The Playful Designer
Presentation of The Playful Designer delivered at NYCxDesign Student Showcase Night 2020.
Project Type
Critical Design + UX Design + Interactive Poetry
The Playful Designer is a proposition; A poetic approach for (re)design(ing) [in|with|of] social constructs. This work addresses the ethical awareness regarding how designers approach situations, and invites more rigorous engagement for challenging implicit bias, especially around the politics and positionality of "helping", authority, expert, or complicit collusion in oppressive systems. The term "playful" serves both as a provocation and a call to action.
Role
MFA Candidate
Parsons, The New School
Project Timeline
Sep, 2019 - May, 2020
Challenges
What might it mean for design to take on (re)Design of social constructs, particularly those constructs which reinforce systems of oppression?
How might I actualize the ways and principles of Playful Design and afford a felt experience of designing for freedom
Approach
In The Infinite Play Exhibition, the primary output of this work, Poetics and lyricism are deployed purposefully. As are exaggeration, aphorisms, double, triple, quadruple entendre, misdirection, and trickery. As purposeful, playful design decisions.
The process of development included:
Ethnographic Interviews with Artists and Activists
Ethnographic Observation and Synthesis of the Relationship Between Designed Space and Ways-of-Being
Website Wireframing and Paper Prototype Iterations
User Testing and Interviews
Outcomes
The Infinite Play Exhibition affords an expansive, generatively confusing experience, composed of 57, strategically, but seemingly unexpectedly, interconnected pages.
It questions the value of ‘simplicity’ and ‘intuitiveness’ as core and necessary design objectives. And, instead, relies on interpretable design dimensions to generate a sort of thoughtful disequilibrium and playful sense of responsibility.
Images from The Infinite Play Exhibition: A labyrinthine engagement with Playful Design