Community Craft and Embodied Input Physicalization at the Playground

Community playgrounds are third spaces where people of different ages and backgrounds gather in proximity to natural elements. We propose augmenting playgrounds with multisensory representations of data that reflect this dynamic confluence of people and nature via community-crafted physicalizations modulated by automated sensing and mechanical activation. Crafted physicalization elements made with recycled, found, and natural materials encoding social and cultural data and are especially suited to public spaces such as playgrounds, where participation must be intuitive, robust, and socially legible. Meanwhile, environmental sensors and the periodic motion of playground equipment can be used to mechanically reveal temporal patterns in data. We illustrate our approach with three speculative installations. To appear at the ACM CHI 2026 Workshop on Craft-Based Data Physicalization: Opportunities and Challenges (https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/craftphysicalization)