Multi-use Playspaces

Learning from from the remix innovations which is often marked by a reframing of existing narratives from innovative perspectives comes the idea of a Multiuse Playspace. The idea is to invoke a public space facility to explore technological infrastructures and mobile materials that can be taken apart, moved and combined, and placemaking interactions and best practices that can be reused and redesigned in a number of ways. Placemaking is a process and tool for creating places and building stronger communities by allowing the creatives and ordinary people to see how their ideals can contribute into the broader process of making change in the city.

A Multiuse Playspace enable new and unconventional ways of thinking and making by providing open infrastructure and urban space as hotbeds for artists, creatives and the community to organize art and technology inspired interventions. Similar to remix innovators such as makerspaces and commons, a Multiuse Playspace is a hotbed for innovation and facilitates creative projects by providing technical and artistic best practices support for creative ideas, activities or projects.

Multiuse Playspaces aim to spark creativity and engagement by cultivating robust forms of play, learning, and engagement in a public space. This guide or toolkit will show you the design-led development process for creating an exemplar Multiuse Playspace.

Creative participation within a local community is challenging to organise and even more challenging to sustain overtime.

Trondheim has several collective community-operated workspaces and incubators for ideas and business startups. In Trondheim we have Adressaparken, a park that provides space, technology, and infrastructures for various types of community activities. There are successful projects out of these community workspaces and infrastructures but getting people involve continuously is a challenging project by itself.

We often hear people ask what is the right formula for getting people engaged. I believe to keep people going, your proposed activity should already be part of their lifestyle or daily perception of social and environmental accountability. It should be as seamless as clicking a facebook "like". Positive response in social media for instance can create social impact and rewards people who receives the "like" and this explains why many people repeat doing them. It is the same for our role in recycling garbage everyday, we pay attention to that action because we know we are creating social and environmental impact on big issues like climate change.

Knowing the role we play, the choices we make is producing a positive difference our world provides a squirt of dopamine rewards every time. Such perception of benefits or opportunities I believe encourages people to keep going thus acts as a bridge to that complex gap in people engagement versus everyday life demands and technology

Running or brisk walking has become an increasingly sociable affair rather than a just a solitary sport in the recent years. As more and more people move and travel overseas for leisure, business, or study, running or walking in groups is becoming a popular way for people to make new contacts locally and abroad.

Running events are usually organized through social media. In facebook we can follow successful stories of group of runners with varying experience meets once every weekdays at a local brewery or craft beer bar, runs anywhere from 5 to 10 kilometers, then returns for drinks. Mikkeller Running Club Trondheim in Norway holds monthly run on Saturdays instead of weekdays.

About the people:
Most Norwegians spend weekends and holidays at the family cabin which makes popular weekend running clubs with social events mostly feasible only once a month. However in Norway and Scandinavia, you could always see a lot of solitary runners and walkers everyday even on winters.

RGB Playspace is a commissioned public art installation for Adressaparken at the city of Trondheim, opened to public last 2017.

It is a permanent lights and sound installation for creative empowerment that can be manipulated and transformed through play. This public art installation invites children and adults alike to physically explore the interactive space to instantly become a composer of music and lights.

RGB Playspace is designed with a robust architecture where light fixtures, sound playback and sensing technologies can be extended or redesigned in the future. Based on the user journey study made for RGB Playspace, several actions has been identified including potential solutions to further increase citizen participation and inclusion by making the installation more environmentally or socially aware. For example, think of a playful installation in the city that can solve big issues like obesity or climate change.

In this section, I am going to examine how RGB Playspaces can be redesigned to extend its social and environmental relevance in the community. I propose to add a technology called Pavegen Systems that converts energy from people`s footsteps into electricity. Walking or stepping into RGB Playspace will not only encourage people to have fun, be physically active and keep doing it if they want to contribute in the production of a green energy.

You got ideas or insights but not sure where to start or how to use them? You can share them. I want to encourage you find a person or a team to share your ideas and challenges with. Someone who can give you advise on how to find collaborators, funding or coaching to jumpstart your project.

You can also learn a lot on ideation process by joining open idea accelerator communities online such as OpenIDEO. In this platform, community members come together in designing solutions to issues presented by non-profits, and the open forum allows everyone to send and receive feedback.

If you are a hands-on type of creative or non-profit, you can send me an information on what you can provide or will need, I`ll try my best to connect you to a list of volunteers and non-profits who needs local resource such as people, skills, or bold new ideas.

In an international setting, you can also try Skills for Change, an online platform that connects willing volunteers with non-profits.

In creating an activity, an event, or a place where people can enjoy themselves - a playground, it is important to examine the needed "loose parts".

According to Simon Nicholson`s "Theory of Loose Parts", many places of human interaction do not work well because they do not have the required loose parts. Places or activities are "clean, static and impossible to play around with".

I have three projects that considers the Theory of Loose Parts (Adresaparken, RGB Playspace, and Reframe / In Front of Me). Based on my professional experience here are some needed loose parts I ponder upon before starting with my ideas or project:

1. A holistic environment where everyone can be creative and inventive.

2. Loose parts are free variables which goes beyond open-ended physical materials to include phenomena (activity, music, gravity, concepts, ideas, etc.).

