This is the final blog of 2014, crowning an extremely brilliant and playful year. Judging by what we already know about next year’s exciting project launches and Lunchtime Talk programme, it looks like it could be even better!
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and see you on the other side…

This week we are delighted to welcome a new Studio resident. Artist and Creative Director of Motley Collective, Sabrina Shirazi will be joining us to develop various projects including the brilliant AFFIX, project, which uses affixable 3D shapes to explore tactile and interactive play. She will also be developing Cuisine+Colour, a collaboration between culinary artisans and visual artists, creating colour infused dining experiences. We are so happy that we will get to see the evolution of these projects, and their visceral investigations into our different senses. We know that Sabrina will bring a lot of vibrancy into the fold of the Studio.

Splash and Ripple have recently been developing a new theatrical experience, called Through Another’s Eyes. In this phone-powered ‘cinematic game of empathy’, the audience will become the central character in a short personal narrative. They will live another’s life for an hour, making decisions for the character they play and developing an understanding of their hopes, fears and motivations. Splash and Ripple have just released a video about the project, which gives more of an insight into what it is all about. The project was born in Recife on the Playable City Brazilian exchange, and has recently been shortlisted by The Space in their current call out for new work.

We had a REACT Play Sandbox Workshop in the Studio on Wednesday. In the morning, the participants were each asked to come up with an offer for the group. They talked about previous project and shared their own valuable experience with each other, around everything from sustainable design to financing projects involving hardware. In the afternoon, the teams invited the Young Coaches ( 8 – 12 year olds who are helping advise on the projects) to come and try out  their prototypes and offer advice.
Strax set up a prototype of their 2 player game for playtesting,
Curio Keepsake had asked the Young Coaches to fill treasure chests with their precious objects, and had a discussion with them about why they had chosen to include what they had. They also tested a prototype of the project’s technology. The kids got very excited by this and stuck RFID tags to everything, including their own foreheads and chins.
Teleportation Tent (formerly Flatpack Cinema) set up a cluster of tents and projectors, got the kids to clamber inside and explored different story dynamics.
Mice of Mischief invited a group of children with Down syndrome to the Studio to playtest different games, and work out which kinds of game mechanic had the best response.
Mighty Minis had 3D printed some egg-shaped prototype ‘souls’ to give to the Young Coaches to carry around so that they could assess how practical/ergonomic the design was. During the lab, an article Esther (researcher on the project) had written about Mighty Minis was published on the Develop website.
Connected Play took a group of kids up to the park and hooked LEDs up to a swing, which the kids could then control by how high they were swinging.

No doubt more brilliant blogs will be popping up over the Christmas break, so keep popping over to the Play microsite.