Play as a Player in Design: rethinking a ‘Curious Practice’ for Co-designing Public Space

‘Move the Neighbourhood’ is a research project experimenting with co-designing playable installations for a public green space in Copenhagen through a design-based collaboration between children and design-researchers. We employed a co-design process to investigate whether deconstructing the rules for both play and design could trigger new ways of conceiving and realizing playable spaces. The aim was to test a participatory process in order to identify what might be meaningful in relation to both play and designing for play, along a spectrum ranging from rules to collaborative improvisation. In this article, we investigate how play can create agency, spark imagination and open up practices in both artistic and academic processes. Drawing on Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, we suggest design/play as a dynamic engine for exploring collaborative design practices as a dialogue between art, play and co-design. In our co-design approach, we seek to unfold what Haraway calls ‘response-ability’ to a ‘curious practice’, exploring the unanticipated in the collaboration as a potential for transforming space. The metaphor of a ‘jelly cake’ from play-research helps us to activate the messiness of play and frames our methodological approach to collaborative design. We see play as a serious co-player that evokes collective worlds through productive fields of action that enable actors to engage in the co-design of playable public space.