3. Bridging the gap between the digital realm and participation. Interaction and participation that not only offer lots of flexible loose parts or variables but encourages people to come together for real.

4. A human centered design approach where participants and their behaviour can and need to be part of the design process of a space.

5. People involvement is not a scripted methodology, only place and people-specific approach.

6. A journey into the real-life stories, experiences, and issues of people is a must.

So, you want to build or organize a creative environment or activity with a certain purpose or impact in mind. If you think your idea is aimed at creating an impact or is bridging the gap, you come to the right place.

Your first step will be to envision the results or the impact you want your project to achieve. Just try to describe it in few sentences for now. For instance,

"I want to organize an activity in a park where people will learn about health and obesity".

When the envisioned results you defined requires social feedback or participation, you might want to study further the factual conditions of well-being your community seeks for in your local area or neighbourhood. This includes having conversations with a wide range of people in your community to prioritize and develop consensus around the results you will pursue together. While community members can often be eager to jump right into identifying problems and solutions, a results-based process helps you and your target beneficiaries be more strategic moving forward. This is also a dynamic process, as many communities will return to their results agenda over time as they learn more and as conditions change.

Assessing the result in the ideation phase of your project is a quick way to help you articulate and improve what you are trying to accomplish. It gives you an easy way to define and share what you're trying to do, and the assumptions and evidence upon which this is based.

If you aren`t ready to construct your results agenda, go ahead and study more ideas on how to create an impact or bridge the gap, here.

There are 3 ingredients that make up a social world - people, things and organisations (Kimbell, 2012). To understand people in a public space, (often referred to as a residents, neighbourhood, participants, workers, etc.) we need to emphatize about them, their environment, and the things they use, interact with or extends them.

The Empathy process involves observing, engaging with and listening to a resident or group of people within the neighbourhood as they live their everyday life. Observing and engaging with people gives you a better understanding of their experiences and motivations, as well putting one`s self in the physical environment can reveal aspects that will help you create a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.

The Experience Journey allows you to see your project through the eyes and experiences of the people who be using it or benefitting from it. It comes with several points of a journey starting from the person`s awareness of the place up until the potential contact with your work.

Identifying routes that are connected to your work, and identifying potential interaction from people will help you reflect on how you will engage with these people and take your work further.

Drawing personas or people shadowing inspires you to understand people's behaviour and motivations that guide you to reach the core of how your work can have an impact on the community.

There are several angles you might want to consider when drawing personas. You might want to observe the public indirectly by spontaneously asking them about their everyday experiences and opinions. Another way is to explicitly collect data from conversations with people.

Once you have thought about the result you are looking for, you might want to study how your work will impact your neighbourhood. Stand next to your target space, depending on what is socially acceptable within a specific situation or culture, you might want to ask permission to conduct an on-the-spot interview with passers-by or a group of people. It is also a good idea to observe people from a distance which will allow them to maintain their natural flow as they go about their everyday life.

The best way to get to know your neighbourhood is to start a conversation with them. Reaching out to them in a face-to-face conversation will give them an opportunity to express their concerns and experiences on the project idea you have in mind.

Speaking with a neighbourhood about their everyday lives can give you a clear idea of the their challenges on a particular issue. It will direct you to understand how your participants can affect the environment and the project that you want to work on. Interviews can justify how and why your project proposal can contribute to the community.

Our dependence on material things in our daily lives is an unquestionable proof of our intimate entanglement with them. We co-exist with natural objects (e.g. trees, stones, or hills), man-made creations (e.g. buildings, streets, or pavements), and digital productions (new technology, mixed reality, wearable technology, or surveillance system).

Greater reflection shows us that these material objects also act consequentially on us, and even transform us in their own image. In recent years, diverse academic disciplines across the humanities and social sciences (such as anthropology, archeology, philosophy, literary criticism, and art history and theory, among others) have begun to reverse this taken for granted view by inquiring into how, in the words of anthropologist Daniel Miller, "the things that people make, make people."

In designing a project or program with creative place-making in mind, we think it is important to learn how material things make people. So, what exactly is the relationship of the people, the neighbourhood, with the digital and material things which are all part of the space you wish to transform?

Depending on your lens, you may see organizations as:

- Clearly defined structures with agreed responsibilities, roles, rules and procedures that supports your project
- Collections of people and things that hang together through interactions, where the boundaries between organisations are fluid and dynamic
- An organization can be an internal or external entity that may or may not have a direct impact on your project.

Identify the organizations involved in your project. After having done so, include them as one of those entities that contribute and impact changes in your project.

We recommend you to take the Drivers of Change activity within your team, this will help you create a shared understanding of the entities and the issues that can shape the future context for your project. If co-created in a group, the drivers of change matrix helps a team see things from different perspectives and can support critical discussion and creativity. It can also highlight important areas of consensus and disagreement.

Creating a storyworld or persona helps a team focus on the people who are part of a service in all their diversity. The process of creating and using storyworlds also encourages the kind of creative thinking needed to generate new ideas for your service.

