Playground x
Luca School of Arts

What can designers learn when they start playing?

Every week, they developed new prototypes and brought them into play sessions with children. They watched how the children interacted with their ideas, what surprised them, what didn't work and what unexpected possibilities emerged. The prototypes were then adapted, rebuilt or sometimes completely abandoned.

As part of the PLAYGROUND — Welcome Little Stranger project at C-mine, Emma Ribbens was invited to teach a design course at LUCA School of Arts C-mine. Building further on the playground created by Walter Van Beirendonck, students were challenged to explore how play could become part of their own design practice.

Instead of designing from a finished brief, the students worked through continuous cycles of making, observing and changing.

Make. Test. Observe. Change. Make again.

The process taught the students to look closely at play rather than simply designing what they thought play should be. Through the children, they discovered new ways of moving, interacting and imagining — while learning to trust experimentation and not be afraid of failure.

The children also became active contributors to the evolving story of Walter Van Beirendonck's playground. Each student developed their own response to this imaginative universe, bringing their own perspective on what play can be.

This led to conversations about wild play, freedom, risk, imagination and the role of the designer in creating space for play. What does it mean to leave room for children to take over? How can wild play find a place in designed environments? And how does a designer's own experience and vision of play influence what they create?

Rather than searching for one definition of play, the project opened up a whole range of possibilities. Every student brought a different perspective, resulting in a diverse collection of ideas, prototypes and approaches.

For Studio Ludiek, this is an important part of designing for play: there is no single right way to play, so why should there be a single way to design for it?