Nathalia Campreguer França

In this paper, we investigate how everyday playfulness can create opportunities for agonism. Playfulness and agonism have only rarely intersected in HCI research, such as using game design elements in Agonistic Participatory Design, or proposing agonism as a theoretical foundation for Political Play. Building on these foundations, our work aims to broaden the design space where playfulness and agonism meet. Drawing on methods from Situated and Emergent Play, we created a design intervention that prompted reflection and empathy among participants, while establishing a shared understanding of the latent conflict the intervention aimed to address. Based on our findings, we propose considerations for designers seeking to use playfulness to create opportunities for agonism. Grounded in Situated and Emergent Play, we furthermore contribute the method of tracing frictions, which offers a new avenue for designing at the intersection of playfulness and agonism.

Interest in making, crafting, and tinkering persists across hobbyist pursuits, professional applications, and academic research endeavors. However, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of the journey individuals undertake to develop respective identities, which, in turn, seem to define how people develop practices, make use of infrastructures, and become part of networks. In this half-day workshop, we aim to explore such biographies and identities, asking how maker, crafter, or tinkerer identities are developed and how they change during people’s lives. Participants will bring snippets of their making (such as artifacts, materials, tools, etc.) with them as means to reflect individually and discuss together. The envisioned outcome is a collection of relevant variables of maker, crafter, and tinkerer biographies and identities to be articulated as inspiration for future making, and as motivation to break down potential barriers.