Playtime at SDW 2015: Designing Playful Spaces for Children
Serious Fun
Playtime took design seriously by not taking itself too seriously. The workshop, held during Sheffield Design Week 2015, explored the intersection of design and play — inviting children and their parents to collaborate on building, drawing and making activities that were as thoughtful as they were enjoyable.
The space was set up with materials rather than instructions: coloured card, tape, string, wooden blocks, fabric scraps. Children were encouraged to build whatever they imagined, with designers on hand to help realise more ambitious constructions. The result was a room full of improvised towers, dens, masks and vehicles, each one reflecting a child’s uninhibited approach to form and function.
Design Without Rules
What I found most interesting was watching the designers themselves learn from the children. Several admitted afterwards that the session had reminded them of something they had lost in professional practice — the willingness to start building without knowing the outcome. Children do not design to a brief; they design to discover, and that exploratory quality produced genuinely surprising results.
One corner of the workshop was dedicated to collaborative building, where groups of children worked together to construct a large-scale structure from cardboard tubes. The negotiation involved — which direction to extend, how to balance height against stability — was a compressed version of the collaborative design process that professional architects navigate daily.
Play as Practice
Playtime connected to the festival’s wider emphasis on participation. Maker Day offered similar hands-on engagement for adults, and the Heeley Shed workshops extended the invitation to community making. Together, these events demonstrated that Sheffield Design Week understood its audience as participants, not just spectators.
For anyone interested in how design thinking begins, Playtime was a compelling case study. The design education pipeline starts not in university studios but in moments like these — where a child realises that the world can be shaped, and that shaping it is deeply satisfying.
