Politics is (re)configured as things are (re)designed. And playful configurations produce forms of being in/becoming with the world. Plays are processually and ambiguously productive. We play-with the material ecologies that surround us to act politically. We play by composing, decomposing, and recomposing reality, inherently re-configuring the matters that come to matter. This workshop seeks to advance a debate around playful design in the context of international social sciences by emphasizing its political ambivalences. In particular, it questions the prospects and limitations of playful design as a mode of re/making international relations differently, while unpacking the kinds of phenomena and politics it engenders. The workshop aims at addressing, for instance, the following tentative questions - and others:
 

• Remaking? - Does playfulness serve the reiteration or obfuscation of existing, ‘serious’ political, social, cultural schemes of being? Or, does it offer chances for resistance and emancipation from the non-playful habitus? How does it intervene in political temporalities and spatialities? Does it break with historical linearity and immobility? And if so, with what consequences? Does it produce justice, healing the past for the future, or is it ever more harmful in a permanent, subaltern present?
• Playful design - What does playful design do? How do the forms, contexts, and connections that compose playful designs in global politics emerge, change, endure, and/or end? What configurations does playful designing make real? How does matter generate playfulness in design? How does playful design distribute agency across the human and the non-human?
• Playful politics - How do aesthetics and affect produce playful politics through designing and in what formats? What are the limits and possibilities of approaching politics from the prism of affect in playful designs of international relations? How are playful designs articulated into specific policy agendas across communities and institutions? Can creativity, improvisation, and strategy be reconciled through playful design? If so, how? Is playfulness purposeful or only consequential?

This will be a closed event, those that are interested to attend it should send an email to Lucas (lucas.perez@graduateinstitute.ch).

This event is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project ‘The Future of Humanitarian Design’.

Image: Future Memory replica at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum. On display at the entrance of the Museum since 2024 as ‘a tribute to the victims of the atomic bombings of 1945 and to the work of civil society and other members of the international community’.