Lucius Von Joo

Lucius Von Joo:

My dissertation was about play and how children play in spaces that they can create their own rules to do that. The dissertation went through drawing illustrations, photography, many different modes, and part of the defense was creating a gallery exhibit that held and shared those modes with the public.
I'm Lucius Von Joo, and I'm associate director of Design Education here at the Digital Futures Institute, which is housed in Teachers' College. I got my degree in the communication and media and learning technologies design department here at Teachers College. And for me, that was really heavy on the communication and education side. In short, the dissertation was about children's view of playing and how they play and the boundaries that they create. But I think it started from thinking about in education and in anthropology, which is part of my background, there's a heavy focus on what children are doing in the classroom and what that tells us about how they'll be part of society.
And for me, I was curious about what's the walk-to school like? What are kids like when they're not being in a place that they're supposed to be social or supposed to be in a manner? What do they choose to be? What kind of boundaries do they create for themselves or uphold when they're not around that space? And so that really led me to a lot of different places thinking about that. But what it eventually landed on was Adventure Playgrounds. Adventure Playgrounds have been around since during World War II is when they first came about. And they're playgrounds that basically, I often described them as curated junkyards. Their original name was Junk Playground in Denmark, and later changed to Adventure Playgrounds in the UK. But the whole thing was kids were playing in rubble, kids were creating the worlds they wanted to, opposed to running towards the swing sets that existed.
And so there was that curiosity of, okay, so let's see what they build and let's make the spaces for them. And so the fact that that Adventure Playgrounds have a shared history that went international, similar to something like a kindergarten movement that has a shared history and then span out. But the way it spun out into different places was my curiosity. So instead of just saying, what is the walk like to school, that could vary so greatly. So I wanted some shared history to look at places of how it's happening in there. Oftentimes, I'll use the words interchangeably, but players in Adventure Playgrounds can age much higher than your average playground that you picture. So depending on the playground itself, you can see kids who are 20 playing in those spaces and just changing, their play evolves with them. Because if you can tear down a slide and build a fort or eventually, I don't know, build a bar or whatever it is that you build in those spaces that fit your interests, it's constantly changing with them. So you do have a larger age gap.
First, like I mentioned, I was curious about the boundaries and really what it meant in a place that was more flexible about what could be done there and what could be imagined there. I was curious, okay, so what happens when you have that? What does that mean? And what rules do come up and what rules do people create, the players themselves create, to work it out? Obviously even when you're having rough play with friends, you still negotiate rules for how that rough play and you know when it's gone too far. So I was really interested in that. But to get the full idea of the space, I knew that I had to think of it at least in three different channels. To be honest, five, but I focused on three for the dissertation. And one was focusing on the players, the people who are playing in that space. The other was the space itself, and the final was the people who facilitate that or kind of create it, are the constant there.
I'm talking about the form of my dissertation, it was a three article dissertation, which oftentimes you have in a quantitative dissertation when they have so much data to work with, they're going to release it in different papers and treat it that way. And for me, because my dissertation was much more focused in qualitative methods, I wanted to have those three papers focus on the three actors that I was looking at. So again, the children or the players of the space, the play workers or the facilitators of the space and the space itself. And so I think I look at those things differently, but I wanted to see it here as much as possible from the experts in that space. Obviously I was a guest at most in all those places.
So I've written some work in the past thinking through post-humanism and thinking about, okay, how do we write about the other actors in a situation outside of just the people that are there? And because we're writing to people and because we're writing about people in those spaces, I really like the concept of post-humanism and that it includes other things that might have been overlooked at historically in research, but for me, it is just doing that. It's adding more, but not necessarily just including others. And to do that well, I wanted to separate them. So when I'm talking about the children, I wanted to exclusively talk about the children. When you look at, oftentimes when children, their voices are in a paper, the minute you hear, oh, and then the teacher in the room thought this, all of those words that are quoted from the child or their perspectives instantly are missed in that paper. It's supplemental, but it's often missed. So when I was talking about the children and the players, I really wanted to be talking about them, not how someone else sees them.
