playing up

Trajectory; Transporting; Enclosing; Enveloping; Rotation; Orientation; Connecting; Positioning.

The eight play schema form a framework for understanding the patterns of repeated behaviour displayed by babies and young children as their understanding of the world around them evolves.

Beyond these younger years, our range of understandings and perspectives of how we engage with environments narrow. Play is no longer the primary mode in which we challenge ourselves and our surroundings, it becomes limited to specific contexts; Sunday league, pub-quizzes, escape rooms, half-marathons, stag & hen-dos… A means of disengaging, not examining and imagining.

Notions of place can be understood as a series of collective recurrent actions that both generate and reinforce spatial bounds and socially accepted behaviours. How might we serve beyond the tennis court, break out of the Mushroom Kingdom, slosh outside the club?

Do the play schema offer a way of revolutionising the fixed patterns and allowed space for play?

Civic Soup and pals set out to explore the city through the play schema. Framing, reflecting and disrupting our everyday encounters with common spaces, playing up will renegotiate our patterns of play as a means to remodel how we exist in-place.