Before doing the strategic score, I had to re-consolidate some of my previous missing research of Hong Kong that would significantly help the project. The idea was to first find out previous attempts in creating Utopian versions of Hong Kong, what materials did they use, forms of creatiions and from that looking into the playground developments of the city and how children reacted towards the designs.

• Updates on Utopian case studies in Hong Kong – The Umbrella Movement, 2014
  2014 September 26 to December 15 in Hong Kong spate fight true universal suffrage of the civil disobedience movement. Demonstrators spontaneously took up several major arterial roads for sit-ins and marches . Occupied areas include the Admiralty , Tamar , Central , Wan Chai , Causeway Bay , Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui . Their main appeals are the withdrawal of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China to the 2017 Chief Executive Election. And the 2016 Legislative Council Election Framework and Candidate Nomination Scheme for the Chief Executive Election Citizen nomination rights and repeal of the Legislative Council functional constituencies . The main symbol of the movement is a yellow umbrella. The protesters used umbrellas to shield the police when they were dispelled by pepper spray . The media thus called the movement an “umbrella revolution” or “umbrella movement.”

•  Hong Kong Playgrounds transformations and important aspects that could be taken into the 2035 Utopia. 

• Discussing the idea of “Free Play” in Hong Kong from the past to present and into the 2035 from both the views of the Government and the citizens. 
  Towards the bottom right pointing out that risks are essential in creating tools for imagination and how parents could be the pioneers in bring out these problems of the present to the architects to create a “Propaganda for Free Play” towards 2035.

• Are they children or prisoners?! (2018)

• Beginning of the strategic score…
  The word “affordance” is key to the strategic score. The word was derived from the American psychologist James Gibson in 1960s where he  developed an alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale. A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as follows.

   

  “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill.”

   

  For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on. There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need to be emphasised here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e., meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus, an affordances-based description of the environment “includes” the animal (Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this, describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an animal points to the functional significance this environment has for the animal.

  Gibson had claimed that nearly every object affords different activities for an individual. This holds true also for conventional play elements like a slide and a see-saw. Children can use a slide as a thing to climb on (using the ladder) and slide down, but they can also jump from it after climbing to the top (if the slide is not too high). Or they can climb to the top via the sliding part using their hand and feet. However, the fact that these conventional play elements are generally used in a single way whereas van Eyck’s elements are often used in multiple ways can be elucidated from a sociocultural perspective on affordances.

Project starts from creating immediate responses from the current purchasable trend of parents bringing their kids into “Playgroups” to slowly rejecting the idea of confining children indoors with low risk and non-challenging activities. Bringing them back to the streets of Hong Kong through creating “playeatres” in chosen public spaces of the city that combines the idea of free-play and theatre where the affordances of street objects, architecture and eventually the city could be challenged in order for the children to self-learn the importance of interaction and team work through failing and risks assessments. In a way the project doesn’t only bring back the idea of free-play into the society of Hong Kong but also criticising the lack of accessible REAL public spaces.

Last but not least, I would like my project to take shape according to this main reference:

The Arrival, Shaun Tan