Playces: Architecture That Affords Play

<p>This research portfolio examines the nature of play and its relationship with architecture. It researches how play is afforded by, and affords, the design of public space, rendering them places of play: Playces. Although play is an important component of everyone’s lives, this research portfolio focuses on adult play. Like art, music, dance and literature, play is a way of engaging and expressing our being in the world. It is a pleasurable activity that also serves a biological function. Play nurtures the mind and challenges our physical capabilities. It is a critical component of human development. Play is largely associated with childhood but maintaining a sense of playfulness is also a critical component of fulfilling adult lives. As we become adults, however, we tend to devalue the significance of play, relegating it to specific times and setting. We usually play in structured settings, solely dedicated to playing, unlike when we were children; we make very little distinction between play and other activities. A person’s propensity to play depends not only on their physiological and emotional state, but also on their environment. Play, unfortunately, is rarely encouraged in urban spaces and even more seldom is it integrated in the design of architecture. As a result, it has generated a society of disconnection, comfortable in the predictability of their surroundings. Architecture has the potential to design for a ludic environment. It can establish a new and ever-changing relationship with adults and re-engage them to the built environment through design for play. A playful framework can allow spaces to inspire new states of mind and detach adults from their everyday reality. Spaces can invite new relationship with the built environment, one of participation and ambiguity, allowing social interactions to thrive, routine to be interrupted and adults to become spontaneously engaged. These areas are investigated following a research through design methodology to provide an understanding of the qualities that can pave way for the ideas of playful urban design. Through a design as research methodology, Playces aims to discover how it can design a play-space that is not specifically created to accommodate play but invites players to appropriate that space through play. Play is explored at four designs phases, which implement a range of playful design techniques. Phase one serves as a preliminary exploration of play through the design of an installation. Phases two and three explore how architecture can possess the same playful interaction in the magnitude of a medium-scale and large-scale public space. The final design is a journey through space where conditions essential for play become evident.</p>

Playces: Architecture That Affords Play

<p>This research portfolio examines the nature of play and its relationship with architecture. It researches how play is afforded by, and affords, the design of public space, rendering them places of play: Playces. Although play is an important component of everyone’s lives, this research portfolio focuses on adult play. Like art, music, dance and literature, play is a way of engaging and expressing our being in the world. It is a pleasurable activity that also serves a biological function. Play nurtures the mind and challenges our physical capabilities. It is a critical component of human development. Play is largely associated with childhood but maintaining a sense of playfulness is also a critical component of fulfilling adult lives. As we become adults, however, we tend to devalue the significance of play, relegating it to specific times and setting. We usually play in structured settings, solely dedicated to playing, unlike when we were children; we make very little distinction between play and other activities. A person’s propensity to play depends not only on their physiological and emotional state, but also on their environment. Play, unfortunately, is rarely encouraged in urban spaces and even more seldom is it integrated in the design of architecture. As a result, it has generated a society of disconnection, comfortable in the predictability of their surroundings. Architecture has the potential to design for a ludic environment. It can establish a new and ever-changing relationship with adults and re-engage them to the built environment through design for play. A playful framework can allow spaces to inspire new states of mind and detach adults from their everyday reality. Spaces can invite new relationship with the built environment, one of participation and ambiguity, allowing social interactions to thrive, routine to be interrupted and adults to become spontaneously engaged. These areas are investigated following a research through design methodology to provide an understanding of the qualities that can pave way for the ideas of playful urban design. Through a design as research methodology, Playces aims to discover how it can design a play-space that is not specifically created to accommodate play but invites players to appropriate that space through play. Play is explored at four designs phases, which implement a range of playful design techniques. Phase one serves as a preliminary exploration of play through the design of an installation. Phases two and three explore how architecture can possess the same playful interaction in the magnitude of a medium-scale and large-scale public space. The final design is a journey through space where conditions essential for play become evident.</p>

