PLAY METHODOLOGIES

Playing is an extraordinary pedagogical tool.
It is an activity that not only allows for the participation and contribution of very diverse agents (creating a strong integrative condition beyond the classroom) but -at the same time- allows students to eagerly envision objectives, construct tactics and strategies of design, absorb negotiations and address pre-existing conflicts. Playing is a way for agency and knowledge to proliferate since it entails a profound enquiry on the conditions of a place while rendering explicit the rules of its systems; it makes boundaries and divisions visible as lines that can be transgressed for larger benefits. In that manner, play is also a subversive activity because of its capacity to envision radical contextual transformations, through seemingly harmless operations.
Playing is mocking the status-quo.
As part of the studio ‘Play Methodologies’ taken forward in the Faculty of Planning at CEPT University (Ahmedabad), students were presented with a set of challenges that made them experiment with such notions of play while taking the city as a laboratory. Hence, they designed a series of game boards capable of reproducing the complex constituencies of a site in south-eastern Ahmedabad (more specifically, Bombay Hotel) which would eventually lead them to the proposition of small-scale, frugal -yet innovative- technologies: what we can term as mobile infrastructures.