Playfulness

Playfulness is evident in children all over the world. Children play to create, learn and communicate. And playfulness plays an important role in design practice too. Indeed it can be seen as a methodology to support the design process. In this, playfulness reflects an attitude to designing that encourages creative thinking and behaviour, from motivation and exploration to stimulation and collaboration. Moreover, playfulness can help design teams to focus on creative potential rather than criticism of each others' ideas. A current example of playful design is the Play Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, a temporary summer venue open to people of all ages.The pavilion, with its curving forms and bold colours, is a joint project by the Lego Group, the Serpentine Gallery and the architect Peter Cook, a founding member of the avant-garde Archigram collective in the 1960. Cook describes the pavilion as a “theatre of formative play” where architecture becomes a stage for unstructured creativity. The project also expresses Cook's idea that building should be joyful, social, and open-ended, a reminder that architecture can be soft, silly, experimental, and still deeply intelligent.