By Dale Leorke

In mid-2024, the future play lab at RMIT piloted a workshop, called ‘Urban Commons’, to test out how we might co-design public spaces that reflect experiences of place with young LGBTIQA+ and First Nations people. Not everyone has equal access to public space, and many people, particularly those from minority groups, can feel excluded from, or ostracised in, public places that others might simply take for granted. Urban play can connect people through shared goals or friendly competition. But it can also be used to rethink and repurpose everyday objects, places and situations in the city, and to challenge or even transgress social and physical boundaries.

With this in mind, we sought to use creative and playful methods to explore how both young queer and First Nations people might reimagine and redesign urban spaces to reflect and accommodate their own distinctive experiences, needs and desires. These workshops were funded by a 2023-24 VicHealth JumpStart! grant, which helps to pilot projects that support young people’s health and wellbeing through arts, cultural and play-based activities.

In our original proposal, we planned to run a series of workshops inside the future play lab’s “playful parklet”, which has already travelled across Naarm/Melbourne hosting a series of interactive art installations, exhibitions, musical performances and augmented reality and tabletop games, as well as “urban play school” co-design workshops with RMIT students. These events have generally been open to the public and attempted to engage any passers-by. But we wanted to reimagine the parklet through queer and First Nations lenses by asking members of each of these communities to co-design content and programming for it. Ideally, a community organisation that supports young people from these communities would “host” the parklet outside one of their spaces and invite their members to participate.

After we received the funding we approached community organisations to co-run the workshops. However, it became clear that these organisations were hesitant about this idea because, reflecting its origins in DIY and temporary and tactical urbanism, the parklet is highly visible and disruptive when located in new spaces. While our playful parklet has received negative feedback from a handful of residents in the past, this has mostly been frustration over the temporary loss of two car parking spaces that the parklet occupies. But in this case, community groups were concerned that the parklet might attract unwanted or negative attention from hate groups and that their members may not feel safe inside it. This prompted us to rethink the workshops so that they were designed to be more safe and inclusive for members of these communities.

Rather than taking place inside a parklet, the workshops would be hosted in and around a community space. One workshop would focus on First Nations youth and involve walking on Country with Professor N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs, Boon Wurrung Senior Elder. It would be followed by a discussion about how participants might use play to disrupt the Western, colonial design of urban space and reconnect with traditional ways of knowing and being in place. The second workshop by LGBTIQA+ community leader Professor Katherine Johnson would ask queer youth to use LEGO to design a small public space, modelled on the parklet, that they would feel comfortable and safe to play and connect in.

JumpStart! aims to support projects that test out ideas and implement them quickly, but with these delays and changes to the project we were over schedule and only had a short time left to organise, advertise and run the workshops. The first two workshops were held on the same day at Footscray Community Arts Centre and although we had 14 registrations…nobody showed up.

This was the result of a number of factors – not least the extremely wet and cold weather that day, but also especially a lack of time and capacity to build relationships with community organisations to help recruit participants from the particular groups we wanted to work with. The organisers discussed how the next two workshops – due to be held the following weekend – might be rethought to better attract participants. We combined them into one, shorter workshop, led jointly by Prof N’arwee’t Briggs and Prof Johnson, involving a short walk followed by a LEGO workshop and discussion, which would be open to anyone to participate. Rather than a structured program, we would simply ask participants to try out our methods and give us feedback on how we might better design the workshops in future.

The second workshop was held at Abbotsford Convent, a former convent redeveloped as an arts and cultural precinct. This time we had 10 registrations and 5 participants – although all were acquaintances or colleagues of the organisers – and better weather. We began with a walk around the Convent gardens with Prof N’arwee’t Briggs reflecting on its highly linear, controlled and commercialised design, despite its close proximity to the Birrarung (Yarra River), which had once been plentiful with birds, eels and fish. We then gathered in a meeting room full of LEGO and asked our participants to design a place that had meaning to them, inspired by their imaginations and our walk.

Our participants came up with an eclectic mix of spaces, ranging from deeply personal to more conceptual and allegorical. One (25, male, gay, Indonesian) designed a peaceful resting place for his pet cat, who had died when he was living in Indonesia and never received a proper burial. Another (29, male, queer, Indonesian) created the interior of an alien spaceship with himself at the control station, which he had “mastered” and which offered him a place where he felt “in control”. The spaceship, he explained, also had a cloaking ability so it could land in places without being seen – reflecting, perhaps, some of the tensions over “visibility” in public space that our project had grappled with.

Two brothers of mixed Vietnamese and Māori descent, meanwhile, designed more conceptual and narrative-based structures. One (17) had crafted an elaborate Mad Max-inspired arena with a figure climbing to the top of a tall spiral that resembled an art sculpture he had seen online. The figure, he explained, was unaware that when they reached its peak someone else would spring a trap, launching a giant ball from a sling to bring the entire structure down, making their efforts futile.

His brother (13) created a smaller-scale installation depicting a helmeted figure, shovel raised threateningly, interrogating another figure handcuffed to a tree about the location of a hidden treasure. Yet the interrogator, our participant explained, was unaware that the treasure chest was located directly underneath them because he was too busy using violence and coercion to seek it out, rather than simply looking at the environment around him. Discussions with the boys and their father revealed that these installations were partly influenced by N’arwee’t’s comments about the history of the place we were in, and could potentially be read as allegories for capitalism and colonialism, respectively.