Centenarians in the Global South: A View from Ethiopia

As global aging advances, the number of centenarians worldwide is greatly increasing. Most of what is known about centenarians comes the Global North. It is not clear what factors contribute to longevity of centenarians in impoverished, mostly rural areas of Global South nations that still lack basic amenities. Cultural differences in the profile, lifestyles, and needs of centenarians in Africa have yet to be documented. Using a case study design, this descriptive inquiry investigated the profiles of centenarians in Ethiopia including religion, marriage, education, occupation, income, and living arrangement. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with nine centenarians (1 woman, 8 men) and were analyzed using descriptive narrative analysis. Respondents were between 100 and 108 years old. All nine were adherents of Orthodox Christianity, had been married, and were great-grandparents. Their adult lives were marked by both residential and marital stability. The Ethiopian centenarians persevered through many losses and hardships with the help of strong community-based social networks. Unlike studies of centenarians in the Global North, most respondents were male and had strict religious upbringings. Understanding the unique profiles of centenarians in the Global South will help to inform research and practice with this growing population of the oldest-old.

Courting emissions: climate adjudication and South Africa’s youth

Background The urgency to pursue sustainable consumption or use energy in a manner that does not negatively impact the environment has become an important theme in recent times. As a major fluctuation in the atmosphere, climate change will be one of the major challenges faced by youth. As a result, there have been a growing number of young South Africans advocating for environmental justice. Surprisingly, their effort has not yielded the expected result as the country continues to emit a high amount of greenhouse gases. The notion of youth may be construed as those between the ages of 15 and 24. The age bracket suggests that the adult lives of this population will be shaped by environmental crises such as famines, vector-borne diseases, and hikes in commodity prices which may impinge on their basic rights to life, health, and property. This development triggers an ancient discourse, what role can youth play towards decarbonization? In other words, which effective avenue could be used by young people for capping emissions? Methods An analysis of South Africa’s energy policy documents relevant to sustainability was conducted through the application of desktop research. We use (inter)national instruments and jurisprudence to understand how a state structure, like the judiciary, could nudge the executive to cap rising green gas emissions. South Africa is used as a case study because of its over-reliance on coal for electricity, and how young people could use the existing legal framework to cap rising emissions. Drawing from existing literature, the paper interrogates the lack of activism around climate litigation and under what conditions this pattern could be reversed in South Africa. Results The paper found that while litigation has an important role to play in mitigating climate change, it ought to be complemented with other forms of advocacy. Conclusions The study concludes that given the government’s perceived slow steps towards shifting from coal to renewables, youth (who will bear the brunt of high emissions) ought to use both courtrooms and advocacy to trigger political action.

From Risk to Resilience: Adult Survivors of Childhood Violence Talk About Their Experiences

<p>The main focus of research into family violence has been around the ideas of intergenerational transmission of learned behaviours. We know a good deal about what constitutes risk for children, the outcomes of that risk and the processes that work to translate difficult childhoods into difficult adulthoods - for some children. We also all know children who seem to have 'weathered' the most appalling childhoods and to have emerged strong and resilient and who do not repeat the patterns of relating they experienced as children in their adult lives. It is this group that is the focus of the study. A purposively selected sample of eight, seven women and one man, with a range of backgrounds, was interviewed in depth using qualitative research methods informed by feminist standpoint theory. All of the eight had identified as having experienced significant violence as children, mainly in their families of origin. They also stated that they did not currently relate to their partners or children in violent ways, nor were they the victims of violent relationships. They consequently fell into the category of those who have "broken the cycle" of intergenerational abuse. Each person identified the things that helped them through their experiences and their reflections were then examined in more detail in the context of other studies on resilience. The interviews yielded an interesting array of findings which were consistent with literature which identifies certain attributes of the person and of their environment as protective. Findings are discussed with a view to their relevance to social work practice and policy. The list of protective factors may serve as an 'inventory' of potential resources for those working in the field of family violence. This study supports earlier work which challenges the idea of the inevitability of the intergenerational transmission of abuse, working instead from a paradigm which suggests that there are a multiplicity of 'resilience factors,' both integral to the individual and environmental, which interact in complex ways to enable many people to survive abuse and to relate in healthy ways in their adult lives.</p>

From Risk to Resilience: Adult Survivors of Childhood Violence Talk About Their Experiences

