OPEN PLAYFIELD “Venghino Signori, venghino” Designing the Collection of Fragments through the Space of Gaming Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri Michael Ventris Trust Award “Games offer play with strategy and chance,rules and competition,winning and losing. They reflect the world we live in and reveal hidden and not so hidden aspects of our nature. What does playing games reveal about you? Are you a secret cheater, a stickler for the rules or a gloating winner?” -Game Plan V&A Exhibition
The world we live in is a intricate network of connections. Today everything is connected. Connecting through digital media, connecting our life with virtual reality, with places. What we do as architects but as well as people is to connect fragments. The way we put together our cultural environment, our knowledge, our influences is what makes your own persona. As architects, we are fully immersed in this fragmented reality. The way we create our work and ourselves is through connecting the parts we get in touch with. It is almost impossible to divide the author and his background from the project itself. Indeed, both in the academic and in the professional world, we investigate the way to assemble informations, discussing the conceptual links between different instances and how to adapt them into physical form. The first and foremost stage is the collection of references, the moment you make your own archive to construct your cultural ground. The way you begin selecting your own fragments creates your own device, your body of production. However, even though you’re always told to find meaningful connections in this vast ocean of informations, the process of selecting the right ingredients is often assigned to intuition, rarely taught, led or controlled. To design is to choose, our job as individuals is to distill the essential components to achieve a collective product. Therefore, why someone would select one thing to be more relevant than the other as a starting point? Is this only an instinctive act? The proposal is a small inhabitable playground to “design” the way you select and collect fragments in the architectural creative process, An ironic attempt to “design intuitions” rather than just proposing an intuitive design. Play has been taken up as a core action of cultural production. The space of gaming incorporates a fundamental dichotomy: chance and chaos together with order and hierarchies. This machine - a wooden inhabitable maze, where you direct a ball into a hole to drop a selected fragment - is a study of modifications, examining what happens when things combine, interact, change place.The physical instability of the playfield is a metaphor of our contemporary realm, where a cross pollination between disciplines, people and objects relentlessly develops. On one hand you introduce a certain amount of objectivity in the process, designing the parameters of the playfield. You can organise the fragments in the pots as in a zoning act, you can dispose the maze - the obstacles for the ball -as if it was an architectural plan. At the same time you enhance the subjectivity, accepting that the selection of your references is led by chaos to a certain extent. You can’t predict where the ball is going to fall. You can design the playfield but you can’t fully control it. You’re constantly challenged by the chance and its mechanisms.
Mechanism and procedures
2.Build the plan of your playfield, choose between the different configurations.
1.Place the fragments in each conical pot.
4. The collection begins! Through a circular wooden joystick and a series of springs located in the centre, the playfield can be inclined at different angles to direct the ball.
3.Inhabit the device, get ready to go!
5. Ball in! Falling into the hole, either the one you wanted or by accident, the ball hits a pile of fragments related to a specific category contained in a conical pot. Which fragment will drop?
6. Go for the next level! Change the location of the fragments and give it another go.
Possible Playfields The game offers the possibility of constructing the level you would like to play with, adding pieces to defend your fragments pockets. The most difficult playfield is completely free from barriers, an open plan with obstacles dividing the interior space. You are in charge of balancing yourself in this world. As you add pieces, the system becomes more easy, allowing yourself to defend a quarter, a half or all the holes in the playfield. The internal partitions are used to define in which container pot you would like the ball to fall. The process becWomes more predictable.
d. 2m
To what extend you want to design your playfield to prevent chance? Remove the partitions, accept the caos. h. 1.25m
Walls Easy Level
Walls Medium Level
Sectors Difficult Level
Plan libre Expert Level
Categories and Fragments The playfields allow you to take fragments, either up to chance, or through experience. The more you play, the more you are able to deliver the ball to the container pot you would like to dip in. The
1.Architectural fragments
2.Creatures
3.Machineries
4. Tecniques
fragments, which you can take throughout the game, are divided in four categories each one with a different colourful container. Before start playing, you can organise the fragments in four homogenous sectors, limitating the chance of falling in a sector you do not want. Another approch, is to place the containers in a random order, leaving to a more unexpected result.
Option1. Fragments pockets divided by typology
Option2. Random fragments pockets
Material and expenses
1. 1. Mini Mountable Analog Joystick £15 x1 Spring-back system for the X and Y axes range: ±25° www.pimoroni.com
2.
2. Self Adhesive Vinyl £50 Gloss finish A0 round cutted www.digitalprinting.co.uk
3.
3a. Plywood Sheeting £6.43m2 Cut to size 22x76x82 thick 9mm Total diameter 2meters (8 slices) http://www.woodshopdirect.co.uk/ 3b. Wooden pieces £4m2 Plywood 6mm h.7.5cm Playfield 1.
x16 x20
4.
5.
Playfield 2.
x12 x8 x32
Playfield 3.
x16
6. 4. Pivot springs $41 + shipping MTEC Shifter springs http://www.mtecind.com 5. Wooden boards £14.30 x1 18mm plywood 37x54cm (12slices) www.woodshopdirect.co.uk 6. Clear Acrylics tubes £0.96x1 Transparent 5 types d:32, d:27, d:22.5, d:20, d:15 www.clearplastictube.co.uk 7. 8.
7. Wooden legs £200x1 Soft wood cnc bending www.cncserviceslondon.co.uk 8. Round wooden circles £20 Cnc bending www.cncserviceslondon.co.uk