Troy Innocent

Dr Innocent (he/they) connects people and place through urban play as Director of the future play lab at RMIT University in Naarm Melbourne. Working with the city as a material, this practice is grounded in reworlding, an approach to speculative design that reimagines the creative, linguistic, cultural, social diversity of our shared worlds. Innocent is convenor of the Urban Play Network, co-convenor of the Australian Posthuman Summer Lab, and leads an ARC Linkage Project on post-pandemic impacts of creative placemaking.

 

As both artist gamemaker and urban play scholar, Innocent's research connects intersectional knowledges and interdisciplinary methods via creative, speculative, and imaginative urban play. These place-based methods synthesise knowledge from urban design, creative technologies, Indigenous knowledges, regenerative design, posthuman thinking, and creative placemaking. Projects are developed, tested, and studied through field research with diverse communities engaged in creative placekeeping to understand their impacts on design and cities.

 

Reworlding frames play as dynamic and disruptive but also immersive, collaborative, and generative. It invites participants to imagine regenerative urban futures that become tangible and possible through imaginative play. Future thinking becomes embodied and relatable to the conditions, structures, and material forms that shape our everyday lives. It is centred on the yulendj barring framework, co-created with N'arweet Professor Carolyn Briggs, that entangles Indigenous ways of being with posthuman thinking.

 

Urban play disrupts our social imaginaries to explore how we might live well together by working with the city as a material for reworlding. Future thinking becomes embodied and relatable to the conditions, structures, and material forms that shape our everyday lives. It’s about learning with place together, making it real – play becomes a place where other worlds are possible.

 

This focus on shared urban futures strategically brings diverse groups of researchers together to tackle enable alternate social and cultural realities, expanded through roles as Regenerative Futures Fellow and member of the Planetary Civics Inquiry. Innocent approaches digital design as a form of world making by constructing systems with their own logic, signs, and aesthetics that invite participants to discover and play within them, rather than as closed systems or designed artefacts.

 

These worlds explore connections between language and reality, working with the affect of constructed aesthetic languages that traverse geometric abstraction and digital iconography, learned through play. Innocent has 25 years’ experience in gallery-based exhibitions, symposia and site-specific projects, developing augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Aarhus, Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Tampere and Hong Kong. This work informed the creation of 64 Ways of Being, an urban adventure platform combining audio walks and mixed realities to situate players in new experiences of place.

 

His research and engagement is defining the emerging field of urban play as intersectional and transdisciplinary, reflected through leadership in shaping post-pandemic urban play. My contribution to this field is to transform established methods in games, placemaking, and creative technologies to engage with socially engaged practice, Indigenous knowledges, and tactical urbanism. This expands impacts of urban play toward social change, adaptation to climate crisis, and to influence policy change in local government.

 

Innocent founded the future play lab in 2020 to deepen research impact culture and capabilities through sustained social impact and engagement. This built on the success of 64 Ways of Being, an augmented reality mobile application that offers immersive walking tours to locations across Melbourne drawing on the city’s multicultural communities and Indigenous knowledges. The lab is now home to the next generation of play designers, academics and postgrad students working with 25 diverse industry partners and stakeholders on projects across Australia/New Zealand, fostering partnerships for sustained impact at scale.

 

The lab has attracted 11 PhD creative practice research candidates in four years, growing impact-focused research training through innovative urban play projects. I am accelerating these impacts through industry engagement with this cohort and affiliated lab members, supported by local government research funding and ARC Linkage Project Play about Place focused on impacts of urban play on creatives, organisations, and communities. Via collaborations across the university including the Australian Posthuman Summer Lab, Urban Play School, and Reworlding City North I have scaled up applied, transdisciplinary research through unique methods for reworlding, documented in my industry report on these methods and projects.

 

These projects and communities always begin with research that is connected to place. Their impact emerges by experiencing and doing them together, applying speculative and participatory design to real-world challenges and opportunities.