At the end of the workshop these LEGO sites were reassembled on one table to explore how they might come together as a neighbourhood. They joined various other sites that future play lab members had created, including more Mad Max-inspired hovercraft, a bridge with figures pursued by a Friday the 13th-esque chainsaw-wielding figure, a silent disco accommodating body-diverse revellers, the ruins of an attempted explorable space, and a replica of our playful parklet.

On its way to being carried over, the replica parklet was accidentally dropped and broke in half. When it was restored and placed amidst the other spaces, its semi-enclosed, angular design looked at odds with the more open and porous spaces that participants had created. Perhaps these were both omens that the more contained, “hard” infrastructure of parklets needed to give way to more permeable and community-embedded “soft” infrastructure that embraces freedom and malleability of identity and expression, as well as movement. 

• 

• 

• 

Dale Leorke is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and a member of the Urban Play Network.

Over the past month, an experiment in shared world creation through an immersive role-playing game set on the streets of Naarm/Melbourne in 2050 has played out over a series of three events at MPavilion in Melbourne. Reworlding: Play The World We Want is a speculative and relational form of world-building focused on evolution over revolution, and nurturing and developing existing patterns in culture, the environment, and society.

The game itself is an OSR (Old School Revival) TTRPG (TableTop Role-Playing Game) created by Troy Innocent in the RMIT future play lab. Development of the rules and setting are continuing following the three MPavilion events, but the introduction starts with the following:

Hello, welcome.

This is Narrm, also known as Melbourne, in 2050.

The City is run by AI. That’s what we’ve been told.

For you, a megacitizen living through increasing uncertainty in The City, there are three things that matter: HOPE, COMMUNITY, and SYMBIOSIS.

The game is played out through a reworlding system using roleplay, props, places and provocations. As promised to the players, here is how the final scenario played out… by the end everyone pictured below was part of Melbourne in 2050. Thanks to Aramiha Harwood for writing up this account, and to all the generous participants who played well together.

Part III.

Played on March 14, 2024

Events take place on January 3, 2050

The Cast

Virgon Accord – Metabuilder – Penelope

Maisy Ware – Metabuilder – Nic

Dusty Crispr – Posthuman Nomad – Ben

Kiian Bernard – Traceur + their trusty robot dog ‘Donkey Teeth’ – Kel

Quiznatodd ‘Quiz’ Bidness – Activist – Ara

The Reworlder – Troy

Rave music pumps in the air as the crowd heaves in time with the music. In the middle of the crowd appear Dusty and Quiz, both of them slightly disoriented by the light and noise. How long have they been dancing? Who knows?

They bump into Kiian and Donkey Teeth, who is also dancing in the crowd. They give each other a welcoming hug and they begin to socialise with others around them. They are drawn to an intense conversation between two metabuilders, Virgon and Maisy.

Virgon believes that the world needs to be perfected as data-driven built environment. If things can be controlled and masterminded, then humanity and the environment can exist in perfect harmony. What is already there, needs to be improved upon. She is strong in hope for the future and humanity, but has little time for misplaced belief in symbiosis with the natural world.

Maisy is also strong in the belief that humanity and the world can exist in harmony, but she feels that it would be better done through reciprocal and symbiotic with nature. Respectful and fluid adaptivity to the environment, rather than selfish extraction, is the only way forward.

While the trio listen to the metabuilders, they notice someone else is listening. This person introduces themselves as Vermillion – a government worker. Quiz tenses at the mention of ‘the gubment’ but fears are allayed when she says that she is a local government worker. She says she is interested in the discussion of building a better future for humanity, in fact she could help with a policy plan to make this happen. Virgon immediately regales Vermillion with her visions of this better future, and Vermillion is immediately taken with these ideas – she’ll help Virgon!

Suddenly the rave music drops a beat, and Sesame Street’s ‘People in Your Neighborhood’ starts pumping out of the speakers. Everyone knows that this means that security is on their way, so the crowd break up and start running in all directions at once.

The group – Virgon, Maisy, Dusty, Kiian, Donkey Teeth , Vermillion and Quiz – run away into the dawn, avoiding the impending security-crackdown.  They are joined by a quiet fellow, Dion, who – while running – has little to say to anyone. It seems he would rather remain quiet and inconspicuous, perhaps a wise choice given the state of Melbourne and its AI.

Making good on their escape, the group pause to catch their breaths and make plans. Virgon would like to check out the Monolith which still looms above the local cityscape. She has been told about the sushi restaurant in it, and she is dying to eat some meat – perhaps beef, if they have it? No-one has the heart to tell her that the sushi restaurant only serves soylent green as a meat substitute…

Maisy wonders if there is any coffee available around them, but there is nothing about.

What to do next? The group decide that they’ll check out the Data Centre somewhere to the west – which also happens to be towards the detention centres and the raging bush fire. They slowly walk along the empty streets of Western Melbourne, the smoky haze getting worse, when they spy a lone figure walking towards them.

The figure turns out to be wearing some sort of uniform, which the group cannot identify. Approached by the group, the figure greets them all. It turns out that she is a security guard for a detention centre – she takes care of the AI security which controls the drones. The group is intrigued, wondering if they could get control of the drones. The guard says she could definitely provide five drones to the group for their use, but she also says that her current ‘mission’ is to bring criminals and hackers to the detention centre. She would need to bring someone into the detention centre as a prisoner, before she gives up control of the drones. The group deliberate amongst themselves. Maisy suggests that Kiian could go into detention, and the group could rescue her in a day or two, with Donkey Teeth’s help.