When I was talking about the space, that one I'm a little more flexible about because I did a linguistic analysis of the writing around the spaces and what it meant to have your words express places. So I was looking at human imprint of the space, but at the same time, I wanted to focus on that. I wanted to focus on what was left. When you don't see the people running around, what do you see in that space? What kind of imprint? And then the play workers, I wanted to have again, a conversation with them on their terms. So even because of that, I wanted a different methodology for each of the actors in that space. So with the children, I did what I call a multi-annotated layered dialogue, which was basically the children running around. I'd show up at a space and I'd be like, "This is your space, huh?" Even if a kid was there for their first day, they'd be like, "Yeah, this is my space." And I'd be like, "Great. Can you take photos of things that you think are interesting here, you have a big memory with?"
And they'd absolutely run off with a digital SLR camera, a little bit of older one, and they'd go take some photos, and then they'd come back and we look at them quickly and I'd be like, "Let's print out a couple of these." I'd try to keep it two to five just to keep our conversation kind of in a place that I could keep up with. It's obviously the player could go much faster than me. And I print those out onto about A-4 letter size paper, and I'd ask the kid, "Okay, great, what did you see when you were taking the photo?" And so they would draw on top of it, because I didn't want it to stop at just great, this is their version of it. And then I would blow up those photos into posters with their markings, and I would bring those to other places where kids would play, these other cities and these other playgrounds and just leave them out and leave them out with a ton of pens.
Whether it be just simple iconic things or sometimes simple words would show up on there. And them just playing with space, a lot of conversation of them wanting to spend time together. So whether that means them drawing themselves parachuting into another playground really far away and imagining that thing. There'd be elements, like there's a turtle in one of these playgrounds, a very large turtle. And the kids would see that, and then they would instantly imagine, what if we had a turtle and our playground? And so actually not only on the posters would that turtle show up, but I saw that turtle markings start to show up on the walls of those other playgrounds. So they kind of had a dialogue with what they imagined.
And so I went really into detail there to just explain that that's what I did for the players of the space. But for the play workers, I wanted to change channels because they see it more spatially. They see it as crafting a space often. They're the ones who will walk around, and again, I mentioned this as curated junk, but they're the ones who go around and kick the structures to make sure they're not going to fall on somebody. So obviously anybody's allowed to build anything, but it's not like it doesn't go unchecked. There's something that I'll add here that's really simple, but the idea in all of this play work and that follows these Adventure Playgrounds is the difference between a risk and a hazard. And a risk would be, for example, if a kid climbs up on this and chooses to jump off. They were able to climb up on it, they're gauging their balance, they're gauging all that. But if there happens to be rusty nails or broken glass down there that they're going to land on and have harm, that's a hazard. That's something that they didn't anticipate.
And so play workers, when I call it curated junk yards, they're constantly going around and making sure there's nothing dangerous in those spaces. Again, it's reassessing it all the time, and depending on the space becomes really flexible. You can tell these Adventure Playgrounds are hard to describe, but oftentimes their materials also... When I was thinking of the material of the spaces they're donated from the local city. And part of some of my other work I do is in maker spaces and a lot of maker spaces have a lot of new materiality in it, a lot of new electronics, a lot of new things to imagine hopefully, I don't know i solutions, but ideas for the future.
And for me, when I saw these Adventure Playgrounds, something else that came up is they're dealing with the garbage of their city to reimagine something or to at least think of new ideas with. So again, when they were founded in the anti-aesthetic of war rebel, it was imagining, what else can you do with this? What can you build with this? And so all to say that I think each paper leads to its own methodology that fits that group opposed to just forcing it across and having that conversation, it's just a different conversation. I think that's my favorite part with all the concept of multimodal methods is that you get to have different conversations using that mode, and people who you're working with get to give you a different version of what they would imagine that space to be.
