, even in some small way.
Adventure playgrounds help us understand how spaces can be designed for play through the use of props that help play take place within a bounded space while still remaining open to the creative, appropriative capacities of the activity. Good playgrounds open themselves up to play, and their props serve as instruments for playful occupation (Play Matters)
It is very encouraging to see that more and more people are aware of adventure playgrounds and that the movement seems to be building momentum (and I’ll get back to this in an upcoming post).
There are many reasons why most playgrounds are not more like adventure playgrounds, and these reasons reflect the many issues we have with play in a broader perspective. As a society, we are generally too preoccupied with reducing the unpredictable and eliminating risk. This is, however, known to have undesired and sometimes opposite effects:
“When adults take over all responsibility for safety by eliminating danger, numerous problems can arise. One issue is that there is no guarantee that the physical play becomes safer. In many cases, children refrain from engaging in physical play to comply with the adults‟ need for a safer environment. Over time, one consequence can be that, when the children face future physical challenges, they will be ill-informed and inexperienced regarding bodily know-how. Their physical incompetence can actually make their play activity even more dangerous” (Skovbjerg, Elbæk & Rytz)
It’s not just safety concerns driving this, however. There is also the more general tendency of eliminating that which we can’t control and that which will not lead to the desired outcome. The classic definition of play by Huizinga maintains that play is an “activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it”. In the current paradigm, where we are so notoriously concerned with measurable outcomes, play is a clearly threat.
We are afraid of play, precisely because play is hard to control, and the same can be said about playgrounds with less regulation, more freedom, loose parts and room for appropriation.
I’m not saying that we should give up making playgrounds altogether, or that all playgrounds should be junk or adventure playgrounds, but simply that there are many complex dynamics in play, and that these can seldomly captured by any one space. The more confined and controlled the space is, the more you reduce the possible spectrum of play. If you tell people how to play, and you create spaces that only accomodate a very narrow definition of “play”, well, you undermine the chances that playful play will happen in that place.
This is also why some of the best spaces to play are not, and will probably never be, designated playgrounds, but spaces “appropriated” for play.
What would make playgrounds more meaningful to you?
Luckily for me, most students seemed to understand the relevance of a debate staged in the library, others, however, had their doubts as to what a festival of play was doing, first of all in the library, and second of all, why it involved adults. 
Back when it was summer (Danish rainy summer, that is) I happened to visit a very special place, the 
