The Spirit of Play

HDK, Child Culture Design students Marta from Poland and Dawn from Hong Kong are going to India! In search for child culture, the project is about PLAY in public space in Puducherry, India.

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Yesterday we run our first spontaneous workshop. Or more like it run itself. First one of local craftsmen and also owner of the little theater in Smedbyn came to visit us with his grandsons. He is very interested in our project, because he makes wooden toys himself and also work with children doing the theater. So he often comes to visit and talk to us and when he said his grandsons are coming to see him for a day we invited them to our place. The boys were first very shy, but then when we said they can touch anything and also do their own stuff using the materials we have, they started doing things immediately and it was impossible to make them stop so their granddad asked if they can just leave them here as he needs to take care of his shop and cannot stay longer. Of course the boys stayed with us and had a lot of fun creating. They also worked as a life advertisement of our 'services'. There were two German families who came in to see what is going on in our 'store' and when they saw two boys playing they asked their children if they want to stay. Kids from one family were too shy, but other girl was quite interested and her parents decided they will leave her here as they go and visit the rest of the street. The girl was a bit slow to start and when they came back she was still making stuff so all in all they had to stay here for another half an hour and wait until she's finished. The boys stayed here for few hour and then took a short break and came back to make more things. In the evening we also had some Polish visitors, who have been living in Jönköping. There were three kids in the family and even though I said they can touch anything they were a bit scared and didn't want to even come close to things. But after a while two girls started making somethings with the materials. However it seemed parents were in a hurry and the dad kept telling them to finish already, so they left without finishing. But I said if they want to come back we are here and we are happy to run more spontaneous workshops like this. I also talked a bit with the dad and he said even though they leave in Jönköping, they never come to Huskvarna because there is nothing to do here. They were only here because his son had a football training nearby. This is the opinion we heard form some other people too, and also our own observation, especially when it comes to child visitors. Adults have shops to visit, and come here mainly for this, unless they are stray tourist coming here from the factory museum. But kids are quite bored here, and even our small workshop yesterday provided a lot of entertainment and became kind of day care, like for example in IKEA stores. I noticed few kids running up to few more interesting things like a wooden postbox or a strange looking bin, trying to open them, see if there is anything inside, or just because it's an object that sparks some curiosity, being different to museum stuff. We are thinking about working on solutions to make this area more interesting and fun for kids. We don't really know yet how it will materialise, but this is something that will come out through the workshops with preschool children and some more experiments.

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We had eventful couple of days. At the end of last week we had some visitors coming and trying out our creations. It was Niklas, one of our hosts here and his children, reviewing our work so far. We did some playing and storytelling - the small girl was very talkative, too bad we couldn't understand her! She played with almost anything she got in her hands, the best game was to throw stones into rain drain and making the 'plop' sound. She also played horse and cart with Dawn using some of the long sticks we got from Niklas, some fresh wood similar to willow, a new material that we will use. On Moday we had a meeting at the local kindergarten with one of the teachers and Kari, our other host. We have been discussing our project and details about workshops we want to run with children and finally! we will start next week. We arranged first meeting to be on Wednesday. Most of the children and teachers are still away but some of the adults are coming back on Monday and it seems like there is enough children staying in the kindergarten over the holidays for us to have workshops with. That's a big step forward.

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It's been a little quiet here, but we've given in the holiday season and have been enjoying the sun and the lake. But also we have been working everyday. We visited some local secondhand stores looking for material references and wow, there's a reason Jönköping is called a secondhand capital of Sweden! There was so much things we didn't know what to look at! But at least we found some interesting things (tonne of golf balls anyone?) We also have been doing some initial brainstorming and while we wait for the children as well as some factories and their waste materials, we have been doing some 'experiments'. We have produced a lot of different little and big things and creatures. We don't really know where this is leading but for now we decided to turn our work space into some kind of museum. Since there is a lot of people coming in here, asking whether we sell anything (since all other houses have shops) or just quickly popping in not saying anything and leaving, confused by what we're doing. There are also some children who get curious in the things we have put on display, but they're not sure if they can touch them or not and if they can really come inside. So today we spend some time dividing up the space and well the museum is in progress! Opening for general audiences soon!

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During our explorations of Smedbyn and its surroundings we have discovered some local species. Now on show in our workshop, don't miss the unique chance to see them live!

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The spirit of play in Jönköping

We haven't been updated for a while since we backed from India!

Yes, first we are both graduated from Child Culture Design in HDK!

Then, on last Wednesday, we arrived in Smedby, an old black smith living and working area, nowadays a craftsmanship area. We were invited by the municipality of Jönköping, the culture department as guest artists during this summer.

