Published in Issue #39 Disegno Journal, 2025

​

The article examines Multiform, an educational sports program that combines a transformable team game, adaptive uniforms, and alternative playing fields to challenge conventional power dynamics and body norms in physical education—inviting children to renegotiate belonging through movement, disorientation, and collective play.

 

Excerpt:

Twenty-four players stand at the edges of a large hexagon taped onto the floor, divided into three teams of eight. In the centre of the court, a yellow sponge ball rests on the floor. We are waiting for the referee’s whistle. I scan the other teams. To my left, the light blue team has a few tall, strong players. To my right, the dark blue team looks quicker, more agile. My own team – the white team – seemed well-balanced, a mix of size and speed.

​

The game is a kind of variation of handball and basketball, but with three goals instead of two. The rules are simple: score in the opposing goals while protecting your own. No running with the ball – only passing.

​

The whistle blows. Gabriel Fontana, the designer of the game and the referee, signified by his striped uniform, signals the start from the sidelines. We launch into action. Quick passes, sharp plays, and before long, my team scores the first goal. We exchange high-fives, celebrating the early lead.

​

But then, Fontana’s whistle and voice cut through the game.

“Open your shirts over your head,” he commands.

​

Obediently, I reach for the flap of fabric on my back, peeling it forward. My white shirt has transformed – it is now light blue.

“Now go to the goal that matches your new shirt colour,” he says.

​

In an instant, the teams have shifted. The game we thought we were playing has changed entirely.

​

Confusion ripples across the field. I am no longer part of the winning white team and what’s more, my new light-blue squad has shrunk to just five players, while the dark-blue team now has ten and the white team seven. The sudden reshuffling disrupts everything – team sizes are suddenly unbalanced, new alliances are formed, and the familiar sense of teamwork is upended.

But the real shift isn’t just physical – it is psychological. We are forced to adapt, to rethink our strategies, and to navigate the unsettling experience of being both in the majority and the minority.

​

Winning no longer seems like the goal. Instead, the game has transformed into something else entirely: a test of adaptation, collaboration, and the ability to understand shifting social dynamics in real time.

​

That was the first time I played Multiform. It wasn’t just a game; it was a kind of undoing. Fontana had invited me to experience it for myself while he was still developing it back in 2018 for his graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven. The rules weren’t like anything I had encountered before – fluid, shifting, designed to dismantle the very idea of fixed teams and clear winners.

​

The game went on for four rounds, and with each round, flaps unfolded, team sizes changed and player roles reshuffled. By the final round, the scores didn’t belong to any one team, but to all of us. Winning wasn’t about dominance – it was about what we had built together.

​

I remember feeling a strange unease at first. I had spent years internalising the rules of traditional sports: pick a side, fight for it, win or lose. But here, everything kept changing. I found myself on a team with people I had just been playing against minutes earlier. The shifting alliances meant that no one could cling to a singular identity as “opponent” or “ally”. It forced a kind of radical openness – a trust in the process.

​

Since then, Fontana has refined Multiform into something even more expansive, establishing himself as a designer at the intersection of sport, design, and social intervention. When he talks about it, it’s clear that this game isn’t just about movement – it’s about the systems that shape us.

“For many of us, PE class was a hostile and unsafe environment,” he tells me.

“Dominant ideas about gender, ethnicity, physical ability, and sexuality are reproduced in sports and physical education. Research shows that marginalised groups are often excluded. These moments of exclusion don’t just stay in the sports hall; they shape a child’s well-being and social development far beyond the game.”

​

His words make me think of my own fraught relationship with sports. I always loved movement, but for years, I approached it in a way that drained me – physically and mentally. Gym class never felt like a place of joy; it was a series of measurements against others. I wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t the strongest, and so I learned to see sports as something that defined my shortcomings rather than my strengths.

Years later, at the gym, I would push myself to the brink, always measuring my worth against those who lifted heavier, ran faster. It took me years to unlearn that mindset, to realise that progress isn’t about punishment but about care, patience, and steady growth.

​

But where do these ideas about competition and winning come from? Are they as natural as we assume?

​

I’ll tell you a little story. One day, after a workout, I sat in a sauna with two men I didn’t know. The conversation turned to a hypothetical question: If you had only five hours left to live, who would you want to have dinner with? One by one, they listed their choices. Both of them landed on Joe Rogan. They admired his mixed martial arts (MMA) commentary, his worldview, and his hyper-masculine approach to life. They spoke about him with reverence, as if his values – dominance, control, self-reliance – were the pinnacle of strength.

​

When my turn came, I said Tilda Swinton.

Silence.

​

One of them snorted and dismissed her as “weird”, then quickly pivoted to Wes Anderson – still within his comfort zone.

​

I realised then that this wasn’t just about celebrity dinner choices. It was about the worldview they had absorbed – through sports, through culture, through everything around them. MMA had shaped how they saw strength and success. Anything that deviated in any way from their rigid definition of masculinity was dismissed outright. A casual conversation in a sauna, yet it reflected something much larger: the way sports culture reinforces narrow ideas of power, leaving little room for anything outside those norms. I couldn’t help but be disappointed by their short-sightedness.

​

How did we end up this way? I know what Joe Rogan would say – “survival of the fittest”. But this concept has long been disputed by thinkers and studies that highlight how collaboration, not competition, has often been key to human survival and flourishing.

​

In fact, research in fields ranging from sociology to evolutionary biology has demonstrated how cooperative behaviours, such as mutual aid and collective action, are often more essential for survival than individual dominance.

(continued)