Let's get phygital, phygital - strategic insights from Playdoh and video
In the Socratic dialogue 'Republic', Plato famously wrote: “our need will be the real creator”, and this rang true in a recent project we at Alkimia Learning undertook in collaboration with fellow KaosPilot Masterclass alumni from Culture Hero. When client constraints meant our well-designed plans would not work, necessity became the mother of invention. With a creative spirit, belief in the power of serious play and some new tech, we were able to iterate on a proven learning experience and achieve the desired outcomes.
“I really appreciate (this activity)...this was brilliant...we can send our feedback and have a dialogue, even remotely, I did feel that this was a dialogue.”
In this project, our role was to co-design experiences that facilitate learning through play partnerships between children and caregivers in 12 countries around the world. As part of the process, we wanted to get the perspectives of the client's staff that have direct contact with their community partners across their diverse network of actors. We thought we could take advantage of an in-person gathering of the team in and lead them all virtually through the playful and powerful 3D sculpture activity that another alum, Elaine Olsen from Perth, introduced us to during the Learning Labs in 2020. However, the Creative Gods were against (or for?) us and it wasn’t possible to do the activity before everyone returned to different corners of the planet.
The question became how might we gather these key stakeholder perspectives asynchronously and virtually in a meaningful and playful way? At the time, we didn’t know the answer, but we trusted that we would somehow find a way, so the team all received a colourful kit of Playdoh and other materials to take home with them and a request to await further instructions.
We decided to create a ‘phygital’ learning experience – a mix of physical and digital. To help us do this we experimented with a platform that was new to us, www.videoask.com which allows you to create one-to-one conversations at scale. We adapted and simplified the original activity and broke it down into bite-sized steps. We then recorded short videos (a screen shot of the video journey is below) to explain each of the activity’s steps and frame questions for the participants to answer either via video, audio or text.
A carefully crafted invitation and link was sent out to the client's staff and every response was recorded, transcribed (with only a few errors), and organised by the platform itself. We were then able to review everyone’s responses and synthesise insights for the co-design process. From our point of view, the exercise was a success as we got great insights for the co-design of the learning experiences and were able to involve the whole team despite the geographical barriers. And as you can see by the quotes shared, the participants also enjoyed it and found it meaningful.
“I started this feeling a bit like this was ‘forced play’ but then was actually really pleasantly surprised by how deep it got me thinking by the end of it. When I turned my sculpture and saw the child figure literally leaning on my symbol of the Foundation I had a bit of an A -ha moment.”
So here's to creative constraints (even they seem annoying at first), a belief in the power of serious play and openness to try doing old things in new ways. How have you discovered new ways of doing old things lately? What have you done to help you and your learners experience the power of serious play virtually?
