To me, creativity is play, which is why I wanted to explore how play can be used as a design approach in interactive technology design, and what strengths and limitations that approach brings.
That curiosity led me to designing an interactive LED system for public transport. From your seat, a joystick controller lets you move a single light along an LED strip that runs through the whole vehicle, bumping into, chasing, or "high fiving" other passengers' lights along the way.
The starting point was the transit space itself: a liminal waiting zone, cut off from daily life, where people are neither working nor relaxing. I wanted to know if that in between state could become an opening for play, and how far I could push it before it stopped feeling acceptable.
Rather than plan the design upfront, I approached the project through what Andrew Pickering calls "revealing" rather than "enframing," staying open to what emerged instead of forcing the material into a predetermined shape. In practice, that meant working from one question: "how do I get even the least playful person to play a little?" I gave a friend prompts to reflect on play while riding public transport, prototyped controls with an Arduino, and tested early versions on baristas at IT-University’s (ITU) student café before scaling up to a public test with three controllers built into the café bar.
That final test was the most telling. People discovered the system unprompted, invented their own games with it (racing lights, trying to "collide," sneaking around invisibly by holding down the button), and interacted with strangers through it.
The tests confirmed there's real potential for playful, unplanned interaction between strangers in transit/waiting spaces. But they also surfaced the project's central limitation: designing for play here means designing at the edge of the space's unwritten rules, what we call a “wiggle space”, the negotiable room between rules and human behavior where playfulness can happen without breaking the social order outright. My tests didn't fully map where that edge sits in actual public transport, where people are usually alone, among strangers, and more protective of personal space than in a café.
My biggest takeaway: play is a powerful design approach for creating systems people genuinely appropriate and inhabit, but it can't be responsibly implemented without first understanding the wiggle space of the context you're designing for.