Because I could have given a survey to those kids as they were exiting and asked them, what'd you do today? What was ?the most exciting moment? And just had this really clear questioning, but I wanted to explore it through the things that I would've never seen or I could have never imagined or demanding a recall at a certain moment, wouldn't have allowed that. And I think, again, when we talk about multimodal methods, it goes both ways. So even when I'm taking notes out on the Playgrounds for my own memory, I would make sure that they were all just illustrated. I would just draw what I was seeing. And for me, that was really important.
So any player at any age could run by and be like, "That's me. That's me on that box." And I'd be like, "Yeah, that is. I'm drawing this to remember because I'm thinking about this." And then they'd be like, "Can I mark it?" Or maybe they hand print on it or something like that. But for me, it was so important to make sure the methods just play with methods enough to give that kind of transparency. And I think multi-modality at its best, gives those layers of transparency. When I'm doing research, I often actually start thinking of the methodology because it's the point of contact, and I just start thinking of all the risks. Having a background in filmmaking, I think of all the things that have happened between cameras and people.
And so it just gets me thinking about, okay, if I'm going to try this, what is that going to be like for the participants and where are they going to get to share? It's just a different way to interact with something. And so I would never take away text for that. It's more just imagining what else is there and what happens when you do it. And one thing that I'll probably keep saying is, and when you try that new thing, what risks are you bringing in for people as well? Great. They have another form of expression, but you're also maybe giving them a bullhorn when they didn't want to. They just want to whisper to their friends. And so it's a balance like that I think. I think that's the affordances is more contact and more expression.
One challenge, as you can see even in this talking through these conversations about multi-modality, is I spend so much time explaining how I did something and not as much time expressing all the amazing things that came out of it. And I think in a paper, in a long-form paper, I get to do that, or in an exhibit, I get to really focus on that. But in a conversation with people, oftentimes I'm spending so much time explaining it because those nuances are very important, and it's very new to the field.
 Advice that I have to give to people about when they want to do multimodal research. It really depends on the circumstance. It depends on the mode they want to try out. So sometimes somebody feels that they have a really practiced voice in a different mode. For those people, it's really like, okay, great, you've spent all that time with it. How do you think through it? How do you make it transparent? And how will you do it in those settings? I think those are the questions. And then there's other people who want to try them out because they're interested and curious. And I think for those people, it's really reading how other people have trialed those modes and really seeing the pitfalls that they had and just adding to the discourse I think.
What I found even that I get frustrated with is I will hear somebody share something and I'll be like, "Oh, that's so good in that video." And then I'll go look for it. I'll be like, "Where did they say that in a paper?" People are more accustomed to that, and then I can cite it, and then people can follow that formula. Or maybe even for their own sake. They've spent more time editing that instead of saying it quickly out loud. But in this case, if somebody encountered my work through an exhibit, I'd love if they just could cite the exhibit because that's the level... Maybe they got interested in it afterwards and then dove in a different way. But if it was the exhibit that got their interest, I would love for them to be able to cite that.
And I was thinking about this and even changing my own practices and thinking about how do I cite other people's work? But I would love for them to email me or whatever, contact me in some way and be like, "Hey, I saw this exhibit. Do you have a paper that relates to that?" Maybe they'll ask that question. I'd be like, "No, no, please cite the exhibit itself." So even have that conversation. And I realized that's not a practice I do. I usually do it on my own and search for the academic path, almost as the institution becomes a mediator of our conversation. Whereas in actuality, I was like, "Oh, they said it there." But where can I tell people where we had that conversation?
What I'm currently working on and what I'd like to continue is this series, so modes again is something we do here in the DFI Gallery where we look at five dissertations that have tried to either include multimodal methods pre in their data collection or express that data in a different mode. So whether that be graphic novel or podcast or whether that be collecting different data as far as gesture or something like that, that wouldn't be traditionally recorded. And so I hope to continue the series so that we're building out again for scholars or advisors to see and have a reference to, oh wow, this idea was thought through this. And hopefully this interview series gives you that context of the behind scenes of thinking through. It's been great for me. Usually, obviously I'm on the other side of the camera for these, but just hearing how people, the troubles or how they move through things with different modes.