<p>The main focus of research into family violence has been around the ideas of intergenerational transmission of learned behaviours. We know a good deal about what constitutes risk for children, the outcomes of that risk and the processes that work to translate difficult childhoods into difficult adulthoods - for some children. We also all know children who seem to have 'weathered' the most appalling childhoods and to have emerged strong and resilient and who do not repeat the patterns of relating they experienced as children in their adult lives. It is this group that is the focus of the study. A purposively selected sample of eight, seven women and one man, with a range of backgrounds, was interviewed in depth using qualitative research methods informed by feminist standpoint theory. All of the eight had identified as having experienced significant violence as children, mainly in their families of origin. They also stated that they did not currently relate to their partners or children in violent ways, nor were they the victims of violent relationships. They consequently fell into the category of those who have "broken the cycle" of intergenerational abuse. Each person identified the things that helped them through their experiences and their reflections were then examined in more detail in the context of other studies on resilience. The interviews yielded an interesting array of findings which were consistent with literature which identifies certain attributes of the person and of their environment as protective. Findings are discussed with a view to their relevance to social work practice and policy. The list of protective factors may serve as an 'inventory' of potential resources for those working in the field of family violence. This study supports earlier work which challenges the idea of the inevitability of the intergenerational transmission of abuse, working instead from a paradigm which suggests that there are a multiplicity of 'resilience factors,' both integral to the individual and environmental, which interact in complex ways to enable many people to survive abuse and to relate in healthy ways in their adult lives.</p>

Profiles of Ethiopian centenarians: A qualitative inquiry

As global aging advances, the number of centenarians worldwide is greatly increasing. Most of what is known about centenarians comes the Global North. It is not clear what factors contribute to longevity of centenarians in impoverished, mostly rural areas of Global South nations that still lack basic amenities. Cultural differences in the profile, lifestyles, and needs of centenarians in Africa have yet to be documented. Using a case study design, this descriptive inquiry investigated the profiles of centenarians in Ethiopia including religion, marriage, education, occupation, income, and living arrangement. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with nine centenarians (1 woman, 8 men) and were analyzed using descriptive narrative analysis. Respondents were between 100 and 108 years old. All nine were adherents of Orthodox Christianity, had been married, and were great-grandparents. Their adult lives were marked by both residential and marital stability. The Ethiopian centenarians persevered through many losses and hardships with the help of strong community-based social networks.. Unlike studies of centenarians in the Global North, most respondents were male and had strict religious upbringings. Understanding the unique profiles of centenarians in the Global South will help to inform research and practice with this growing population of the oldest-old.

Childhood years as generational capital: Narratives of the 1970–1978 cohort

People born in the 1970s in Estonia spent their childhood during Soviet times and experienced their coming of age during the transition years of the 1990s. Experiencing the Soviet regime as children gave them experiences of that era, but kept them at a distance from involvement in regime’s culpable actions. It also enabled them to start their adult lives during the transition times, adjusting to new transition routes. Remembering the Soviet era and the social change is a powerful resource for this group. This symbolic capital and socialisation perspective accentuates itself in different situations, but among others when evaluating young people’s performance or social conditions. Based on in-depth and focus group interviews with 47 representatives of this cohort and articles written in mainstream media, the article will scrutinise how the memories from the Soviet time as well as social transformation in the 1990s has shaped the generational consciousness of this age group. It will be argued that studying retrospective accounts of children about the times of change can be fruitful as it shows how these experiences are transformed into symbolic weapons in power games and shape the generational landscape and hierarchies. These experiences can be transformed into what will be conceptualised as generational capital.

A STUDY OF POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES OF DISABLED CHILDREN IN INDIA

The Constitution of India (1950), Article 41, states the ‘Right to Education and Work’ and Article 45 on ‘Free Compulsory Education for All Children up to the Age of 14 Years’, both Articles are inclusive of children with mental retardation. The Education Commission, 1964-66 directed to move education for persons with disabilities from that of the charity mode to one of the rights mode, hoping that at least 5 per cent of the persons with mental retardation should have received education by 1986. It lay emphasis on making persons with disabilities as useful citizens in their adult lives. The Commission further recommended that both special schools and schools in the integrated school system should include persons with disabilities. The present paper focused on the study of various policies and program of disabled children in India with the prime objectives are (i) To understand the concept of disabled children (ii) To understand the policies of disabled children in India. (iii) To discuss the programs of disabled children in India.