Playful Places

Participatory Workshops, 2025

Playful Places was a series of workshops designed in collaboration with Laura Coucill, Kate Stott and Hannah Thatcher at the Salford Laboratory of Architecture as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. The workshops were aimed at young people age 5 to 18 to explore the ways in which our cities could be designed for work, rest and PLAY, registering the lack of playfulness in our buildings, landscapes and urban spaces.

The first workshop ran during half term at Manchester Library, where children designed and constructed their own playful buildings and combined them to make a city, thinking about how buildings, streets, parks and public spaces might work together to create a city designed around play. Rather than asking children to simply draw what a city might look like, the process gave them the opportunity to experiment and manipulate shapes and forms using different materials and textures. The models were then digitally scanned and brought together to create a collaborative three-dimensional city. The resulting environment could be explored using a VR headset, allowing the children's physical models to become an immersive digital landscape.

The project continued with the Architecture Society at Loreto Sixth Form College with a three-part workshop beginning with a talk about how architects use colour, humour, unusual forms and playful ideas to create engaging places. The talk introduced projects including John Outram’s Victoria Street (1988), Studio Mutt’s The Ordnance Pavilion (2018), FAT and Grayson Perry’s A House for Essex (2015), WAM Architecten’s Hotel Zaandam (2010), Wingårdh Arkitektkontor’s Ting 1 (2013), Atelier Bow-Wow’s Sprout Bridge (2020) and BIG’s Superkilen (2012). Students then explored their own ideas through rapid model-making exercises, creating three colourful paper models each in three-, six-and twelve-minute intervals before combining them into a collective playful city which we then taught them how to scan and manipulate themselves so that they could create their own immersive environment.