Serious Play

Through Serious Play, Dott will co-design a playground that could potentially supply power to the National Grid and inspire a whole new generation of play.

Children have boundless energy. Running. Swinging. Jumping. Shouting. And Serious Play sets out to inspire the next generation by putting this energy to positive use in these energy-hungry times. At its outset, the project is seeking to discover whether we can harness the energy of children at play, and feed it into the energy supply. Making energy generation community-based and seriously good fun, the focus of the project is to co-design playground equipment, co-create sustainable power and co-build an adventure playground.

Update:

15th June 2010: Co-Designing Continues

During the Royal Cornwall Show, children were asked to draw on a postcard what they would like the Play contraption to look like. We received a handful of creative, colourful designs, above are a just a selection of them. There were ideas from human hamster wheels to exploding bubbles and energy generating rope swings to a fusion reactor! All ideas will be fed back to the designers and you may well even see them as prototypes in the future.

10th June 2010: Play at the Royal Cornwall Show

The Play team showcased their prototype playground equipment at the Royal Cornwall Show in Wadebridge. The event recorded over 100,000 visitors, many of whom came to the Dott stand in the Green Energy Village. There were 2 Play pieces on show, one allowing children (or adults) to spin on plastic disks consequently turning on a number of colourful lights. The other prototype gained a lot of appeal due to the noises that were produced by inflating a balloon, while jumping on 2 ‘bulb like’ pods. It was a good form of exercise as well as sounding like a church organ. Overall, it was a very successful 3 days for Serious Play, and many local schools and groups have shown an interest in working with the project.

1st June 2010: The Fruit Machine

Each of the 4 energy field bulbs are composed of 3 key components: a cap (or ‘doer’), a stalk (or ‘connector’) and a root (or ‘transformer’). The interactive fruit machine is a way in which the target audience can create their own selections of the 3 components and rearrange to create a workable bulb prototype, which creates energy through play. This fruit machine interactive is central to ongoing co-design sessions and will form part of both the RCS showcase and any future exhibitions within the community.

28th May 2010: Rough Cut Video – Co-Discover Stage

The Play Energy Field is a platform for children, young people and families to create energy through play, in a fun but also educational way. The Play team are in the process of creating 4 prototypes, or ‘bulbs’ which focus on 4 energy themes: Water, wind, heat/light and kinetic. These prototypes will form the central part of a showcase at the Royal Cornwall Show (RCS) in June. Through ongoing co-design and a future programme of discovery sessions these prototypes will be resolved, with the target audience, and added to, to create a growing and evolving energy field.

15th April 2010: Co-Design Workshop

The challenge of the Dott Play project is to create a piece of play apparatus which makes energy generation fun, educational and accessible. The project’s focus is around the link between play and sustainable energy production. Through co-discovery and co-design the project asks the target audience to define the meaning of both play and energy and come up with a fun, interactive solution to the challenge of energy generation through play.