Keila Z. Pérez, Mathias Poulsen, Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones
This conversation emerges from desires of more democratic planning. Not in the sense of getting more people to show up and participate in a one-off engagement process but thinking about ways to sustain a culture of engagement with our everyday environment and places we inhabit. Through their playful lens, two design scholars and play facilitators help me explore possibilities to rethink the formats through which people are engaged in order to “have a say” in issues that affect them and the planet. The following are some excerpts from our extended conversation:
Katherine: What are you two working on?
Keila: Right now, I’m in Jordan working on a project with the “Global Goals” initiative establishing an activist football (soccer) league. We have one hundred women playing and the ten teams carry out activist actions in their communities between each game day. After a match, the two teams go to a “play activist field” where I host them and we’re trying all kinds of play methods to exercise their role as activists. We practice partnering up, speaking up, and leading.
Mathias: I am in Canberra, Australia, as part of my PhD project where I’m trying to understand play as a mode of democratic participation. I’m drawing on the Danish tradition of junkyard playgrounds or Skrammellegepladsen, as a space and metaphor for democratic participation. I ask, what if our deliberation is not only rational, sitting around a table making really proper, coherent arguments about things… What if it’s also more experimental inquiries and ways of exploring some matters of mutual concern? If we have a space we want to explore, or an issue in the community that we want to deal with, what if that happens also, by playing and by building things and engaging with materials.
Katherine: You’re both trying to facilitate these experiences as ways to expand democracy, but in different ways. Mathias, maybe you’re experimenting more with the format itself in these playground experiments while Keila is using play to activate other areas of life?
Mathias: Yeah, at first, I wanted to understand a different format of participation. To say, okay, the human expression and being in the world can’t be captured in rational language only, so we also need embodied, playful ways of making inquiries, and of making our statements and arguments. But what I’m starting to also ask is, maybe by doing this I’m also finding a way to critique democracy itself in its current conception, something I’m realizing by being here and having a different context. Democracy is really built on very western Eurocentric values and principles of modernity and Enlightenment, in rational thought and the individual and all those things that we really take for granted in the Global North. And some of the things that I’m interested in the playground have to do with bodies playing a really big role, it’s the irrational, the sensorial. It’s the relations rather than what the individual can do. It’s distributed agency.
Katherine: No doubt there are important critiques to the disembodied way the deliberative model and communicative rationality have been theorized. And taking a cue from Johan Huizinga, one of the great things about play is that it can break from the “real”, it can even embrace the irrational or non-rational that you are naming. So, why should we mix play with messy political considerations?
Mathias: We know as designers, as people, that there are other creative ways of both getting to know the world and to express our opinions, on the world. So, that was it. I just felt like, okay, when we play, we do this as well. We say things about who we are and what we find to be important and how we like to be together with each other. We make a lot of these kinds of statements. I just wanted to bring that into a practice that is otherwise really sort of fairly rigid and formal and very language-based and very “rational”. So that’s sort of one way of countering that, of saying, if we are to go on with this democracy thing, then I think we need a broader repertoire of ways of participating.
Katherine: Keila, you worked with Danish politicians for one of your projects in your Master’s. Now you are working with women in Jordan. Both groups have quite different backgrounds from our own as Puerto Rican women. How do you think of this relationship between play and culture and what are your thoughts on facilitating for a multicultural group or for a group whose culture might be different from yours?
Keila: Yeah. So, one thing working with play is that it definitely has a universal language to it. No matter where I start to explore these topics and facilitate a play experience, there is something universal even if people don’t have the words or use the same language to describe it. We all know what it feels like to be in a state of play or in a state of playfulness.
Now, one of the main differences would be the way that play is valued, and its initial acceptance to it. Of course, being in a country like Denmark, where play holds a really high position, it almost feels like a luxury that you can sit down with a running political candidate in the middle of his campaign and have a playful discussion, sitting with tied coffee mugs, pulling each other’s cups, and playing with cakes while talking about really important political topics.[…] It feels like a privilege that I can do that in Denmark, whereas when you go into some other places, there’s more hesitation to engage in something that seems so frivolous at first sight. But as you go into the process, people start to see that there is something much more serious and much deeper to it. And that somehow you can extract a lot of sense and a lot of meaning from the process of engaging with playful experiences.
