glossarium

The concept of a playable city centers around the idea that public spaces can invite people to interact, play and boost creativity while still be a part of the modern infrastructure.
It pushes the idea that modern structures don't need to follow the concept of 'form follows function' but can be designed according to the principle of 'form follows fun'.

In a high pressure society, like the one we live in today, people are pushed to perform at maximum capacity.
With the uprising and further development of technology, the boundaries between the workspace and home are wiped away and people struggle to find a time and place to relax and unwind. Stress and depression is at a all time high.

The idea of a playable city wipes the boundaries between the workspace and home away in an opposite direction.
Why can't we do our work while having fun and playing?
This type of design allows us to explore other options and alternative lifestyles that might benefit our overall wellbeing.

Eveyday, every hour, every minute of our lives we are engaging in a performance, willingly or not. When we wake up, set the table, eat breakfast, get ready, ... our every move is determined. We chose which plate or bowl we want to use, which chair to sit in ... It is all a play of the day to day. Our environment forms a scenery.

The interiors we enter have an effect on how we will perform.
They are in immediate relation with each other. If the table we are eating at is to small for our party, we will have to act differently. We might spill, leading to a funny anecdote about spilled beans that might not have taken place if the table was big enough ...

We are born with a natural sense of wonderment. As kids our imagination has no limits. We can play endlessly with our imaginary friends, live in castles, fight dragons as a prince or princess. As we grow older we start to lose a lot of that imagination because by growing up our wonderment

crubles piece by piece. Partly because we learn about things but this shouldn't mean we should become less imaginative. Why can't we imagine things while knowing how planes fly and what inflation means. One should not rule out the other. Our build

envirnoment becomes less and less exciting. Every building becomes a copy of the previous one. Modernising our world should mean keeping wonderment alive in every nook and cranny of our spaces. Let us become more curious by looking around ...

When we as a society became modern, a streams of possibilities was presented. With our new developed technology, building processes could speed up, manufacturing became cheaper and mass production made the world go round. This mass production also led to mass waste. It has become normalised to buy new clothes every season and also purge

our closets every few months. Almost everything that eveyone in this world throws away, ends up on the landfill.
While this system might work for a few people who became part of the top 1%, it is not durable and our planet is suffering. That is why we should focus on circular design or circularity rather than to mass produce everything new.

Circular design is a design practice that build on what one already has, and then makes a design based on the materials that are up for use.
Old doors can become new tables, scaffolding is no longer just a temporary construction tool and with some freshing up a lot of used material like wood, stone and brick can find a second life.

In it's core a community is about people comming together to share, connect and belong. To facilitate these communities, our build environment becomes very important. To design for a community holds a greater complexity: it has to nurture human relationships, collective identity, a shared experience, and has to accomodate to a large variety of individuals.
Historically, common areas were of great importance. With no modern technology, no internet, these were the spaces where

everyday life, politics, work, ... got sorted. Peoples livelyhoods were literally supported by a community.
In our modern world everything is targeted more towards the individual. We close ourselves off from the outside. We provide for ourselves, have our unshared space, even in public we are shielded from our surroundings by our phones.
Through time we can establish a shift in the way our build environment is constructed: there are fewer common area's,

or in other words: fewer common area's where we can just be together and don't have to consume.
The community is build on just sharing space and time withour having to give something in return.
Today, we lack these spaces. As (interior)architects we could ask ourselve the question: How do we build togetherness through architecture and the interior?

The way we look and think about how we should live has changed drastically through time and is related to our social, economical and politcal condition. We can see the same trends emerging in the same socio-econical admophere.
In the mid 20th century, after the war, our architecture is driven by industrialization, urbanization and a need for flexible, efficient living solutions. Designers began to explore the possibilies that mass production

,in combination with the factor of limited space in our rapidly growing population, could bring.

Our design became a lot more modular. Systems and objects were created that could interchange, be rearranged or adapted to suit different needs. When we think about modularity we automatically see it's limitations but it is also an invitation to think different and be creative with design. Modular living could bring a huge value

to our contemporary way of living.
An example of mixing creativity with innovative ways of living is Joe Colombo's Total Furnishing Unit (1972) presented at MOMA. The design presents all essential domestic functions into a single modular structure. Designed to be inserted into an empty room, it transformed any space into a fully livable environment.

Deep within us lies a force older than language, technology or order: play. Not as a pastime, but as a source of meaning. Not a distraction, but as origin. Humans play, and it is precisely through play that culture emerges. That is the essence of the concept homo ludens, the playing human, as Johan Huizinga once described. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is a form of expression, exploration, and testing boundaries without breaking them. Children play to understand the world. Adults play to reshape it. In play, space opens up for imagination,

rules we create ourselves and freedom within structure. It is an exercise in empathy, collaboration, and creativity. What if we built our cities not only for efficiency, but also for play? If we saw humans not only as 'homo economicus', rational and goal-oriented, but also as homo ludens: those who live, learn and create through play.
Play turns the city into a living organism, where people don't just move but they experience. In a world increasingly driven by performance, deadlines and control, play becomes an act of resistance.