A toolkit for play: The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook
As a kick-start for the autumn, Falay Transition Design is publishing open-source transition design resources for everyone already working or willing to work for a more sustainable future. Here we explain some of the main incentives and learning targets for exploring The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook - tools for exploring sustainability from a playful and joyful perspective. We wish you an inspiring sustainability journey!
The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook: Play potential card deck for environmental action
The climate is changing, but whilst the environmental movement grows, so does concern for our individual and collective wellbeing - especially for those of us frequently engaging in complex, wicked problems. To enable lasting engagement and nurture innovative, creative responses to the crisis, we must find new, more sensitive ways to address these critical topics.
The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook and its different tools explore the potential of playfulness and joy within environmentalism, for building resilience and healing within conscious communities. Through imagination, escapism, roleplay and more, the design tools enable users to co-create speculative ideas in order to find playfulness in everyday environmental action, foster creativity and enable long-term engagement with these distressing topics.
Why play?
The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook and its design outcomes stem from our collective member Savannah Vize’s Creative Sustainability master’s thesis. The thesis explores the potential of play as an antidote to growing concern around eco-anxiety and climate grief.
With its long discussed importance in healthy child development (Pellegrini and Smith, 2008), alongside its therapeutic potential to nurture and reduce stress (Schaefer & Greenberg, 1997; Ward-Wimmer, 2003), play and playfulness promote spaces for healing and imagination. More recently, however, research into play has also explored its transformative potential in disrupting existing structures and ways of thinking, and therefore its ability to catalyse new modes of creativity (Altarriba Bertran et al., 2020; Gaver, 2015).
Through a participatory research-through-design process, the thesis concludes that on the one hand, play and playfulness find a way to enable creativity, solutions-oriented conversations and action. Specifically, play/playfulness provide curiosity and new lenses to explore the world, leading to engagement, innovation and experimentation - and ultimately, production. And yet on another hand, play/playfulness can be harnessed to create calm or much needed distraction, to recognise and face difficult emotions, and in turn help us continue engagement and action in the first place. Play/playfulness here takes more of an antidotal role to the inherent doom and gloom of environmentalism, focusing foremost on our wellbeing as a prologue to production. In both these senses, it can transform our relationships with sustainability, providing a solution for more long term, positive and reflective engagement.
The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook digital workshop gameboard
Through the thesis research process, Savannah developed a number of tools to explore play in this context. These tools are now shared as open source resources for anyone interested in exploring environmentalism from a more playful perspective, investigating their own relationship with playful environmentalism, and/or ideating playful ideas to support wellbeing and create more playful interactions with environmental sustainability.
The Playbook toolkit includes:
An activity research pack for finding playfulness in your own everyday environmental actions
A deck of cards for imagining, dreaming, designing and inspiring a playful environmental action
Workshop instructions and resources, which centre the card deck and facilitate their introduction and use
A catalogue of speculative ideas for finding playfulness and joy in everyday environmental action - which exists both as a pdf and as a living, growing directory on instagram @eco.playbook
You can find all these tools, alongside the full thesis at linktr.ee/ecoplaybook
We are excited to hear your impressions and experience using our tools – or guide you forward with your organisation’s transformation, by facilitating a workshop for you.
Start a conversation with us!
References
Altarriba Bertran, F., Segura, E. M., Duval, J., & Isbister, K. (2019a). Designing for Play that Permeates Everyday Life: Towards New Methods for Situated Play Design. In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363400
Altarriba Bertran, F., Segura, E. M., Duval, J., & Isbister, K. (2019b). Chasing Play Potentials: Towards an Increasingly Situated and Emergent Approach to Everyday Play Design. Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 1265–1277.
Arrasvuori, J., Boberg, M., Holopainen, J., Korhonen, H., Lucero, A., & Montola, M. (2011). Applying the PLEX framework in designing for playfulness. Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, 1–8.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2019). Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 11(4), 589–597.
Gaver, W. (2012). What should we expect from research through design? Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 937–946.
Mattelmäki, T. (2006). Design probes. Aalto University.
Ward-Wimmer, D. (2003). The Healing Potential of Adults at Play. In C. E. Schaefer (Ed.), Play Therapy with Adults (pp. 1–11). John Wiley & Sons.