Mathias: Keila, I love this. But, I love how you hold onto this notion that while it feels like a privilege, while it feels like luxury, it is actually not. It’s something that’s much deeper than that and a part of our human nature probably.
Keila: Yeah. I think that’s where play has its potential. It’s a natural way of being in the world. Even if at some point we’ve kind of lost that and we’ve forgotten that, we’re here to try to insist that it’s actually a way that feels quite natural to explore and to negotiate our ways of being together as a society.
Katherine: Do any of you feel strongly about play having greater potential outside of institutional channels? Should we bring this type of thinking into a planning department, for example?
Keila: I think both are important and both have a different potential and a different role. There’s something for sure that can be valuable in putting play in institutions. You can use it for social innovation and there’s collectives like Play the City, I think from Holland, doing this particularly. But then, it becomes a lot of gamification processes of how you consult the citizen. And for me, it’s more interesting when we’re taking this grassroots approach and when we’re putting play at the hands of people at their everyday life situation.
Mathias: I think, we often tend to equate democracy with the institutions and representative democracy. And it can be so much more than that. How can we shape a society together that’s meaningful for all of us ideally. And the institutions are a part of that, but they think they’re the biggest part of that. And a lot of people think that, but to me, they’re just a part alongside a lot of other components. I think there’s a need to raise the awareness of the capacity of democracy to also live outside of institutions. We should just accept the local enactment of life…it’s what matters. And then of course we need to be able to sort of talk to each other, but at least it puts more emphasis on the living of life rather than the institutionalizing. So maybe some better balance is needed between this general tendency to put everything into the institutions. It feels like we don’t really know how to move on and I think part of that might be because institutions are not that imaginative.
Mathias: However,within the urban planning field, there seems to be on the one hand, a celebration of the temporary and improvisation in public spaces. And on the other, there remains this ideal of making things look nice and feeling orderly and under control. Colleagues here in Melbourne are designing for play in public space and trying to see what happens when you bring play into the streets in different ways. And I’m also keen to explore and think more about how we can create these kinds of frictions between these ideas about improvisation and the institutional needs for control and predictability. What happens when we take play to the streets and we invite people to play and we honestly, sincerely don’t know what will happen? Because we can’t just pretend not to know. We actually, really have to let go of that control and desire to predict things. If we just pretend, then it’s not gonna get very interesting, it’s not gonna become real play that people are actually having a sense of ownership over.
Katherine: I think planning does not feel comfortable with that at all, maybe in part because this idea that we work for the public good has some of us thinking that we figured out what this looks like…
Keila: It’s not all designers that take that approach into finding out what are the actual problems that we wanna find solutions to. Are we asking the right questions or are we just in a cycle of creating the things that we think people need? I think it’s a shared dilemma with planning in some ways. And I think that’s also why play brings an interesting resistance to the material; a resistance to what may be an accepted aesthetic approach, an accepted material approach, or an accepted form. It might be because play can easily exist without us designing for it. But we can of course, also decide to enhance it or to create even better conditions for it to arise.
About Authors:
Keila Zarí Pérez is a social–play designer and educator. Her current design practice is rooted in activism and participation in socio-politics through play and playfulness. She works with speculation and embodied ways of teaching in design education. Her work includes furniture design, playful methods, and process facilitation, as well as research and teaching at the LAB for Play in Designskolen Kolding, Denmark. She is now a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Design and Creative Technologies, UT.
Mathias Poulsen is a play activist and PhD student at Designskolen Kolding, Denmark. Currently working at the Lab for Social Design where he combines research on design, play and democracy to explore how we might design for new forms of democratic participation. His PhD project has emerged from years of working with grassroots communities, especially within play and education. He is also the founder of the international play festival Counter Play and the Danish Play Think Tank, cultivating communities for investigating play.
Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones is a doctoral student in the Community and Regional Planning Program in UT-Austin. Born and raised in the west coast of Puerto Rico, she is passionate about health and environmental justice and believes in people’s right to stay and achieve wellbeing on their land.
