NETWORKED PLAYSCAPES 




MIT Media Lab

Laboratorio para la Ciudad 
Museo Tamayo
Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura
CIDI UNAM
Casa Talavera
Café Bagdad

PUBLICATIONS
Portocarrero, E. Networked Playscapes: Redefining the Playground Program in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, 2017

TALKS
2019 Experience Fighters
Madrid, ES 
2017 Mapping Festival
Paradigm Shift Forum
Geneva, CH
2015 O’Reilly’s
SOLID Conference
San Francisco, CA
2015 Ad Week Creative Thinkers
New York City, NY
Tecnológico de Monterey
Mexico City, MX


AWARDS
2017 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Award in the Visual Arts
2016 Bill Mitchell ++ Fund, MIT
2015 MISTI Seed Fund, MIT & CONACYT
Space informs play; play informs space. Designed with a broad definition of play in mind, Networked Playscapes provide infrastructure for connection at different scales while centering on ludic interaction across social and geographic divisions. Driven by local idiosyncrasies and physical affordances, Networked Playscapes take the telepresent quality of imaginative play to make congruous use of physical computing embedded in architectural constructs and nature itself.

Networked Playscapes was deployed in Mexico City by invitation from the city’s innovation laboratory chief creative officer. Three distinct networked installations bridged six neighborhoods with high indexes of segregation through play. Networked Playscapes won multiple grants and awards, and was generously supported by public and private institutions, bringing people together who would not otherwise come together from its conception.

In terms of networking, they sample three levels of connectedness: awareness of other, awareness of consequence of action at a distance (teleoperation), and interpersonal engagement with others in synchronous and asynchronous modalities.

For detailed information on Andamio, Triciclo, or Listentree, please visit each.

Networked Playscapes was granted the Bill Mitchell ++ Prize, an MIT-Conacyt Seed Fund, and was supported by Archivo Arquitectura y Diseño, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, and Museo Tamayo, where it inspired the exhibit "Noguchi's Playscapes."

Networked Playscapes was recognized with the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize for the Visual Arts at MIT.


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The world has become urban, communication untethered, and objects have surpassed humans connected to the Internet. We are shaped by the intersection of urbanization and ubiquitous computing. Play too has changed with the advent of new technologies. Where streets were the playground and neighbors were our playmates, we now play mediated, across distance, with people we might never meet.

Digital or physical, play is an act of creation and appropriation, a respite in a world geared towards consumption, efficiency, and technological determinism. Play is more than children's fun, and playgrounds are more than places for play - physicality, materiality, and commonality strengthen our experience of the real in the realms of perception, experience, cultural and social interaction. Play is better served when grounded in material form and does us better when it is accessible, shared, and happens in the public space.

This research project proposes that the advantages of networked play need not be exclusive to the indoors and that playgrounds today may need no real estate, and explores ways in which we can reintroduce play as a tool for integration in the cities-to-be by designing grounds-up, locally informed, networked, hybrid playscapes.