Using this method we can begin to develop an understanding of a person as connected to lots of other people, organisations and things rather than as an independent actor without a backstory. The method produces a boundary object which can help bring a team together and be referred back to. A successful storyworld will be discussed as if it was a real person and used to test ideas out by asking a question: "would they collaborate in our team?".

The alternative to the storyworld is a storyboard. Storyboard is use to gain a sense of what is involved in your project from beginning to end. The method provides a way of focusing on the user's experience by developing a human narrative. It also helps participants to understand the gaps and overlaps which might exist between different providers.

Storyboard helps a team focus on the persons experience of your work, rather than seeing it through the lens of a single specialism or organisational function. Storyboard will enable a project that can easily be visualised and understood involving a storytelling component on a human scale rather than on a technical level.

"Role playing is the practice of group physical and spatial pretend where individuals deliberately assume a character role in a constructed scene with, or without, props. The key differentiating aspects of role playing are: 1) Being 'in the moment' - an individual and group state that enables vivid and focused exploration of the situations and 2) Physicalization - using the entire body to explore generation of ideas that takes "brainstorming" to "bodystorming."" Simsarian, K. T. (2003)

Many artist and creatives might wonder how important collaboration really are. Why would a visual artist, sound designer, composer or painter be interested to collaborate with others when they are able to do work effectively alone? Why would sharing ideas, compromising to incorporate someone else`s style of work and thinking, and feeling obligated to give up ideas better than celebrating success independently?

While many information and training courses are available through the Internet that enables hobbyists and folks of all ages to learn autonomously and produce outstanding results independently, no one is meant to be alone. As much time we spend developing our work, imagine the benefits if someone else already has the answers to some of our greatest challenges.

So if we want to be more motivated and inspired in our work and generate new ideas and challenges, then collaborating with other creative people can help us see our work in a different perspective.

I have been collaborating for various creative projects and research these past few years aside from producing my own artistic work. By pairing myself with another creative or technologist, there`s definitely an experience of exponential growth by developing on my organizational skills, techniques, and leads to discovery of new ideas.

Let's take a look and learn from some of my collaborations below.

Hackheim`s Tunnel Lights

I presented this project because it is a good example of a collaboration in larger group. The collaboration starts from a very open project description which is to build interactivity at Adressaparken`s tunnel through lights, sounds or projection. The flexibility and openness of the collaborative project call allowed an open dialogue to take place and as a result tapped into everyone`s creativity.

Prototyping is something we all do in our daily lives when we try out new things - from trying out new recipes while cooking to trying out different routes while going somewhere - it simply involves trying out an idea to see how it can be improved. At work however, prototyping is more than just 'trying out'; it is a structured way to check that you have an efficient and fitting solution or approach before rolling it out or making a big investment in it.

Improvement Triggers provides a collection of questions which can be used to help you look at your work a bit differently. Inspired by the tool 'SCAMPER' (Eberle B. 1997), these questions are designed to provoke you into new ways of thinking, and are structured in a way that lets you approach either your existing offering or a potential new solution from a number of directions. This is a great way to make your work stronger, especially in areas where lots of competing solutions are already available. The questions in this tool assume that anything new is a modification of something that already exists. This might not always be strictly true, but approaching your work from this perspective can very be useful when you're trying to articulate how what you're doing is different from anyone else (or how it builds on what's gone before).

We'll look at some of the best crowdsourcing platforms on the web, along with successful campaigns funded on each one. These tools are not your million dollar solution — just because you set up your project doesn't mean donations will automatically pour in to you. You need to mobilize your friends, family and constituents, and engage with niche communities online if you want to succeed.

1. Crowdrise and GoFundMe
What: Fundraising
Why: Effective and easy to use
How: Use it if you are a non-profit or individual supporting a non-profit

Both platforms accomodate project-based, time-restricted fundraising for a charity or personal cause. GoFundMe for instance has categories for just about any cause you can think of, and an 'other' category in case your cause is really out of the box. As with most fundraising platforms, there is a fee, so find which option works best for you or your organizations.

For non-profit, you might want to check out Causes, they have a fluid Facebook integration which makes them popular these days.

2. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo
What: Fundraising for projects
Why: Builds community and provides a reward structure
How: Use it for any creative project

Both platforms are project-based fundraising sites, but they differ slightly. Kickstarter is for funding projects from the creative fields, from photography and film to publishing and technology. This is not the place to fundraise for a non-profit or cause.

What the neighbourhood feel, think and do in a public space is one of the most important information to learn before any start of a project. In synapses expansion a short survey from people helped us predict how participants will react and what they will expect when an interactive installation is placed at the park. We started with a survey by asking residents and visitors in the neighbourhood on what they think, feel or do in a particular scenario that relates to a public park. We used these gathered information as an input to our storyboard.

To ensure the safety of the public, to avoid traffic flow disruptions and to prevent privacy violations, it was important for the team to know the directives or practices followed in the use of Adressaparken.

Directives list shows some of Addressaparken's regulations that were presented to the team by Adressaparken`s stakeholder. We took some photo and or drew a sketch of the exact location of the regulations or directives imposed or suggested in the use of the space.