Radiococo Broadcast #32
a process
I did a little sharing about Wandering Objects in Singapore earlier this month, which helped me consolidate our co-design process and now I am ready to share it here!
Our main limitations for this project were time and distance–we were a 20h train ride away from our collaborators and had just one workshop session with them before the build phase. Ideally, in a perfect co-design world we would have involved them right at the start, had multiple rounds of feedback and iteration before the build phase and included them in the building of the play sculpture.
Since the theme was about exploring, we designed the workshops to find out how children and young people explored their environment, with tools and with each other. So how did cardboard and craft materials turn into a temporary outdoor play sculpture in the new city centre of Kiruna? We picked up on key observations and translated them into the design of the play sculpture:
They created a lot of tools for different ways of looking, so we made sure that the play sculptures afforded that too.
The older group of students were into having two bases, where they could communicate with each other over a distance, and recreate various multiplayer video games irl.
They also talked a lot about parkour, so we made sure the structures were sturdy enough to climb on and had interesting/ challenging terrains. There were safety concerns about the ramp with square holes big enough for a kid to catch their foot in. But at the official opening of the sculpture, they proved to us that they were very adept at navigating unusual terrains and could be trusted to be careful with it.
So many of them also created little nooks and hideouts for themselves, so naturally we needed to include that too.
And finally, how do we keep their weird and wonderful creations??? We won’t even dream of trying to replicate it, so we let them do it themselves.
We created an ‘office’ with loose parts (PVC pipes and wooden blocks with holes) so that they can continue to create tools for exploring and share them with others in the space too.
We were only there for a day after the project was completed, so we don’t know if it stood the test of time and weathering 👀 There's no one size fits anything when it comes to working with (young) people, and so this was one way we chose to work with them, trusting in our roles as designers and their roles as explorer experts.
I still get so excited talking about it 2 months on, thank you for listening/ reading (_:
This month’s play-list
speaking of weathering: a projection of how our climate might be like in the future 🫣
Bullshit sans, a great typeface I wanna see being used on LinkedIn 🤪
Learn history visually 😱!