Kiian agrees to this plan and is handcuffed by the guard and taken away to the detention centre. She is processed and locked away in a cell. The guard immediately receives a promotion at the detention centre – she is now a Chief of Guards (COG). She hacks into the security AI and sends 5 drones to Virgon, who takes control of them. Talking remotely through the drones’ speakers, the new COG thanks the group for their help – if there’s anything else they need in the future, just ask her.

The group are unsure what to do next. They could wait to rescue Kiian, but it’s only a matter of time before government forces repair power to Melbourne’s AI and things return to normal – do they have very long?

Suddenly, from out of thin air, appears a person. This takes the group aback for a moment, but they cautiously greet this person. Of an Asian background, the person introduces themselves as Christi. She is a police officer.

Quiz freaks out. “RUN” he shouts, leaping to jump on Christi. She quickly clarifies that she is a RETIRED police officer, which stops Quiz in his tracks.

Christi was a police officer in China who just retired, and was looking for a place to retire. The group didn’t think to ask how Christi suddenly travelled from mainland China to Melbourne. They continue to discuss whether or not to rescue Kiian, and how they could do it. Christi suddenly tells everyone “I have this teleporter that can take me from any place to another. I call it… a magic door.” He pulls out a small device from his pocket. He will help the group, if they can help him find the perfect place to retire.

Virgon pitches the ideas of her megabuild – of a perfect planned mini-city, here on the outskirts of Megacity Melbourne – to Christi. There would be wide shaded streets and lovely shopping centres, and gleaming office-buildings for citizens to work in. The perfect place to retire!

Carlo likes this idea and agrees to teleport into the detention centre (with coordinates from Donkey Teeth), pickup Kiian, and teleport back out – with the proviso that he will have a home in this city of Virgon’s.  A simple and elegant solution, and the group congratulates one another when this is done with little fuss.

Virgon would like to celebrate with a coffee, but – here on the outskirts of Mega-Melbourne – there is not a coffee to be found!

Their ideas percolating, Virgon and Vermillion are keen to build this new city, but how will it be done? As if summoned by Virgon and Vermillion a crowd of at least 100 people march down the main street on which the group stand. They are all fired up, shouting slogans and carrying XR banners.

Christi chooses this time to inform the group that he also happens to be carrying a gun – which only unsettles everyone even more.

Leading the marching group is Christian, who stops to talk to the group. She tells them that she and her community group want to claim this street. It is an important part of their community and they want to prevent the outside world from developing on it. Virgon explains her plans for a new community, and Christian thinks this sounds promising. She agrees to help Virgon, if it will help preserve this main street.

The group stop their marching and begin helping Virgon to plan out this new megabuild. People quickly mark out spaces for development, and Virgon uses the Drones to rapidly start 3-D printing the buildings. All of this activity draws out other locals. Rani approaches the group and offers to serve them chai. The group agree that, without any coffee so far, chai is just as good for caffeine. As she serves the chai, Rani lets the group know that she works with a group of activists known as the Friends of the Forest. She says that her group started the bushfires towards Geelong, but they are controlled bushfires. Controlled burns are an indigenous practice, to help regenerate the environment and renew growth.

A restaurateur also approaches the group. He is trying to establish a business in the area, and this megabuild of Virgon’s offers the perfect opportunity to do so. He offers food to the builders and the group, to help sustain them as they continue their building. Quiz asks, in vain hope, if the restaurateur has any coffee he could share, but he says that he is saving it for when he opens the business.

The roar of a truck alerts the builders of an approaching vehicle. Down the road it roars, emblazoned with the letters ‘SES’ on the sides of it. Out leaps an SES emergency worker, asking for help. Her name is Sarah, and she needs some people to come and aid her in removing some collapsed trees. She reckons that these are the last of the trees blocking government agencies from re-establishing power and connection with the AI data centre. Once these trees are removed, Mega-Melbourne will soon return to normal.

Rani says that the trees should be left to burn as they are, or else nature’s balance will be disrupted. Christian and the restaurateur feel that, if the all-powerful AI was to be restored, the street and the megabuild should absolutely be protected from the AI’s control and oversight. How could this be done, though?

Vermillion suggests contacting the COG security guard. The security guard had told the group that she was an accomplished hacker – perhaps she could hack the AI when it restarts and keep this megabuild out of the AI’s sights? When they manage to get the security guard on the radio, she assures the group that she can definitely do what they ask.

As if to back up this plan of the group’s, Sarah also lets everyone know that she knows where Claire and Mushen can be found. i.e they are underground, hacking into the AI to ensure that it remains down. If they help her restore power, she will let the group know where Claire and Mu-Shen are.

Reassured of all this, Kiian and Donkey Teeth – with Carlo and Dusty’s help – teleport to the Trees and they help to remove the trees. It is only a matter of time until the AI system is restored. What should the group do? Continue with the megabuild with this new community of people? Or find Claire and Mushen, and bring down the data centre that houses the AI?

Virgon is happy with the megabuild, and wishes for it to proceed – a happy, perfect, shiny urban system. A property developer approaches everyone and throws her support behind Virgon, suggesting she could find more people to come live there.

Quiz is not happy, he thinks that the system needs to come down for good. Rani argues that man’s relationship with nature needs to be returned to balance.

Maisy stands up and addresses the community – she argues that humans can no longer see themselves as the sole arbiter of all that happens in the environment. As people, we have a chance to build something anew in Melbourne – renew it, as it grows out of the ashes of the former AI-controlled Megacity. Much like new bush will grow from the burnt remnants of the old. Open spaces, living with the bush and the environment – respectful of it.

