This week the British Council and Watershed have brought together twelve leading artists and designers from across East Asia and the UK, for a five-day sprint at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio around the theme of The Playable City.


Play is a compelling and powerful tool. It can change behaviour; transform perceptions of space; and inspire audiences to participate and contribute, rather than simply observe. For this sprint, participants are working together to experiment and prototype playful interventions that use creative technologies to rethink public space.

Drawn from across varied art forms and disciplines, participants from the UK include installation artist Tine Bech, games designer Julian Sykes, sound artist Kathy Hinde, visual artist Mathew Trivett and product designer Vahakn Matossian. International guests include Australian theatre makers Leticia Cáceres and Angela Betzien of RealTV, Japanese Product designer/sound artist Yuri Suzuki, visual artist Megumi Matsubara also from Japan, Korean duo Bang & Lee, and Malaysian composer Ng Chor Guan.

Setting out to catalyse an active community of peer learning and development, this five-day Sprint has created a platform for critical and technical investigation of ideas through a process of discussion, sharing, making and testing; and allow participants to make valuable connections that will last beyond the end of the lab.

So far participants have been devising and making work that explores usings an LED colour system attached to bicycles that gamifies your daily commute, a raft that transmits pirate radio from the harbourside and an app that allows to follow your heart to installations and stories around the city. To find our more have a look at the blog, follow the hastag #playablecity on twitter and come to our free lunchtime talk today at 1pm to hear all the triumphs and tribulations from the artists themselves.