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Fun

Hi!
Welcome to the Glasgow Office of Fun and Games

 


Play exists outside our normal reality. It allows us to experiment with and learn about the world without repercussions. It puts us in a different mindset and lets us adopt new values and behaviours.

For these reasons, Play offers an engaging medium for exploring new interpretations of our urban environment. The sense of agency that comes with Play is a powerful tool to encourage ownership of our surroundings. It generates a free space for us to reimagine our relationship with our cities.

Play is an integral part of our humanity and culture.

Where is the space in our cities for Fun and Play, instead of efficiency and consumption?
How could we use design to experience cities in more playful ways?
How could city planners implement play as a practice for urban environments?

We are exploring these questions through this research project.

For this purpose, we declare the foundation of a fictional body, the Glasgow Office of Fun and Games. Its aim is to experiment with new playful relationships between inhabitants and their urban environment.

This project seeks to involve participants from local areas of Glasgow to gather “soft data” : information that is difficult to measure, such as opinions, feelings or perceptions. Residents have valuable local knowledge about their areas and surroundings. This project asks them to create and share stories or other creative interpretations (poems, soundscapes, videos) of where they live. To engage with participants in playful ways, a series of tools, the Data poets, has been developed to be used during engagement sessions and events.

︎ Interactive survey
© GSA 2020
© Gaston Welisch 2020


Project supported by The
Glasgow School of Art