GAME CHANGER

Sparked by the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, the workshop “Game Changer” reconsiders the normative principles of sport. Physical performance, competition, time-centric events are some of the expectations for athletes with or without disabilities. What if those principles were evolved to make sports and movement more available to everybody regardless of their visible or invisible (dis)abilities.

“Game Changer” invites neurodivergent people to participate with their thinking, innate creativity, and sense of play. It proposes to reinvent the space, rules and objects of sport through design and making. We believe all neurodivergent people are designers by default and that sport is for everybody. Participants do not have to be trained designers, let alone athletes or into sports.

Activities will be developed for individuals or small groups. Projects can be practical like building an object, or imaginary like inventing a game or sharing a story. At the end, we hope to reshape sport with unusual objects, different notions of time, a balance between the personal and the collective spaces, and the excitement of participation as opposed to performance.

With this workshop, we want to explore a model of how we can adapt our way of designing, working and creating with neurodivergent people, and how their perspective can benefit everybody.