It is left to the community to decide. Everyone meets to discuss, and negotiate with one another. Secret Deals are struck, agreements for the future are made.

In the end, it isn’t even close. The community go with Virgon’s plans. Why? It is the will of the community, and that is enough.

The AI is restored, the system begins anew. The COG hacks into the system and protects Virgon’s mini/mega build from the AI’s sensors – it will grow on its own, independently.

Quiz shakes his head. They had the chance to bring down the all-encompassing AI system and free Melbourne’s citizens, and they’d let it slip through their fingers. He’d run out of hope, now.

He approaches Christi and asks the retired policeman to ‘magic door’ him somewhere  else in this World.

“Sure” says Christi, pulling the teleporter out of his pocket  “Where would you like to go?”

“I dunno” sighs Quiz “Somewhere that at least has Coffee.”

By Dale Leorke and Aramiha Harwood

The Future Play Lab’s annual Play About Place Symposium returned for its fifth iteration, this year held at RMIT’s Melbourne CBD campus and coinciding with Melbourne International Games Week in October 2023. Its theme was the “playable campus”, with talks, workshops and playable installations exploring how creative placemaking and experimental game design in public spaces can make university campuses more inclusive and resilient.

The symposium opened with a keynote by Dale Leorke and Danielle Wyatt, who discussed how examples of “playable libraries” from their book The Library as Playground might translate to the playable campus, followed by a Q&A with Lab director Troy Innocent. The symposium then involved two hands-on workshops where participants were invited to reimagine and rebuild RMIT’s Bowen Street as a space for play, interaction and reconnection with nature, Country and place using LEGO. Both workshops had about 18 participants, most of whom were women or non-binary.

Alongside the symposium, five playable installations created by students in the Lab also ran across the RMIT campus, putting these ideas into practice.

Playable Campus as a Living Lab

The first workshop was co-facilitated by Innocent and Lynda Roberts, Senior Advisor in Creative Communities at RMIT, along with Leorke, Wyatt and Prof Lisa Given, Director of RMIT’s Social Change Enabling Impact Platform and Professor of Information Sciences. In this workshop participants were invited to recreate Bowen Street – an internal street that runs through the heart of RMIT’s city campus and serves as a corridor between two busy roads at each end – based on how they think it should look in one year’s time.

Several rectangular tables were joined together with LEGO baseplates at their centre to provide the “canvas” on which participants would recreate Bowen Street. Participants tended to stay at one section of the table and contribute various LEGO pieces to build up the campus’s infrastructure, buildings, outdoor furniture, public spaces, and – of course – people. Others focused on curating their own “mini-sections” of the campus, some of which included a graveyard populated with skeletons “for the ‘under’ community to meet and discourse”; two “daredevil stations” connected by a tightrope, a drone-racing course and climbable animal bridge with rewards at their end; a rave site for “nighttime activation”; a Holocaust memorial “for reflection but also private alienation if you want get away from the fun of Bowen Street”; and a shark-infested reimagining of nearby Melbourne City Baths.

• 

• 

• 

Although, as Innocent sarcastically acknowledged, “not all of this will be possible” to create by next year, it did prompt a rethinking of RMIT’s campus around “thresholds” of entry and how these thresholds might invite its surrounding community in: “Why would someone from outside the university come if they’re not a student? For knowledge, to learn something, or discover something, or experience something.” The discussion that followed focused on how universities might encourage this discovery through playable installations. As game designer Hailey Cooperider put it, “you’re changing people’s default relationship [with Bowen Street] from ‘thoroughfare’ to something to dwell or engage with. And the great thing about play spaces is that they can create that moment of liquidity in people that allows them to shift their relationship.”

For Roberts, these issues spoke to “the future of the university” itself: “on one level, they’ve become more like businesses and there’s often a paywall to knowledge” but at the same time RMIT city campus is “a very public porous space and that makes me think about how you make RMIT’s knowledge equally public. How do you invert the university in this space through the dwelling points, as points of invitation and exchange?” This might happen, one participant suggested, through “easter eggs embedded in the environment itself, like geocaches or QR codes that spark curiosity.” Another noted that universities “tell stories already” and “we can use that wisely” by making people “aware that the university also holds an interest to people that use imaginations.”

Regenerating Place through Indigenous Ways of Being

The second workshop was led by N’arweet Prof Carolyn Briggs AM, Boon Wurrung Senior Elder and Elder in Research at RMIT. She was joined by facilitators Dr Christine Phillips, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and steering group leader of RMIT’s Architecture and Urban Design Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Engagement Committee; and Dr Aramiha Harwood, postdoctoral researcher in the Future Play Lab.

This workshop again asked participants to recreate Bowen Street, although this time based around the campus’s natural landscape and geography before European colonisation – where a waterway once flowed through its centre – while responding to the campus’s present relationship with its surroundings. Innocent suggested that the opening of a new railway station in Carlton, to the north of Bowen Street, could redefine how the northern buildings of the RMIT city campus connect with the main campus. At the south end of campus, meanwhile, there could be stronger connection with the hustle and bustle of Melbourne Central and the State Library, linking them via RMIT to the shops, cafes and museums of Carlton in the north.

In contrast to the wildly fantastical designs the previous workshop produced, this workshop was somewhat more measured and grounded. One participant requested that a Google Maps satellite view of Bowen Street be shown on the screen, and participants then assembled the LEGO baseplates to replicate existing buildings, open spaces and parks – although with Bowen Street reimagined as a river. Instead of people, the campus was predominantly populated with native plants and more-than-human creatures which had largely been driven out by urbanisation, such as turtles, bats, spiders and insects. An outdoor stargazing zone was set up with beds for people to lie down on and observe the night sky, while a separate community space was established for human gathering and sociality.

