If you have had some sort of Spring Break, I hope you’ve recovered and are leaping like an excited gazelle into what we hope will be summer. Can I ask you a question? Are you interested in what it takes to be playful with others, especially outside your familiar circle? If you are, I hope you like this post. In it, I’d like to take a moment to reflect and share something that’s been on my mind since attending the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Barcelona (CHI 2026) about play, playing with others, and adopting what called the ‘lusory attitude’ (Suits, 2005/1978). Before I share my thinking – when we talk about ‘lusory attitude’, we refer back to Bernard Suit’s (2005/1978) discussion of the attitude of the game player, specifically to accepting the rules of a game to make playing it possible, even when those rules make it tricky to play. It’s about a willingness to play on different terms.
CHI 2026 is a beast of an international conference – lots of people, lots of disciplines, lots of laptops and lanyards. It’s technically orientated, so not my home territory, but as a member of the RE:PLAY Playful Learning in Higher Education study, I was on board. I went into the week with an informal question: what could happen if I entered this ‘other’ world with genuine openness?
As it happened, there were all sorts of moments and interactions that were interesting and that inspired my playful plans for teaching, learning and research. Here, I’d like to share two examples. Firstly, I attended a wonderful paper presentation titled Interactive Tatreez: How (and when) Can Digital Fabrication Augment Cultural-based hybrid crafts (thanks to Sara Nabil, Pouya Khorsandi, Jannah Sultan, Sama Moustafa and Shahd Hamani). Tatreez, I learnt, is a form of Palestinian Arab Embroidery. The team shared exciting and emotional work with Palestinian women that involved digital design, sensors and other sorts of enhancements of a traditional hand stitching social practice. I went simply because my own playful practice often involves making with others. My prejudgement was that the introduction of digital would thin out or colonise a practice that seemed to be grounded in a form of social, ritual, identity work. I saw that the introduction of digital focused on enhancing and expanding the pride, care, affirmation and cultural resistance that Tatreez conventionally nurtured. I needed to open up and enter into the digital fabrication process (on the team’s terms) to understand that digital would not automatically flatten community making practices. The team had thought hard about this and I learnt from them.
My second playful encounter was in visiting a demonstration titled Co-Ideation Across Time: Designing Embodied Prompting for Creative Thinking with Large Language Models, a piece of work by Yuqing Lucy Li, Quincy Kuang, Paul-Peter Arslan, Yuhan Wang, Hiroshi Ishii and Xiao Xiao. My attention was grabbed by another activity that looked similar-but-different to my own playful practice of table-top artefact interactions in teaching and research. The system used physical artefacts and a large interactive flat-screen monitor to interact with multiple artificial intelligence personas with their own perspectives and skills. In their paper, the team argue that chat interfaces make thinking linear and passive, whereas creative thinking is embodied and iterative. Despite being a tech lover, I brought with me a prejudice that this type of interface would be a gimmick; what could embodied interactions with LLMs add to what I already did with hand made models, table-tops and talking in working class communities? As the team demonstrated the placing, rotating and tapping-to-expand content, I needed to ‘have a go’ and to adopt a lusory attitude to take part on the terms of the demo. Only through doing this did I experience the potential in the demo – the value of using movement, placement, gestures, relating of artefacts to think tentatively and experiment without a polished question or hypothesis. The AI documented those ‘natural’ moves quite well and often worked with an embodied form of enquiry, enhancing it, especially by doing what can be (in my experience) the distracting job of documenting rapid, ideational moves in community research.
Fully embracing the demo opened a horizon for me, as with the Tatreez paper, to think about how the digital could enhance instead of flatten playful exploration.
Both encounters showed technology in embodied, relational practice without decentring it. Both of them disturbed a guardedness I hadn’t quite named – that I was comfortable with cardboard, pebbles, string and paper, and was ambivalent about digital. The Tatreez paper especially helped me to see how digital could usefully be part of a more-than-human epistemology that values material knowing (fabric, stitch, carboard construction) rather than replace it.
I am left with questions of ‘what if?’ and am curious about how digital could enhance connection, flow of activity, documentation of work and more in my own playful practice. I’m interested to see whether our RE:PLAY Fellows’ redesign work and our case studies may play with similar things. Whatever happens, I am convinced again that being willing, open and engaging with difference pays off in playful learning.
Suits, B. (2005) The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Broadway Encore Editions), Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadway Press. (Originally Published 1978 by University of Toronto Press)