Playing with senses and materiality
How am I going to find the perfect combination of material, interaction and play? Apart from my own physical and material exploration I’ve worked on understanding both play, senses and haptics in order to have a solid foundation for my experience.
Understanding play What does define play and creates a playful experience? There needs to be a playspace34, creating a physical and conceptual relationships between objects that generate the play. John Sharp* & Colleen Macklin** describe a kind of play, whimsical play35, as a ride at an amusement park or kids rolling down the hill. Whimsical play provides unexpected results offering a sense of euphoria by generating dizziness and a play experience that you need to feel to understand. My approach to add play experiments into the narrative led me to figure out how important might be play for my research.
*John Sharp is a game designer, graphic designer, art historian and educator. He makes games, teaches game design and other creative pursuits, and researches and writes about games, play, design, and art. **Colleen Macklin is a game designer, an Associate Professor in the school of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design and founder and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping Education and Technology Lab), a lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement.
Importance of play Miguel Sicart understanding of play gives me another perspective, “Play is a dance between creation and destruction, between creativity and nihilism. Playing is a fragile, tense activity, prone to breakdowns36.” How different can be the play that I want my experience to have?. “And play is not necessarily fun. It is pleasurable, but the pleasures it creates are not always submissive to enjoyment, happiness, or positive traits. Play can be pleasurable when it hurts, offends, challenges us and teases us, and even when we are not playing. Let’s not talk about play as fun but as pleasurable, opening us to the immense variations of pleasure in this world 37.” This kind of play can open up the kind of conversation I want my audience to have by setting the right mindset.
Learning from play Seymour Papert, Media Lab founding faculty member, created a basis of a new theory of learning through construction. Children seen as designers and creators thanks to tools that he created, such as Logo (Lego Mindstorms’ programming Language). Instead of being consumers of technology, defended that learning through imaginative experimentation and creating objects that could be shared, happens best in an active knowledge constructing environment for children. “I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard 38.” Seymour Papert has no doubt, too. Creating small challenges will be more effective than just letting hard to be hard inside a text book. Science might seem complex, but could be fun too! His notions of pedagogy, his innovative ideas on how to let children learn math by themselves created new aspirations in my research. I genuinely believe in his principals on education, and I want to follow them along with mine. Even if the purpose of my project is not just merely educational, I want to keep this idea of fun complexity.
Understanding haptics & senses My goal was comprehending what goes beyond sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch The senses of touch39 describes haptics, as expansion of what touch from skin can reach compared to what is privately sensed. It compares touch to hearing and seeing, that have a correspondent organ.
“Touch being a manifold of sensations, ‘feeling’ involves not only perception by touch, as we have seen, but also perception of our whole bodily state, involving interoception and somatic sensations”. This particular perception through a bodily state is what I’m interested to explore. My material and physical exploration leans towards ‘feeling’ beyond sight.
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