UCLIC Research Seminar Series

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, like other mechanisms for conceptualizing societal wellbeing, center problems of immediate and pervasive importance: gender equality, world hunger, global health, quality education, and more. These are challenges of global relevance to be examined, engaged, alleviated, and we have little time at hand to do so. What most frameworks for global and social change frequently sideline is the role that leisure, or play, might have in supporting these tremendous pursuits towards making the world a better place for all.

Implicit in these tensions is the assumption that play is not high enough a priority, not low enough in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and therefore not anywhere in the plans that researchers and practitioners of global, sustainable development tend to foreground. What then is play good for? How might it open us up to imagining new and different futures?

In this talk, I will begin with my initial encounters with play and leisure, the path my early explorations took me on as I grappled with these questions that it raised, introducing the audience to the work of others that offered inspiration along the way. I will draw connections with research efforts in the HCI community, and conclude by raising questions for the audience to engage with around making play work 4D, or for development.