Augmented places: educational environments and the sense of ‘play’

Digital media could be considered a type of ‘play’; as creative and engaging tools to design and think with about architecture and designing processes. Within this paper, the digital media are considered as a tool that provides us with qualities equivalent to those of play. ‘Play’ is a notion easy to comprehend intuitively, but complex to analyse and define. Anthropologists and psychologists have examined the elements that make the play engaging and stimulating, and to function as such. Here, we will base our examination of play, and its relation to digital media, upon the three notions that Piaget describes as the three stages of play: (a) the element of surprise and the tendency to explore things through action, (b) the role-play, and (c) the complex rules and metaphors that make up the play. Through this paper, it is argued that these three elements are key aspects of the digital media, and reasons for which the often constitute engaging mechanisms to ‘play’ or design with.