Listen

Each of our projects kicks off with a listening phase. A Playful City spends time listening to the client, community and wider stakeholders to get a sense of the current state and desired future state before we even think about putting our ideation caps on. We take an emotions-led approach to get to the core of how a community feels and how they would like to feel. This allows us and them to think big without being limited to solutions and ideas and also allows us to meaningfully engage with children and young people. 

A Playful City believes communities are the experts in what they need. In order to deliver it, we need to facilitate conversations and listen carefully to what they have to say.

Learn

Communities are experts in what they need, but A Playful City are experts in how to deliver it. Our multidisciplinary team and collaborations take some time to make sense of the insights and translate them into strategic and actionable solutions and interventions. 

As strong believers in learning through play, our ‘learn’ phase includes what we call a 1:1 prototype - this is essentially us testing an idea or intervention in situ and in real time. Whether it's a trial event or a rough prototype of a physical intervention, this is us asking the community ‘have we heard you correctly?’ and is the best way to learn what works, what doesn’t and what needs to be improved on.

Deliver

Finally, we take the learnings and insights from both our listen and learn phases and deliver a final community brief. We call it a community brief as all insights and actions have come from the community in some way and will inform the next stages of work. This supports sustainable development and local ownership, two pillars of A Playful City’s work. 

Our community briefs do not mark the end of the project but are the seeds of the next chapter. They are usually live documents, intended to inform the next stage of work, empowering communities and collaborators to continue to create more playful, healthy and inclusive public places.