• 

• 

In this way, Place or Country could be a pedagogical tool – working as a mnemonic device to help learners remember important advice and/or knowledge from teachers. Perhaps the design of this northern precinct could incorporate these facets of Indigenous ways of being and knowing? Reflecting this, participants created an Indigenous community garden – which could teach knowledge of medicines, herbs and foods – aligned with cosmological and seasonal designs of the garden itself, in one of the enclosed spaces around Building 57. 

The workshop ended with a yarning circle in which N’arweet provided some quiet advice and knowledge of her own experiences around this area of town. At times, when she has needed to be in Carlton, she has felt that the city and the urban landscape – the streets and the built infrastructure – have blocked her travels from the CBD: “my problem was I couldn’t get through. I was trying to constantly weave through a system that blocked my way.” She also felt that the redbrick, working-class exteriors of the RMIT City campus buildings best reflected its working-class origins in the former Working Men’s College, as well as acknowledging the locally accessed clay and materials to make those redbricks.

N’arweet suggested that we take a photo of the final LEGO-made precinct from above, looking down. She said we were making a Map of Country, in our minds and in our imaginations, and it could look like much Aboriginal art that we see in our galleries. This brought home to all of the workshop participants that we were engaged in a Creative project that – while looking into the Future – we honour our Indigenous past. What we are bringing about, through Creative Play, are new ways of imagining and interpreting Place  – with the help of Creative Indigenous Knowledges and Practices. N’arweet concluded, “we just got to unlock all that ancient knowledge in all of us. I think that’s one of the things we’ve forgotten to do. We are entities that are made up of so many different influences, but we exist.”

Dale Leorke is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and a member of the Urban Play Network. Aramiha Harwood is a postdoctoral researcher at RMIT on the Future Play Lab’s Play About Place research project.

During Melbourne International Games Week in October 2023, the Future Play Lab partnered with RMIT Creative and RMIT Culture to create a “playable campus”. Students in the Lab’s “Urban Play School” program designed five different street games or installations that invited passers-by to play with Bowen Street – which runs through the middle of RMIT’s city campus – and with one another in unique and creative ways.

The five games were all made from simple, recyclable material like cardboard and paper tape and used accessible rules or low-tech devices blended with thoughtful game design to transform the street into a playground. They were originally designed for outdoors, but when it rained one day the games were temporarily moved indoors. As the Lab’s director Troy Innocent noted, though, this turned out to be fortuitous since it allowed for “playtesting under different conditions.”

Symphony With

Symphony With by Gin Ling and Nicholas Leong is a playable music sculpture or “sensory toy” evocative of playground equipment. It invites participants to interact with various buttons and tubes on the sculpture to produce different electronic sounds, encouraging collaboration between both friends and strangers to generate a serendipitous symphony in public. It was designed around the concept of music as a “universal language”, using gestures and movement – rather than words – to connect people. Symphony With attracted over 200 participants in total, including about an equal amount indoors and outdoors, and its creators reported many strangers spontenously connecting with each other through the installation.

Stacker

Stacker by Khatim Javed Dar tasks players with stacking colourful cardboard boxes on top of one another against a wall. Players have a set time limit and must act under a series of randomly generated rules, such as using only one’s elbows or head to move the boxes. The game incorporates a scoring feature with markings on the wall that are playfully based on RMIT assessment criteria, with “High Distinction” as the highest score. As a cooperative game, people could work together to stack the boxes, and Dar reported this often happening among strangers, with one person even lifting a complete stranger up so they could stack the final box. At one point, two games ran simultaneously with different groups competing with one another to stack the fastest.

Collectors

Collectors by Lester Dvinagracia Asperga is based on the Filipino street game Patintero. It is a competitive game composed of two teams: defenders, who stand within a demarcated field and must protect stationary tokens; and runners, who try to take the tokens. If a defender touches a runner as they reach for the tokens, that runner is eliminated. The six different tokens each feature an icon representing a different “way of wellbeing”, including “grounded”, “balance”, “active”, connection”, “curiosity”, and “thoughtful”. For Asperga, the fields in the game symbolise the different university semesters during the university experience and the runner has the opportunity to collect these values, either deliberately or unconsciously, through their journey at university. Defenders, meanwhile, must protect those values, and they wear a bib bearing the word, “ikaw” a Tagalog term for “you”, signifying that sometimes what hinders us from attaining these values is ourselves.

Find Me Here

Find Me Here by Elizabeth Amanda is strongly story-driven, based around three stages: “connection”, “reflection” and “gratitude”. It gathers participants into groups and asks them to search their surroundings to locate one of several hidden boxes. In these boxes are various concepts, which participants choose from and assign to another person in the group. Participants are then asked to gather at a table and write down their reflections on a post-it note, which is attached to a “gratitude wall” that documents the “journeys” of each group. Amanda reported many people being drawn to the wall and requesting for it to be kept permanently. The experience was often deeply intimate and tended to work better indoors as post-it-notes were less prone to being blown about by wind.

