The first floor of the Solarium became a real paradise for playing during VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2020. It was home to, amongst other things, life-sized modular building blocks, fantastic creatures, and deliciously soft dragon’s lairs, all of which were completely reimagined playthings that encouraged children of all ages to let off steam. The design playground was the work of students from TU Wien. The Center of Three-Dimensional Design and Model Making addressed, amongst other things, product design at the interface with architecture and art. In the summer semester of 2020, students worked on the design of a children’s construction toy, which should awake an interest in self-determined and oblivious play as a means of enhancing the sensorimotor, social, and creative skills of its young users. The TU’s Human Computer Interaction Group questions the IT mindset and provides a home for projects that creatively and critically address the challenges of new technologies. As such, Social Play Technologies saw VIENNA DESIGN WEEK as an opportunity to offer insights into its research into design processes with groups of neurodiverse children. With its combination of both interactivity and pure play, the presentation showed how children challenge our notion of design and helped us to understand what technology must be capable of if it is to ensure that playing together is possible in all its diverse forms.

socialplay.at

igw.tuwien.ac.at/hci

e2642.kunst.tuwien.ac.at