Playful things: Participatory Design on the margins

Playing in the margins of the contemporary city has suffered significant losses also due to the responsibility of the public power in the absence of the establishment of policies that ensure the means for this activity, essential to human life, to happen. In big cities, it is observed that inequality among individuals and forms of social exclusion are also perceptible in the characteristics of public spaces and playful urban furniture designed for children.

The doctoral research entitled Participatory Design at the Margins – Democracy and the Right to Play in the City (provisional title) is based on a look at four neighborhoods in the metropolitan region of the cities of São Luís/Ma, in the Northeast of Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal, based on Participatory Design workshops with children. These workshops take into account the perceptions of children from these territories about their places, we seek to reflect on how the right to play is being neglected by the absence and deficiency of playful public environments and equipments in these marginalized areas.

The insufficiency of these propitious environments in urban margins leads us to try to understand, through participant observation, how children produce their own play spaces and how design, through participation and guided by decolonial practices, can be an instrument to enhance this experience together with them. For this, we use the tools of Participatory Design as a social experiment to co-create things – social-material elements – valuing children and their experiences of using the space, respecting their knowledge, culture and identity, recognizing their creative capacities.

We also tried to investigate possible future perspectives to improve this picture of absence, in the production of spaces and equipments centered on these users, encouraging their active listening, in order to draw participative urbanistic plans and guidelines for the elaboration of public policies for spaces and leisure equipments in the margins, in a joint effort of the public power allied to technical knowledge, based on design, architecture and urbanism in the perspective of children and their right to the city and to play.