Discovering St.Kilda’s Urban Play Personality

by Carlo Tolentino, Aramiha Harwood, and Troy Innocent

The future play lab was officially part of the St Kilda Festival in partnership with the City of Port Phillip. Happening on a sunny Saturday of 15th Feb 2025, St Kilda Festival is an annual festival that celebrated local culture, live music, food and art along the St Kilda foreshore.

“Since the first St Kilda Festival in 1980, this well-loved annual summer celebration has established itself as an iconic event that brings the community together.

In 2023 we introduced a new two-day format, which was a huge success in its inaugural year, attracting more than 375,000 live music lovers over the fun-filled weekend.” (stkildafestival.com.au)

This is the first of numerous planned Urban Play initiatives, that the future play lab’s ARC linkage: Play about Place: Expanding the impact of Creative Placemaking after COVID aims to explore, test, and iterate on. The idea of a Pop-up Urban Play event, emerged during the event’s planning phase of and frames the lab’s themes and activities during the St Kilda Festival, with the aims of getting to know the people in the neighborhood through a combination of planned and spontaneous urban play.

On the day of the festival, the lab’s Pop-Up Urban Play booth and play space would be enclosed within a 7m x 14m area situated along Shakespeare Grove. The location itself provided active foot traffic from festival attendees, and a prime location just across Luna Park and in proximity to youth activity related booths and music stages. Within the designated space, the future play lab team setup a marquee to provide shade and serve as a booth for open music play, conducting new playful surveys, and provide information on what the future play lab is. The open play space was then adorned with geograms cut from pink astroturf, to create a striking and playful appearance from a distance, as well as functional symbols to situate urban play games.

The urban play games were a number of pre-selected games combining Aboriginal games, new games movement, and music games. A number of Urban Play menus were held up by PSO’s (Playful Spaces Officers) to encourage curious passersby to pick a game to play, as well as empower players the choice to play an urban play of their choice. Competitive and simple to understand games were the most popular, such as lemon joust and oddball.

”Would you like to know your Urban Play Personality?” was an opening line said to curious passersby and playful participants in order to test a newly devised playful survey to gather feedback on what kind of urban play games people in the community would be interested in playing or potentially be seeing in their neighborhoods. A distinct playful personality badge was then given to participants who completed the survey, to which other passerbys would appear to be curious about and consequently also be inclined to discover their Ubran Play personality themselves. A table was set up with a spread of various musical instruments, and helped in attracting festival attendees into the Urban Play booth to engage in open music play, the playful survey, and even lego building.

‘We developed a set of urban play types cross referencing popular play personality surveys as both a method for collecting data and as a tangible reward for play by providing colourful badges for participation that identified people as creative placemakers, playful citizens, urban storytellers etc – this was also a way to get to know the people in the neighbourhood’

Associate Professor Troy Innocent

Over the day, there were a total of 461 people who were recorded (via clicker count) enjoying  Urban Play Booth activities. Of this number, 68 of them took part in the Urban play type Quiz for the Future Play Lab. These Quiz participants were a diverse bunch – while more than a third (36.8%) of respondents were between the age of 30-39, there were relatively even numbers of age groups, from teenage years (19 and under – 16.2%) through to senior years (50 years and over 10.3%). Close to half of Quiz participants lived locally (49.8%) while another 40.3% lived close by in Melbourne. Only 9% of Quiz participants came from outside Melbourne.

From the Quiz results, there were some points of interest. Fun seemed to be the greatest motivation for participants in Play (“I just want to have fun” = 65.7%). Connection to Place and Home as a location where you live at a given time, was highlighted by the majority of quiz-takers (58.2%). More than a quarter (28.2%) felt that Home was more of an association of where you grew up. When questioned on climate crises in their local neighbourhoods, a large majority (60.2%) felt that working together as a community was the best way to adapt and overcome challenges. It is interesting that 30.4% of the participants felt that fun and games were an essential part of building local community.  

A number of Urban play Lego kits were also prepared for the two Urban Play workshops during the day. The Urban Play workshops were meant to be a more structured approach to making attendees play through all the urban play menu games, an info session to Urban Play, and creating their own Urban Play block and neighborhood through lego. During the day however, the building of a lego Urban Play neighborhood was organically done by excited children, teens, and their parents already engaged with the various urban play games that were continuously happening throughout.

The pilot activities and materials in the Urban Play pop-up were:

• A temporary pop-up setup through a marquee/tent.
• Urban Play Menus to select games.
• Astroturf shapes to establish a playful space.
• Urban Play games
• Lego kits for
• Playful Survey + badges
• Pilot prototype – meet people in the neighborhood

Overall, the combination of pop-up urban play setup, urban play menus, playful surveys, and urban play lego kits proved to be very successful in how the whole day of activities came together. There were at least 1,000 people who passed through the pop-up Urban Play space to either play, take photos, and discover their urban play personalities. Pilot Urban Play systems that provides the team with a wealth of new information to plan out the Future Play Lab’s Urban Play events throughout the rest of 2025, while gathering meaningful data through playful surveys and community consultation.