Reimagining Play

⚲ London

We are grateful to have been shortlisted with Projects Office, for the London Festival of Architecture and Dulwich Picture Gallery Reimagining Play competition. The competition invited concepts for a playful sculpture that would inspire wonder and joy for visitors of all ages. We created the Willow Way, a regenerative, fluid playful space that celebrated nature and different ways of playing.

Willow Way competition submission by Projects Office and Dream Networks CIC

Render produced by Projects Office

Co-design Workshop at Rye Oak School

We led an engagement workshop with the children at Southwarks' Rye Oak School, first identifying ways children like to play, then designing interventions to enable those types of activities. Children imagined how they, and others, experience play and play environments, encouraging empathy and prompting a broad variety of design suggestions.

Clear themes and priorities emerged for play and the play spaces:

Sensory experiences: how places sound and feel to the touch.
Inclusion: wheelchair accessibility; range of different experiences possible.
Imagination: features and spaces that spark ideas, that resemble other things, or that can be used creatively. Space for dreaming and pretending.
Movement: climbing; running, rolling, crawling, counting, jumping, dancing, hopping.
Discovering: hide and seek, exploring
Playing with others, including ball games

Building on these key themes, the team worked together - drawing on our professional experience to define three key playful interactions for the play sculpture.

Moving
Looking
Feeling

creating INTERGENERATIONAL play at Dulwich Picture Gallery

We created an interactive, playful tunnel with babies, children and their parents at Dulwich Picture Gallery. As part of our collaboration with Projects Office Ltd for the London Festival of Architecture play sculpture competition for Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Dulwich Picture Gallery tunnel decorations

London festival of architecture competition - Rye Oak workshop

The children got to discover how they could play through connecting with nature and themselves. They learned about the indigenous ways of sharing memories, used symbols to paint their favourite memories of playing - then got hands on creating their own 3 dimensional interactive play tunnel!

What the 25 children, parents, and grandparents produced 4 days after during the workshops truly amazed us. A fantastically wonky tunnel, made out of cardboard, makedo connectors, autumn leaves, their decorations,memories,imaginationsand collective agencies.