We could tell you about it ourselves – aka Ale and Chris – but Playground is our brainchild, and together with Tommi and Tobia, we were also its coaches. We risk being a bit biased. So, we asked Gio for a review, as she saw Playground take shape and, more importantly, experienced it as a participant.
Over to you, Gio.
Here I am, the Playground insider.
I’ll start with a confession: I’ve never been a big fan of workshops.
They give me that strange feeling of things being rushed and expectations being too high. You have to understand everything immediately, come up with a brilliant idea, get along with people you might have met half an hour ago, and in the end, it often all feels a bit up in the air.
So, I approached Playground with curiosity, but also with some prejudice and one question: will it manage to change my mind?
On the first day, groups were formed and the brief was given: New cults.
It was intentionally very open and, essentially, asked for three things: decide what to believe in, invent a ritual, and design a relic. That’s it.
We basically had a blank canvas, and put that way, it sounds like every designer’s dream. In reality, after about ten minutes, you realize it’s harder than it seems, because when everything is possible, coming up with ideas is easy... the real difficulty lies in choosing.
And indeed, the first few days were the most chaotic. Ideas, references, and directions that seemed perfect would suddenly stop being so. It was a constant process of opening paths, then closing them, and opening others.
In the midst of this initial chaos, the coaches never told us which path was the right one, they didn’t choose for us, and they didn’t turn the project into the one they would have done themselves.
They helped us make decisions, to understand that at a certain point it was important to make a choice—that is, to stop adding and finally start building.
For me, this was the real exercise: accepting that designing also means closing off possibilities., because a path followed to the end can take you further than ten possibilities left open.
Another plus of the workshop: having (and creating) opportunities to completely switch off, forget about the project for a while, and do something else.
Beyond the coffee breaks, there were lunches and dinners all together around a single table, with meals prepared by a personal chef who definitely spoiled us. And then there was screen printing, the ping pong tournament, and foosball. And even briscola, with the accompanying traumatic discovery: apparently, it is not universal cultural heritage.
In short, we didn't get bored, but above all, those moments helped us get to know each other better, joke around, and bond as a group. And when we went back to work, you could feel the difference because it became easier to discuss, disagree, change our minds, and find compromises, without experiencing every choice as a small personal defeat.
Then (sigh) the last day arrived. And, inevitably, the last night too, the one where we really started building. We prototyped the physical and digital parts and, as our relic took shape, the many doubts that had remained suspended until that moment began to resolve themselves, almost on their own.
Here is another lesson from Playground: building clarifies. What a satisfaction to see something that didn't exist a few days earlier become real!
Friends, colleagues, and some companies from the Rawr network arrived for the final project presentations to share the results of those five days. But instead of explaining research, concepts, and processes with a string of slides and renders, we were asked to do something else: convert people.
Each group had to present itself as a small community with its own cult, show the relic, and seek new followers.
Even the way of presenting became part of the project itself. My group and I took the stage with a pillow in our arms, sleep masks, and slippers, and we ended the presentation by going to sleep. Perhaps you can guess our cult... the cult of sleep!
It was a way to take away some of our performance anxiety and make the presentations much more fun for those who came to watch.
I arrived feeling skeptical, thinking workshops weren't really my thing, and I left with a prototype under my arm, a few hours of sleep, and a desire to do another one as soon as possible. I had a blast, and I assure you that’s an unbiased opinion.
So yes, at Rawr we are already thinking about the second edition of Playground.
Get ready for next year.
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