Replayables
Modular Play Systems
Replayables is a collaboration with Becky Kazansky, Erica Newman, Ju Yun Song, and Eunyoung Kang
Replayables was developed as a project for Design for UNICEF, an ongoing collaboration between ITP and UNICEF originally organized by Clay Shirky. Design for UNICEF has produced a number of projects that have been applied in real world situations with positive impacts on communities such as RapidFTR and Water Canary. This year’s Design for UNICEF was led by Jorge Just (RapidFTR) and Chris Fabian, Innovation Specialist at UNICEF.
Replayables is a prototype for modular play systems that might be included in supply kits for children in disaster relief situations. Replayables are designed to be open-ended forms of play that enable individual play and discovery but encourage group and collaborative play through their modular nature.
Each Replayable unit has an inherent level of complexity and reconfigurability that a child can understand and explore through solo play, but that complexity grows when two or more units are combined together. Combining units allows players to discover new possibilities that are only possible through collaboration.
The two units that I focused on were a paperboard color tile puzzle and a set of cut-out 3D building blocks also made of paperboard.
Replayables are not intended specifically for classroom use though they might be useful tools in such settings. The concepts that children can learn individually and together are powerful developmental ones that children within a broad age group can benefit from. Ideas such as procedural construction, interdependency, how different typologies can emerge from the same parts.
One idea was to have versions of Replayables printed on the inside of supply packaging that could be used after the supplies had been distributed.