Playhouse Design Competition - Play at Home

Three Manchester design studios are hosting the PLAYHOUSE Competition jointly to design something that will enable people to play at home during lockdown.

Play is an essential part of all our lives, whether child or adult. Be it playing sports, a board game

or simply sharing jokes with friends, play is just as important to adults as building a den or playing

dress-up is to a child.

The Coronavirus outbreak has left many of us having to spend extended periods of time at home

in lockdown, restricting the opportunity to socialise and play in ways that we are used to.

How can we use creativity to encourage play at these unique times?

 The Brief

To design something that will enable people to play at home during lockdown. Your design could make an existing everyday activity playful, provide a break from work, or make work more fun. It could recreate some form of existing outdoor play inside the house, create a whole new type of game, or do something entirely different to create play!

It could be for adults or children, and enable a person to play alone, with their family or housemates, or even with their neighbours or friends far away. Your design should only use objects commonly found in the house, garden or shed in its construction or as props. It could make play inside or outside the house (in the garden) or even on the house itself!

Inspiration sources and examples

For inspiration, you might consider the different types of play that exist. (Listed right)

You might also find inspiration in the work of: Heath Robinson, Rube Goldberg or Japanese Chindogu.

Some examples of designs created around the house might be:

House maze

By using the furniture available in each room, siblings could create a maze that runs the length and height of the house for each other; changing the winning route each hour.

Washing line stories

By making a makeshift pulley system from washing lines, bike wheels and clothes pegs, stories could be written on paper and pulled back and forth to be shared between neighbours.

Types of Games

Intellectual play:

Solving mental mind games for pleasure. e.g. doing a board game.

Social play:

Interacting with others through playful scenarios. e.g going to the pub or play-fighting.

Active play:

Moving all or part of the body, to actively induce a playful state of mind. e.g going swimming

Extreme play:

Using extreme scenarios or conditions to induce a range of emotions resulting in pleasure. e.g skateboarding.

Exploratory play:

Using your senses to experience the world around you. e.g exploring the woods.

Imaginative play:

Inventing scenarios in your imagination, and sometimes acting them out.

e.g playing shop.

Creative play:

Creating something new, for pleasure.

e.g painting a picture

Frivolous play:

Undertaking small and simple acts that induce a playful sensibility

e.g. playing a prank.

Submission requirements

One or two A3 sheets (landscape or portrait) explaining your design.

Your files should be saved as a high resolution (300dpi) PDF (Max 25MB) and should show an image or set of images of your design in use. This could be an illustration, a 2D/3D technical drawing, a photo of a model, an animation, a mix of these, or anything in between! You may want to add annotations, dimensions, constructio information, or zoom in on parts of your idea to help us understand how it might work.

 Submission Deadlines

First wave of submissions by 6pm Friday 24th April 2020 to be featured in May.

Second wave by 6pm Friday 22nd May 2020 to be featured in June.