THE THEME
The workshop is aimed at trying to explore ‘play’ as a world of its own, where play comes in the guise of various activities not always obvious as play but with the promise of play. In this ‘world’ of play – viz., the playsphere - collaboration becomes a way to enrich the scope of play itself.

THE INTENT
Given the short duration of the workshop – 3.5 + 3.5 hrs with a final presentation - the emphasis will be to engage the students with a sense of the process that leads one to start with universals (in this case ‘play’ and ‘collaboration’) and reach through a given design challenge, a set of specifics in the form of design interventions.

THE PROCESS
Starting with an initial set of exercises common to all 12 students, and which attempt to build towards the ecosystems of the chief variables (viz., ‘play’ and ‘collaboration’), the students will then be divided into groups of 3's or 4's as might seem practical, and each of them assigned a certain environment/user group/audience, to which the students will then address the given design challenge based on the boundary conditions of play and collaboration as thrown up by our initial exercises in brain storming.
The students will be encouraged to think out of the box to build a sense of creativity into their respective design interventions, especially for those situations that are constrained by play-restricted or collaboration-restricted elements.

THE EXPECTED OUTCOME AND DESIGN GOAL
The final output(s) will take on the form of visualized environments and strategies aimed at heightening the values of our daily lives through a creative combination of play and collaboration.
The design goal will be to afford a glimpse of playspheres – a conceptual world residing in a series of mental maps - but which arguably could very well exist in the real world with just a little design consciousness.

Time permitting, I will also venture to demonstrate some examples of design work from India related to this area.