Yomeci Orchestra

Lastly, Yomeci Orchestra by Uyen Nguyen – based on her previous work with the Future Play Lab as part of the Yomeci Play collective – uses colourful tape markers and musical instruments to create a spontaneous public musical performance. One or more people are tasked with navigating the tape markings by jumping, hopping, stepping or skipping across them, while other participants use various musical instruments to generate an impromptu orchestra based on their movement. Like previous Yomeci iterations, Yomeci Orchestra ingeniously creates the illusion of generative sound through serendipitous collaboration. When the installation moved indoors it attracted fewer people and ended up having to compete with a nearby DJ stationed in front of RMIT’s esports gaming room.

The five installations only ran temporarily over several days during Games Week, but there are plans to make some or all them more permanent features of the RMIT campus. While each of the installations could potentially be developed as “stand-alone” spaces that are left for students and visitors to discover and play with themselves, they also benefit strongly from facilitators – and it is often encounters and conversations with the creators that make them such unique, personal and playful experiences.

Dale Leorke is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and a member of the Urban Play Network. All photos supplied by RMIT Creative or the artists.

Future Play Lab researchers Dale Leorke, Troy Innocent and Carlo Tolentino have published a report documenting the Clarendon Street Arcade project, which launched in South Melbourne in July 2022. Five custom-made arcade cabinets loaded with original games that were created in collaboration with local artists, gamemakers, students and First Nations People formed a “trail” along Clarendon Street, remaining outdoors and on the street 24/7 until the end of October 2022.

This report documents the background, design process, installation and deinstallation of the cabinets. It provides an in-depth account of this unique placemaking project and situates it within a broader recognition by local governments of the potential benefits urban play can bring to public life. The full report is available here.

Over two days in October 2022, the Future Play Lab collaborated with Danish play activist and academic Mathias Poulsen to convert an existing, empty parklet in St Kilda, Melbourne into a pop-up skrammellegeplads or junk playground.

Originally, the plan was to bring RMIT’s playful parklet, which has travelled across Melbourne’s inner suburbs over the past year, to St Kilda. But when a nearby café expressed concern about the impact on its business, the Lab instead hired an existing parklet in front of Pause Bar that was not being used for the weekend. We then invited Poulsen to transform the parklet into a space for play, leisure and public consultation about the playful potential of parklets. This fused our interest in temporary and tactical urbanism with Poulsen’s method of designing and studying junk playgrounds as part of his PhD research at Denmark’s Design School Kolding. 

For Poulsen the junk playground, or “skrammellegeplads” as it was conceived by the Danish architect C. Th. Sørensen in 1931, can be understood as an agora, a public space for playfully engaging with democratic questions. What if participation in the ongoing democratic conversations are not merely verbal, he asks, but also unfolds through playful encounters, where we build things out of discarded materials to tell stories and share our hopes and dreams with each other?

The morning began with the arrival of a truckload of junk and discarded items that Poulsen and Future Play Lab Director Troy Innocent had gathered leading up to the event: plastic and wooden crates, furniture, cloth, street signs and construction markers, wooden panels, broken sculptures, household items and a miscellany of other unidentifiable objects. Innocent also brought drills, a jigsaw and other power tools that had previously come in handy when assembling the Lab’s Clarendon Street Arcade cabinets.

Working with researchers and students from the Lab, as well as other visitors and members of the public, the team gradually constructed spaces for sitting, drawing and playing games. One table became a designated gaming area, while several wooden crates were stacked and nailed together to create a dance platform. Innocent and Poulsen also created a “reception desk” to greet passers-by, inviting them to fill out a piece of paper with a sketch of a parklet design on it to create their ideal public, playful parklet.

One challenge was that the amount of junk was too large for the parklet space, which was smaller and more confined than the Lab’s existing playful parklet. Poulsen also typically works with larger, more open spaces when running skrammellegepladsen workshops, so the parklet’s size – equivalent to a car parking space – meant there was not much room to move initially. As the day progressed, though, the team rearranged the junk into usable spaces, demonstrating that a skrammellegeplads was still possible even in such a small sliver of space.

The project also aimed to illustrate how street spaces currently dedicated for cars can quickly and easily become public spaces for community gathering, experimentation and play. The project had approval by the local council, City of Port Phillip, but the team were free to use the space for any (legal) purpose. Day 1 was dedicated to engaging with residents and preparing the parklet to become a party space for the evening.

Engagement from the public was minimal, however. The parklet was situated in front of a bar, pharmacy and organic food store close to Balaclava train station. Being in this commercial and transport hub, with only a narrow footpath between the storefronts and the parklet, most passers-by were busily on their way to shops or cafes and largely incurious about this new pop-up space in their neighborhood.

Nonetheless a few passers-by stopped to discuss the parklet and build things for it, including one man in his 50s who described himself as a professional woodworker and helped craft a racket and hoop for a makeshift ballgame; and several people who filled out the playful parklet design sheets. Workers in the nearby Little Hen food store were also friendly and accommodating.

On Day 2 playful parklet regulars Yomeciband and Communitas came to perform in and around the skrammellegepladsen. Yomeciband invites passers-by to step, jump, skip, dance or walk on chalk drawings of colourful Yomeci creatures on the footpath, generating musical sounds that are improvised on a keyboard synth and played through bluetooth speakers. Like the day before, most passers-by were on a mission and simply walked through without playing, but children in particular often stopped to dance and skip along the drawings. Two skeptical teenage boys were also unconvinced by Innocent’s explanation that the sounds were created by nanobot sensors embedded in the chalk drawings, preferring the more obvious explanation that Yomeciband sound designer Fynn Michlin created them on the fly.

