Costume for Spaces: Designing Textile Materials for Children’s Spatial Play

Every child knows how to drape a blanket over two chairs and turn it into a house. Costume for Spaces takes that impulse seriously. Working in partnership with Nicolai for Børn in Kolding, this project explores how textile materials can be designed to support children’s spatial play in an indoor institutional context. Through two workshops with 48 children and iterative prototype testing, the research resulted in a system of textile loose parts (jacquard-knitted panels and props) designed to activate part of an underused black box space on children’s own terms.