The first days we have been familiarsing ourselves with the city. After walking around for few hours we went to visit 'bike kitchen'with aim to try to buy 2nd hand bikes and coincidentally met Tessa, working for Jönköping municipality, who was kind enough to lend us bikes for the whole period we will be here. That made everything much easier, especially because if we need any materials or tools, we have to make a trip to the city centre from. Also for our project it's good to explore places, which is much easier done on bikes rather than bus, which takes only certain routes.

The spirit of play will look for crafts play and education opportunities within the community area, we will also working with a group of kindergarten children later (after they're back from the vacation)

This weekend we were traveling a bit south to Fågelleken, to visit our friend, vici's old summer house. It is a very old house built in 1870, full of treasures from the former owner, a telegraph engineer who also loved to collect stuffs. 

We did a little bit of adventure and also kick off of doing some small crafts by using both the nature materials and old scrap materials lying in the house.

After few days of settling down, we have set up our working studio, proper work will be started tomorrow! please follow us to see how the spirit of play is going to be!

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Back in Sweden again

Some good Karma at last! Today we received an email we have been given another scholarship! This will be helpful to develop the spirit of play. Nice news to get in this cold, gloomy weather!

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We have done the final presentation for our course "children and society" to CCD through Skype. We've designed a character - the spirit of play, and a guide for NGOs volunteers in this stage, which we are going to develop further after we back to Sweden.

Unlimited forms of the spirit of play 

The spirit of play is a character represents a playful way to understanding. It can be transformed into different forms base on the creator's imagination and locally available materials, it can be a play character, a game tool, a theatre costume, a playground sculpture, a container or a container.

The pictures above are showing some variation example of the spirit of play which we have made mostly with locally find materials in the nature.

A tool for open-ended communication and humanistic understanding

This is also a guide and a tool for NGOs for working together with children (could also be adults) through play and craft (which means by creating the spirit of play). We are intended to suggest a humanistic approach and an open way to understand ethnic group, from social behaviors, traditions, needs, to specific interests. 

The guide can be used as an additional learning activities to existing educational program. By practically engage children and create the spirit of play together, the activities provide wider choice of what children (and adults) could do base on locally available resources.

To be continue...

This is the beginning of our idea and the work we've done in this 4 weeks, we will keep updating our development process and of course the final guide book. 

Big thanks to everyone from the Narikuravara Community, all the great children we had chance to work with, Samugam workers - especially Lotte, Jonas and Pushparaj, our translator Nikhil, our exclusive sponsors and supporters Åke and Mattias, Pondicherry University student Shiva for introducing us to Samugam and especially our bus driver for showing us the right way to remove coconut leaves!

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The trip is almost over, we have made our goodbye meeting with the children both in the community and the children's home on Tuesday. We rounded up what we've been doing with them in this few weeks, showed them how to make characters with the baskets we made from the  previous workshop, gave them the pictures they've been taken, and finally we gave them each a banana as a thank you present.

After weeks of fun and engaging times with most people from the village, it feels strange that it's the end of the work in the community. The investigation of play in the community is over by the time, but our project "the spirit of play" will still be continue! 

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Preparing something special for the meeting with children tomorrow. The shopkeeper must have done a business of his life today :)

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Now it's all work, work, work probably until last minute. We will keep our final idea a secret but there is a small sneak peek! Big release on Wednesday :)

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Photos of some play activities going on during and after the weaving workshop!

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Friday was the day of our last workshop in the community. We brought our baskets frames and wanted to give them to children to see what kind of things they will come up with. In the end we didn't have enough baskets, as both volunteers and also Samugam worker, who is our translator wanted to join in the weaving. Children couldn't wait to start and were nagging us to hurry up (we were still 'preparing' leaves for the weaving as we waited for all children to show up). Some of them were starting on their own, but then discouraged when it didn't work out just abandoned the pieces. When everyone gathered up we talked quickly about the functions of the things we prepared (''It could be a bike helmet'), explained the task and put out the baskets for participants to choose (as they had different forms) and then disappeared in seconds, everyone was really committed to start. In the end some of the participants didn't get any frames, and we had to start quickly preparing some from the loose parts we had. Also the volunteers decided to start their baskets from scratch and seemed quite dedicated in their work. In the end we had a lot of different baskets, two girls did the same shape, but one of them used a really nice way of weaving, creating kind of diamond shapes. Samugam worker, Push, created a basket with a long strap and smaller children loved playing with it carrying their toys inside. When all the baskets were ready, even more children came and everyone started playing with them - using them as hats, masks, carrying toys, putting cats inside, putting them on (when the baskets didn't have a bottom, smaller children just went inside and pulled it over themselves) etc. etc. It was really good fun, both for the children and for us, to see them playing and making up new functions. At the end of the workshop almost all baskets were taken, not only by the authors, but also other children. Then we saw even more play going on outside (photos in the next post). The volunteers asked us to leave the leftover leaves in the creche so they can use them another time, which made us happy as this was our aim. On our way to the car, we met again the 'crafting man' making some new intricate structures from stems and fruits, definitely inspired by the baskets. We won't have any more workshops as our project is coming slowly to an end, but we will go to the community once again to say thank you and goodbye to the children, adults and workers of the NGO.