Communitas allows passers-by to influence and conduct a musical performance using word cards and hand gestures that instruct singer Tanya George, singer/bassist Dan Witton and drummer Paul Guseli to slow down, speed up, freestyle, or stop altogether. It also attracted only a few dedicated participants, including several people (Michlin among them) who used interpretive dance moves that the band responded to and incorporated into the tempo and style of their performance.

The end of Day 2 saw the skrammellegepladsen dismantled and Pause Bar’s parklet revert back to an empty space. The following weekend, the Lab appropriated another space across the road – a dedicated community parklet implemented and managed by City of Port Phillip – for two more interactive and informative activations.

On Sunday 9th October the Seaweed Appreciation Society International (SASi) brought their portable seaweed library to one end of the parklet – a collection of seaweed-related books and artefacts aimed at raising environmental and artistic awareness of seaweed and marine ecologies. The collection was free to browse and attracted the interest of several passers-by, including a fisherman who described how his fishing has shifted to become increasingly sustainable and who swapped contact details with SASi for potential future collaboration.

At the other end of the parklet artist Dylan Martorell set up his Robotics Ensemble, an assembly of semi-autonomous robots powered by a solar generator that generate music and sound. Passers-by could move the various robotic instruments through a laptop and keyboard interface, or simply use instruments and objects to make sound from the installation and surrounding environment. One man in particular was particularly enthusiastic, experimenting with various instruments in and outside the parklet, and at one stage was joined by two other members of the public in a completely impromptu, collaborative performance.

The Robotics Ensemble was not without controversy, though. Its noise seemed to spark the ire of a few locals, including store owners who gave disapproving glances and a resident who the team suspected might be on her phone making a complaint. In the end no “public order” officials arrived to break up the performance, however.

These two activations represent a new phase of the “playful parklet” project. It is the first time the team have built a DIY “junk” parklet from scratch and it’s also the first time we have used existing parklet spaces rather than our travelling, customised playful parklet. This is perhaps the most “tactical” of our projects so far – repurposing existing parklets for play, responding to regulations on the fly and landing in the middle of a busy commercial district where multiple, sometimes conflicting, actors, attitudes and interests are at stake.

In the coming weeks, Communitas and Robotics Ensemble will return for encore performances at the community parklet, which is stationed in front of the pharmacy at 163 Carlisle Street, Balaclava. The full program is here.

This post was co-authored by Dale Leorke, embedded ethnographer at the Future Play Lab, and Mathias Poulsen.

We’re coming to play Carlisle Street this October! Starting with a weekend of urban play to kick off Melbourne International Games Week including a workshop with Danish play activist Mathias Poulsen, a parklet party and regulars Yomeciband and Communitas.

Embracing on play about place, various locations on Carlisle Street will be activated in and around Balaclava Station.

Saturday October 1
12-4pm Skrammellegepladsen
Join play activist Mathias Poulsen and build a junk-playground in a parklett for MIGW.
6-8pm Parklet Party with $0
Party in the parklet with live video projection animating the junk-playground.

Sunday October 2
12-2pm Yomeciband
Walk and play with musical chalk creatures.
2-4pm Communitas
Be a conductor in a playful music game.

Sunday October 9
12-2pm Seaweed Library
A library of SASi texts about our underwater kin.
2-4pm Robotics Ensemble
Autonomous musical robots powered by the sun.

Friday October 14
4-6pm Communitas
Be a conductor in a playful music game.

Sunday October 16
2-4pm Robotics Ensemble
Autonomous musical robots powered by the sun.

Friday October 21
4-6pm Communitas
Be a conductor in a playful music game.

Sunday October 23
2-4pm Robotics Ensemble
Autonomous musical robots powered by the sun.

Friday October 28
4-6pm Communitas
Be a conductor in a playful music game.

Sunday October 30
2-4pm Robotics Ensemble
Autonomous musical robots powered by the sun.

RMIT researchers and the Future Play Lab have co-authored a report about the “playful parklet”, a customised parklet for both free public use and programmed activations that has been travelling around Melbourne’s suburbs since November 2021.

This report focuses on the Malvern iteration of the public, which was supported by the City of Stonnington. The report documents the background behind the project, the parklet’s design and on-site installation, the process of working with Stonnington Council and choosing a site in Malvern, and the parklet’s impact on the local community. The researchers present their findings and outline future directions, which will be of interest to researchers and other organisations undertaking similar public space activations.

To date, the parklet has visited Melbourne’s CBD twice, Malvern, Footscray and Brunswick. It is currently stationed at RMIT where it is undergoing further testing and ideation for future projects, and it will be back out on Melbourne’s streets again by October 2022 for Melbourne International Games Week. Check this site closer to then for further details.

Clarendon Street Arcade was always a bold project: designing and fabricating five custom arcade cabinets intended to stand out and attract attention on the street, and that would remain on-site, 24/7, for two-and-a-half months.

The cabinets have now been in place, forming a trail along Clarendon Street in South Melbourne, for seven weeks. Staff from the Future Play Lab have been maintaining the cabinets, checking them regularly for damage and technical problems. But one of the biggest unknowns of the project was how the cabinets would hold up to the everyday challenges of the urban environment: rain, sun, birds (particularly their droppings), graffiti, vandalism and general wear and tear from public use.

Two weeks ago, the first instances of intentional damage to the cabinets occurred. Someone smashed Musimoji‘s screen, and the acrylic protector covering it, destryoing them and rendering it inoperable. Jukebot was also punched or kicked, causing its acrylic exterior to collapse. The damage to both cabinets was discovered on August 27th after the Dessertopia store, outside of which Jukebot resides, reported Jukebot‘s damaged acrylic cover. Musimoji required extensive repairs and replacement, while Jukebot mostly only needed its paneling re-attached and several buttons replaced, which were handily stored inside the cabinet for incidents like this. Both cabinets are operational again at the time of writing.

