Reworlding our cities: connecting people and place through urban play

Developing creative ways to connect people with public spaces through urban play is the focus of research led by artist gamemaker Dr Troy Innocent.

SDGs

As Director of RMIT University’s Future Play Lab, Innocent’s research and creative practice integrates augmented reality, game design, mobile technology, street art and urban design to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways.

Collaborating with local artists, students, academics, and First Nations Peoples, his diverse projects have included developing arcade games on the street, creative wayfinding apps and immersive audio walks.

Urban Play

Image credit: Sarah Chav, Playful Parklet, 2022

Innocent brought Melbourne into the Playable City network in 2019 by developing creative methods of urban play that connect people to place and engaging communities in thinking about the future of their cities.

Innocent describes the project as placing people and play as central to regenerative urban life.

“It asks how technology can reconnect us to our cities and bring urban play to everyday life. Playable cities can strengthen our connections to where we live and work by drawing on an eclectic mix of play, creative technologies, public art and urban design,” said Innocent.

Just as game designers often start their creative process with the experience they imagine for the player – the ‘play experience’ – this project asks, ‘what is the city to a player?’ and ‘what does it mean to make a city playable?

The project was first launched as Playable City Melbourne in 2016. This was followed by the Melbourne Knowledge Fellowship in 2017 to research and develop playable cities in the UK and Europe, culminating in a report outlining a vision for Melbourne.

See the city through new eyes

person standing in alleyway holding mobile phone in the air

Image credit: Kit Edwards, 64 Ways of Being: Labyrinth of Language, 2023

64 Ways of Being is an augmented reality mobile application that offers immersive walking tours to 64 locations across Melbourne and draws on the city’s multicultural communities and Indigenous knowledge. The project was first explored as part of the project ‘Kummargii Yulendj,’ which translates to ‘Rising Knowledge.’

The innovative project combines games, art and augmented reality. Players follow characters, activate architecture, discover hidden worlds, interact with strangers, and talk with trees and rivers. In some tours, the voice of N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM draws attention to landmarks through stories about Indigenous language and experiences.

people standing on a beach holding phones and looking at an augmented dragon in the sky

Image credit: Kit Edwards, 64 Ways of Being: Kummarggii Yulendj, 2022

In 2022, the 64 Ways of Being app was relaunched as an Indigenous-led cross-cultural walking and listening experience that wove together Boon Wurrung knowledge about caring for Country and western tools for regenerative living and working.

Innocent said the project had been an amazing opportunity to collaborate with other creative practitioners and that he was looking forward to seeing people explore the city in such a creative way.

“People often think of digital games as something played on the couch. We wanted to show they can be much more than that…imaginative, urban play can transform your connection to place,” he said.

The app was created by Innocent along with live arts collective ‘one step at a time like this’ and game developer Millipede (AKQA Group) and funded by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. Its development involved collaborations with local artists and the broader multicultural communities in Melbourne.

Through my phone screen, a kaleidoscope of delicate wildflowers blanked the mail as visions of the landscapes and ceremonies of the Traditional Owners told by Elders danced in my ears.

(Doosie Morris, Broadsheet, 19 May 2022)

Creative practice research into ‘Reworlding’

The concept of ‘reworlding’ offers a window into Dr Innocent’s research practice to reimagining, and reconnecting to, urban life.

His research develops methods of ‘reworlding’, a term first introduced by Donna Harraway. It references the worldview of the First Peoples of South America (Danowski 2013), who perceive time and place as recursive and non-linear.

Reworlding frames play as dynamic and disruptive but also immersive, collaborative, and generative. By situating people within lived experiences that reimagine urban life allows regenerative urban futures to become tangible and possible through imaginative play. Future thinking becomes embodied and relatable to the conditions, structures, and material forms that shape our everyday lives.

Projects such as Playable City, 64 Ways of Being, and the Playful Parklet are examples of how active interventions could encourage people to ‘resist, remake and reimagine’ the world around them.

A creative response to the Covid pandemic

In Victoria, the pandemic hit immediately after devastating bushfires. As a response to these crises, the projects developed after lockdown explored the potential for reimagining the world.

In 2022, Innocent with researchers from the future play lab, delivered the Clarendon Street Arcade project. They collaborated with local artists, students, academics and First Nations Peoples to design five arcade cabinets loaded with original games inspired by Melbourne’s culture, geography and Indigenous history. The game cabinets were installed along Clarendon Street in South Melbourne, forming a ‘playable trail’ that helped to increase community participation and visitation.

person playing on an arcade set up on the footpath

Image credit: Kit Edwards, Clarendon Street Arcade, 2022

Impact on local government

The project was commissioned by the City of Port Philip, as part of the state government COVIDsafe Outdoor Activation Grant program. By bringing play and activity into urban spaces, it demonstrates how urban interventions could help people reconnect with the city post-COVID. It is also a valuable case study on the social and economic benefits of urban play in rebuilding the local economy.

“Positive feedback was that businesses were really super engaged, and anecdotal evidence from the businesses we engaged with … was that there was a lot of play, and people were stopping and having increased dwell time on the street,” Innocent said (Government News, 21 November 2022).

The recognition that urban play could be a critical and creative approach to civic engagement has led to further collaborations with other local governments. City of Stonnington worked with the lab on approaches to creative placemaking to connect with local businesses in Malvern through a playful parklet to increase visitation and ‘dwell time’ in the area leading to a three-year ARC funded study on three levels of impact of urban play: creative, economic, and social.

Impact of urban play experiences

Through his collaborations with local governments, Innocent’s projects activate public spaces through creative play, contributing to inclusivity, increased visitation, economic development and public safety.

...it would be presumptuous to say that design can save the world but it might be able to change the world, or part of it, and at the very least suggest possible solution spaces to be explored.

Troy Innocent, forthcoming book chapter in Design in Action: Reflections on Social and Inclusive Practices (ed. Anastasios Maragiannis).

Key contact

Dr Troy Innocent
Senior Lecturer, School of Design
Director, RMIT future play lab

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