Each Project Play team will design, build, and demonstrate a kinetic play structure for children and their grandparents. We have several ambitions. We want to create opportunities for fun, active, play for children: the amusement park ride, the active playground structure — unique physical experiences (think roller coaster, merry-go-round, ferris wheel). We want to create opportunities for children to play, not only with one another, but with their parents and grandparents — a multi-generational experience. Instead of going to the fitness center, why can’t adults visit the playground and work out with their children as part of play?

Our play structures will be human-powered; we will harness people turning cranks, walking on treadmills, or other physical exercise to make the rides go. And we’ll work mostly with recycled and reused, and traditional building materials. But in addition to the low-tech energy-savings of human-powered motion, we’ll use digital electronics to enhance the rides with ambient intelligence. Sensors, switches, and robotic actuation will create a hi-tech overlay to the experience. We’ll try to harness energy from the people playing to generate power for the electronics, making a zero-energy high-tech robotic playground.

We’ll draw inspiration from the mechanical inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, the kinetic sculpture of Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely; but also the high-tech robotics art of BurningMan, Survival Research Labs, and the DIY / Make everyday creativity culture of today.

The workshop is mentored by Professor Mark Gross and Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do. Professor Mark Gross works at Carnegie Mellon University on computational construction kits, tangible interaction, computer-supported critiquing, creativity, and modular robotics for education. He has worked on constraint programming languages and sketch recognition and teaches tangible interaction design. Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do works at Georgia Institute of Technology on creative machine environment and healthcare environment of the future. Her research explores new modalities of communication, collaboration, and coordination, as well as the physical and virtual worlds that push the current boundaries of computing environments for design.