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The children were quite eager to start weaving themselves and when we came on Thursday with a bunch of coconut leaves for them, most of the children from the previous day appeared for the workshop. We prepared two instruction sheets, one with a basic weave pattern and one which explained how to make a ring out of leaf stems. One of the volunteers also joined in the workshop, learning to weave together with the children. We started from the basic weave - under, over, under, over and then proceeded to make our of the baskets which is made only from leaves, and doesn't need the hard frame. This was quite difficult task, and when the weaving got quite confusing, the children started to give up on continuing. Only one girl managed to finish her basket, but everyone tried really hard. We realised that we have aimed a bit too high and maybe should take it easier with the difficulty level. So when we came back home we started preparing hard frames, made out of stems, which children can use as a base. We prepared 5 baskets, for the workshop next day and some elements for more if we need them. We were also happy to see that the man, we inspired day before, continued experimenting with craft and improved his temple cart model by adding new details.

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On Wednesday we brought our baskets to the Community and when children spotted them, they got really interested and started picking them up and playing with them in many different ways. We also inspired one of the older man to start crafting things. People in the Community didn't know how to make baskets but at least this one man knew how to make some nice hand craft. We got some  coconut rings and bracelets from him. As we were thinking that one of the ways to make the baskets playful is to make them into characters we prepared some drawings with the outlines of the baskets we made for the children to draw on. The forms were quite abstract and as we asked them to draw characters, they didn't necessary associate the outlines with the basket forms and we got some interesting results. The small round basket often became a face, but children were also thinking a lot of functionality, drawing fruit, animals or fish 'inside'. They really got into the task and the whole group went completely silent for the first time. The drawings could be a good base for us when thinking of functions and detailing of the baskets. We also discussed about what different things the baskets could do and apart from obvious like 'keeping different things' children also thought about some playful functions like catching butterflies or ball (with the basket that looks like a big ladle). At the end of the workshop we got a present from the 'crafting man'. Using leaf stems and some kind of fruit/nuts he made a structure, which is supposed to be a temple cart. It has a triangular shape, with three wheels and is used during the festivals, when the statue of the god is put inside and the cart is rolled around the town by the people. It was great to see we sparked someone's imagination and that we really motivated him to make things!

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Our first idea for the project came from the trash issue in the community and learning how to deal with it. We were thinking of introducing some kind of trash bins which in playful way would teach children to use them. However during the process we realised this idea posed a lot of questions, both ethical (is it right to come as an outsider to a closed community like this and tell people what is wrong and what is right?) as well as practical (even if people start using bins will anyone come to collect the trash?). So we slowly moved towards suggesting a solution for various functions, from shooting game, collecting stuff, and crafting, through an example of making baskets//bins. We spent Tuesday learning how to weave coconut leaves and trying out different ideas for baskets, which we could prepare for the workshops with children. Our experience from the willow weaving workshops helped, since the principle is more less the same, only the material differs. We also found some tutorials on youtube for different techniques. We prepared few mock ups for the discussion and practical work with children.

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We have been neglecting the blog recently but we are too busy writing on our reflections. Feels a bit too early to write the report since the work is still in progress but at least we have a good excuse for a coffee in the old town... By now we can probably start writing reviews of the cafes too :)

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On Saturday we went to the Community again.First we helped the Belgian volunteers to wash the children and supervise teeth brushing. That took quite a lot of time so later we just had a small workshop. We talked with children about issues of cleaning and trash and tried to find out their views. In the discussion the children said they see the problem and that they would like to clean, but no one ever taught them to, but it's hard to tell how much of it is actually them saying what they think we want to hear and also how much gets lost in translation. Then we took out the map again and asked them to draw the places with trash on it. Interestingly the children were quite reluctant  to draw the trash, only pointed out where it was. However it is hard to tell if they didn't draw it because it's trash, or because they just didn't want to 'destroy' the map in general. Later we asked children to shows us their game called 'Koko' (not sure on the spelling), which they talked about in one of the previous workshops. First they played alone to show us the rules, and then we were supposed to join in but we didn't feel comfortable playing the game, because we felt the NGO workers weren't happy about it. The translator was rushing  the children and the volunteers preferred if we played something that involved little children too.