![\"\"](\"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/replay\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_1879-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAs 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\u2019d 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\u2019s terms) to understand that digital would not automatically flatten community making practices. The team had thought hard about this and I learnt from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018have a go\u2019 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 \u2013 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 \u2018natural\u2019 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. I am left with questions of \u2018what if?\u2019 and am curious about how digital could enhance connection, flow of activity, documentation of work and more in my own playful practice. I\u2019m interested to see whether our RE:PLAY Fellows\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suits, B. (2005) The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia<\/em> (Broadway Encore Editions), Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadway Press. (Originally Published 1978 by University of Toronto Press)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you have had some sort of Spring Break, I hope you\u2019ve recovered and are leaping like an excited gazelle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":2152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"1","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflection"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/replay\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_1891-1024x768.jpg\")
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Both encounters showed technology in embodied, relational practice without decentring it. Both of them disturbed a guardedness I hadn\u2019t quite named \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n