How to activate and engage a culturally diverse community to strengthen community spirit through the act of playing?

Intercultural interactions root its importance in forming meaningful relationships and creating a friendly environment in the community. As people share cultures and learn from one another, they become more confident with themselves as individuals and comfortable practising their cultures. By using “play” as a tool for interculturality to happen, it is in these “games” do people lower their inhibitions in participation and allow inclusivity to act.

Murals and graffiti decorate Deptford, indicating richness in the arts and expressions of culture. This diversity can be seen as an output of various perspectives and locals’ interaction with spaces. Play emerges as its own character in navigating through behaviour and reactions and proposes a sense of freedom in re-identifying the urban settings.
The typical perception of “play” relates to children and games. In this design-research project, the definition of “play” moves beyond that to find that it is innate to human behaviour.

In Homo Ludens, playfulness can be seen in all aspects of life—from the joy of games to the seriousness of religious practices.
Play is in interpretation.
The architectural proposal departs from the idea of re-interpreting a building as a public space, with each floor resembling its parts. Treating the existing playground as an infrastructure, cubic fractals are used in its design in lieu to adapt the language of the structure as streets and squares. These spaces are set to interact with private functions to create a dialogue between scheduled programmes and impromptu.

Continuing the design research of the project as an intercultural node engagement machine, the intervention juxtaposes a proposal for interferences in a routine. Endeavouring these disruptions as playful interventions would develop and produce iterations of this initial proposal.