Apart from these instances of vandalism, the cabinets have suffered minimal external damage to date. The main issue for some cabinets has been water damage, with heavy rains particularly in August getting into the cabinets’ wiring, despite them being waterproofed and under covering. This has left them unplayable for short periods while they are fixed. Yawa‘s screen has also been overheating, likely due to direct sunlight shining on the cabinet, and the Future Play Lab team are considering installing fans to cool it down.

Jukebot has proven the most technically challenging cabinet. It has no screen, instead consisting of 24 buttons that are wired to an Arduino microcontroller. This executes the programs that cause the various lights to light up and the music to play, but it has proven inadequate and often crashes or fails to execute properly. It is in the process of being upgraded to new technology, like a Raspberry Pi, with the hope this will solve the problem.

Other cabinets, like Yomeci Hole, have held up well to the weather and have not been intentionally damaged to date. One of its creators, Uyen Nguyen, says that residents nearby have even been “tending the hole”, picking up cigarette butts and other litter left on it. She and her co-designers often have to clean the screen, which gets dirty from rain splashes and people stepping on it. It has also had modem, screen and power issues that required it to be dismantled – no small task – and repaired, meaning it has had several days’ resting period.

The cabinets are still on-site until at least October 9th, which is the end of Melbourne International Games Week. After then, they are likely to be relocated to RMIT campus which will allow Future Play Lab researchers and students to tinker with them more, and closer to home.

Dale Leorke is an embedded ethnographer in the Future Play Lab.
Update Sep 8th: this post was updated to add images from a recent photoshoot and include further details about the vandalism.

On July 26th the Clarendon Street Arcade project officially arrived on the streets of South Melbourne. Five bespoke arcade cabinets designed by artists, gamemakers, academics, students and First Nations People are now playable until October. Created by RMIT’s Future Play Lab and funded by the City of Port Phillip’s COVIDSafe Outdoor Activation Fund, the cabinets form a “trail” along Clarendon Street for residents, visitors and those familiar with the project to discover.

Yawa

Heading south along Clarendon, Yawa is the first arcade cabinet players will encounter. Yawa is a game about the Boon Wurrung language for up to four players, created by N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, Jarra Karalinar Steel and Narayana Johnson. Resembling more of a tabletop game than a typical arcade cabinet, players sit on stools around a table and look down on a flat screen. When players move one of four joysticks, an avatar appears in the form of a possum spirit – created by Steel and featuring in her other public artworks and installations. Players then move across an intricately layered, abstract map of Country, collecting words in the Boon Wurrung language and learning their English counterparts. The words are spoken by Briggs, who is a Boon Wurrung senior elder and founder and chairperson of the Boon Wurrung Foundation.

MAGI 10-in-1

MAGI 10-in-1 is a more traditional arcade cabinet, with three games created by current and recently graduated MAGI (Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity) students at RMIT. The games include Tram Chaser, a side-scrolling platformer by Eamonn Harte; GlugGlug Game by Justin Jattke, a fast-paced rush to water dying houseplants; and Sticky City by Khatim Javed Dar and Monique Kemboi, where objects in the city stick to players as they move, increasing or decreasing their score. Although up to ten games had originally been planned, only these three were completed in time for launch – although more games may be uploaded to the compilation over the coming months. The games take about 90 seconds each to play and in classic arcade style proved challenging for many players on the launch night.

Yomeci Hole

Yomeci Hole, also known as Yomeci Arcade, is the latest project from the YomeciPlay collective. It resembles a mound of grass on the sidewalk, with a virtual hole at its centre surrounded by six buttons. As players peer down into the hole, the game instructs them to stomp on the buttons to clear the screen and progress through a realm of Yomeci creatures. Yomeci Hole is perhaps the most abstract Clarendon Street Arcade “cabinet”, but like all the other cabinets it invites fast-paced play and is extremely replayable. Players can play solo or with friends or other passers-by to hit the correct buttons and progress through each layer of the game world. On launch night, the game was popular with four school children who enthusiastically jumped on, slapped and rapidly pounded the buttons in multiple consecutive games.

Musimoji

In Musimoji, up to three players compete to create music by firing emojis corresponding to their colour. Musimoji is created by Troy Innocent and Allison Walker. Its cabinet resembles a monolith rising from the ground and is decorated with symbols that would be familiar to those who have experienced Innocent’s work before. Its music, meanwhile, is created by Walker, a Melbourne-based composer known for her ambient music.

Jukebot

Located outside dessert shop Dessertopia, Jukebot is an interactive jukebox for up to three players. The cabinet has no screen, but is wired with 24 green, red or blue buttons. Once players choose a colour they must hit all the buttons of that colour. The first player to do this wins, and Jukebot will play a corresponding track before resetting. In between play sessions, a voice will sometimes invite passers-by to play it. Jukebot has been the most technically challenging cabinet to make because of its many components. Initially the buttons were wired to an Arduino device, but it has been unable to handle the sophisticated sequences required to play the game, rendering it unplayable at times. It will soon be upgraded to a Raspberry Pi, which the Future Play Lab hope will resolve its lingering technical problems.

Updates and more information about Clarendon Street Arcade can be found on the City of Port Phillip’s website and by following Playable City Melbourne on Instagram.

Dale Leorke is an embedded ethnographer in the Future Play Lab.