LIKU: Building Through Motions
“LIKU: Building Through Motions” addresses the lack of movement-based play done by children in indoor environments, seeing how outdoor play is identical to active play and indoor environments are more associated with sedentary play. Responding to the issue, this project has a goal to encourage full-body movements for children within indoor environments, while at the same time aiming to nurture play culture that is led and invented by the children themselves.
This project explores the method of designing that is born through children’s performative body movements. It is an attempt to combine child culture design with elements of bodily movements found in the performance art field. It starts by investigating the myriad of possibilities a child’s body can both influence and be influenced by objects within an indoor spatial context. It is then continued on to the exploration of designed objects that accommodates such movements and in return, allow children to perform said movements.
A play object is the outcome of this project. Liku, an Indonesian adjective equal to meander and twisted is chosen as the name that represents the quality of the play object. LIKU creates the full-bodied action capacity of children’s play while also promoting free play that let children decide how they want to play, giving children the agency to decide the kind of active play they want to do with it.
