Play in the laboratory of the possible
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A cardboard train… A dachshund race… A party to celebrate all things that go pop! What do these things have in common?
They were all “experiments” conducted by a group of “play pushers” determined to transform Haig Park in 2019. And the chief “play pusher” Cathy Hope joined Salon Canberra recently to share her insights into how Canberra could become the “laboratory of the possible” by embracing play.
As an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Cathy works with government, industry, the community and in education to harness the power of play, which she calls her “passion project” and her mode of practice and research.
There are many definitions of play, but Cathy likes a simple one: “play is the laboratory of the possible”.
The benefits of play in childhood are well known. Play is a building block of physical and cognitive development, helping to shape identity and social connections, encouraging safe risk taking and teaching us how to navigate the world.
Far less research has been undertaken to understand the benefits of play in adulthood – because play is considered something for kids. “But studies in the neurosciences and psychology are showing the importance of play across the lifespan,” Cathy said.
In 2019, Cathy led the team that delivered the Haig Park Experiments – a six-month $1 million ACT Government funded activation designed to “test aspirations for the place and in the process to improve attitudes to the park”.
Initially created as a windbreak, Haig Park is home to more than 7,000 trees. But it had been pinned by women on the Canberra Safety Map as one of the places in the ACT where they felt most unsafe. Cathy’s job was change perceptions. As she said: “A sausage sizzle, a huge party and even markets back then weren’t going to cut it. We needed play to loosen constraints and reimagine our relationships.”
Cathy and her team used play as the foundation. What did this look like?
“We started with cues that were familiar.” Dog owners were the most frequent users of the park, so the project team handed out doggy treats, started a ‘Dogs of Haig’ project to collect and share stories of dogs and their best friends in the park, and ran playful ‘Paw Parties’ which are still held on the last Sunday of every month. One of my favourite memories of 2019 was taking a friend visiting from England to Haig Park to watch the dachshund races and sip craft beer from a pop-up market stall.
Other activations were created with children in mind – “because kids are the best players of all and they make people and places feel safe”. The project team set up 20 physical and creative play activities. One of those was POP! – a party that celebrated bubbles and all things that pop. There were bubble blowers and pop-up popcorn stalls, pop music and popsicles. (A few months prior to POP!, Salon Canberra was lucky to host social researcher and psychologist Hugh Mackay AO in the inflatable ‘Canberra Bubble’, a space which transformed the former prime minister’s favourite catchphrase from a political put-down to a place for people).
One of the most imaginative of the Haig Park Experiments was to ask artists to “playfully mess” with the way that visitors engaged in the park. One artist was Pablo Latona, described by Cathy Hope as a “genius of play”, who joined us at our Salon Canberra event wearing a white paper suit ready for guests to scribble on. At Haig Park, Pablo delivered a “suite of transformative participatory pieces”, but the community favourite was a cardboard train. Pablo and a colleague used two large cardboard boxes with straps, and a large cardboard tube “that somehow blew smoke”. Four Haig Park stations were signposted by a piece of cardboard pinned to a tree. “People got on board the cardboard train, and shuffled along as a collective, getting on and off at ‘stations’ at their leisure. That simple. That brilliant.” People loved it and Haig Park was “magically” transformed.
The outcomes of the Haig Park Experiments were “beyond our wildest dreams,” Cathy said. And for a year and a half after those experiments, not one woman pinned the park as an unsafe place. “That is the power of play!”
The experience with Haig Park led to new opportunities at Ginninderry, when Ginninderry’s then Community and Cultural Place Manager Susan Davis, reached out to Cathy to apply her knowledge to this new and growing community. Working together with students from the University of Canberra, they harnessed what could be considered a deficit – wind – into an asset, hosting a new and enormously popular kite-flying festival.
The kite-flying festival soon became just one element of the Paddy’s Park Play Day series, which are events based on the Play Outside Day initiative first established in the UK, aimed at creating a habit of outdoor play and activity for everyone. The Paddy’s Park Play Days aim to normalise the use of Ginninderry’s first neighbourhood park as a gathering place for the community to engage in a return to free-form, screen-free play, and have since evolved to celebrate cultural festivals such as Easter and Diwali.
So how do we harness the lessons learnt from those experiments at Haig Park and Paddy’s Park to transform Canberra into a laboratory for the possible?
Cathy believes our foundations are solid: the innovative Burley Griffin plan; an unfolding story of transformation and renewal in design and hospitality; and a strong appetite for play among creative industries, government and the community.
Our challenge is to “work together to loosen and reconfigure the constraints” so we can make Canberra a “playable and playful city”. Can we make Canberra the “laboratory of the possible”? Let me know what you think!
Feature image: Bottom L-R – Cathy Hope, Catherine Carter. Top– Tulitha King
