Playing with the Trouble: A Library for Transformative Play

Spaces that cultivate playfulness can open up participants to express, share, question, and transform how they experience and act in the world.

Over four years, our interdisciplinary team of researchers has been co-designing playful materials and activities that can support knowledge exchange through unusual collaborations in research and education, and developing them through sessions across four universities in the Netherlands as well as at Norwich University of the Arts in the UK. Our library for transformative play, online and in physical form, synthesises insights from a range of games and activities into a shareable resource addressing five ‘purposes’ within interdisciplinary (and transdisciplinary) collaborations:

• Surfacing worldviews
• Facilitating collective imagination
• Staying with the trouble (in Donna Haraway’s term)
• Unmaking systems
• Embracing ambiguity

Playing with the Trouble has been funded by the EWUU Alliance’s Centre for Unusual Collaborations via their Spark and UCo grant schemes, from 2021–25.

Conferences

Lockton, D., Vervoort, J., Waardenburg, M., Duncan, J., Chambers, J., Ripoll-Bosch, R., Vervoort, J.M., Browne, J., Downward, G., Llamas, A., Knight, S., Vu, D.V. and Colombant, S. (2023). Playing With Systems. In: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD12, 6–20 Oct 2023, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Lockton, D., Chambers, J., Vervoort, J., Vervoort, J.M., Browne, J., Ripoll-Bosch, R., Ruijtenberg, S., Duncan, J., Waardenburg, M. and de Lint, L. (2022). Playing With The Trouble: Exploring (mini)games for interdisciplinary connections. In: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD11, 3-16 Oct 2022, Brighton, UK.