“Someone wanted to play!”
- I was honestly a bit beside myself when I finished that conversation with Kolding School of Design back then. It felt like there were others who could see the potential in combining play and design. It was an incredible experience. Someone wanted to play.
Cas Holman still vividly remembers her first conversation with Kolding School of Design. It was in 2016, and she hardly knew Kolding or the school. That did not matter. What became clear after that conversation was that an idea she had been working on suddenly resonated.
- I was incredibly excited because it made sense and felt necessary. What really felt groundbreaking was the research element—making it a design discipline. That gave it a weight and seriousness that play rarely has on its own. I still find that I have to justify play in order to work with it. That’s why it made such a strong impression on me that someone wanted to build an entire programme around it, she recalls.
The Danish connection
On the other end of that conversation was Karen Feder at Kolding School of Design, who had a similar experience. Coming from an educational background, the meeting between play and design made immediate sense to her.
- There was an immediate sense of resonance. In Denmark, we have a strong design tradition and a deep respect for play, so the connection made perfect sense as soon as it was articulated. The reaction was often the same: of course. The link was already there—we just lacked the language for it. Over the years, together with people like Cas, we have found that language, and once the words were in place, the field began to take shape.
This marked the beginning of a field that has since been developed, tested and enriched with experience, language and direction. Today, Play Design stands both as a way of working with design and as a perspective on how people of all ages learn, create and navigate the world.
Associate Professor Karen Feder was on the other end of the phone call that Cas Holman still remembers as something special. When asked to describe Play Design in one word, she chooses “togetherness”.
A radical approach to the present
For Cas Holman, this is precisely the point. Play Design is more than products and methods. Play is both a way of working and a way of understanding people. It is embedded in her design process and in the spaces she creates for others. When she speaks about play, she also speaks about freedom, curiosity and giving people room to find their own path.
- The world around us is so focused on efficiency and productivity that taking time to play—or even just to drift for five minutes—is quickly seen as a waste of time. That’s why suggesting something as ‘useless’ as play can seem disruptive, even radical, in a society geared towards constant output. But for me, play is a fundamental part of being human. The past ten years in Kolding have shown that there is value in beginning something without knowing the outcome in advance. That is the essence of Play Design for me.
It is a point that resonates with something familiar in many of us. We want something out of our time. Something out of exercise. Something out of silence. Something out of everything. In the midst of this, it becomes harder to enter into something before its purpose is clear.
There has to be room for a bit of silliness
Cas Holman puts it in simple, everyday terms. We forget how to be a little carefree, and that says something quite precise about adult life and how our society is currently organised:
- We live in conditions that leave less room for play. Productivity takes up more space, efficiency takes up more space, and many people experience increasing uncertainty in the world around them. That makes it harder to feel safe enough to play. As a result, play no longer just happens—it has to be chosen and actively sought out.
The same perspective runs through her book Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity from autumn 2025. Here, she brings play into adult life. The book is full of stories from her own design practice, but it is written for a much broader audience than designers, aiming to challenge the idea that play belongs only to children:
- The book is less a traditional design book and more a book about adults and play. It’s full of stories from my design work, but what I really want is to help adults reconnect with their own sense of play. The point is that play doesn’t just belong to children. It follows us throughout life and shapes how we learn, connect and find our way.
What if…
For Holman, play accompanies us throughout life. This is also where her perspective meets that of Helle Marie Skovbjerg. As Denmark’s first—and only—Professor of Play Design and Professor in the LAB for Play Design at Kolding School of Design, she has helped give the field academic weight.
She plays a central role in the movement that has made Play Design more than just a good idea. For her, the field gains strength by recognising that play and design share a common approach: they explore, open up possibilities and set things in motion before answers are fixed.
- In the beginning, we spent a great deal of energy explaining why play deserved attention. Today, we are in a different place. More people can see what it offers. For me, there is still a fundamental question at the heart of play: ‘what if’. That’s where play remains alive, because it opens up something we do not yet know.
This question runs through the entire story of Play Design. What if play and design are not just connected, but inherently intertwined? What if play is more than a space of freedom? What if the exploratory, the unexpected and the offbeat are not decorative elements around the process, but its very driving force?
For Helle Marie Skovbjerg, play and design are closely linked because they both begin with curiosity. Both explore the world rather than simply confirming what we already know. Both open something up before it is fixed. That is why she returns to the exploratory, the unpredictable and that which resists being tamed too quickly:
- It is perfectly fine to have an intention with play—to bring it into learning and many other contexts. But what you design must still function playfully. Otherwise, you lose what makes play valuable in the first place.
From proving to showing
Looking ahead, Cas Holman sees the next step clearly. She points to fields such as working life, healthcare, business, urban planning and political strategy as areas where play can play a greater role in reshaping how people work, collaborate and perceive possibilities.
- There are constantly new graduates emerging with a deep respect for both design and play, and they bring that understanding into many different contexts. I believe that will have a significant impact, far beyond educational institutions. It cannot have been easy to establish this, which also says something about how perceptive they were in Kolding to recognise early on how important it was to give play this space and weight. Now it is truly beginning to live on through the people who carry it into the world.
There are many valuable ways to waste time. Some of them turn out to be quite important. Perhaps that is the most precise lesson from the first ten years of Play Design: play does not stand apart from life. It is part of it.
When Cas Holman distils it down, she does so without hesitation:
- A good life is a life with play.
It almost sounds too simple.
Like one of those sentences that holds more than it first reveals.
