With a long history of short term, low-cost experimentation that’s responsive to the needs of local communities, we aim to make the act of reimagining our world for the better playful, tangible and infectious. We can test a variety of temporary place-based scenarios so that you can take an evidence-based approach to urban planning and design.

Over the course of many years in placemaking, we’ve developed a range of playful ways for engaging with communities on a wide range of projects. Depending on the context, purpose and scale of your project, we use the IAP2 framework to work with you and identify suitable engagement methods to reach your target audience.

Whether it’s developing a play strategy, designing a play space, opening up a conversation about climate change, community asset mapping or a pre-prime engagement about micro-mobility, our point of difference is our experience in creative methodologies that cut through. Our goal is to harness imagination, using play and creative ways of understanding to bring people together to build serious solutions.

Monitoring and evaluation is a key part of closing the loop, and we make sure that you’ve got robust data and meaningful recommendations for the road ahead.

The Play Personalities Quiz was developed from a set of eight play archetypes to get people of all ages thinking about what play is and how they play. We developed an event around the quiz for ChristchurchNZ identified people’s play personality, gave them each their resulting play card with more information, and then matched them to fun activities that we designed for the event, as well as wider opportunities around Ōtautahi, Christchurch. This is a great engagement tool for urban planning, developing a play strategy or promoting local tourism. Get in touch to find out how we can customise it for your community.

An approach to community-led development that encourages people to identify their strengths and assets through a process of collective ‘mapping’. This is a communal approach to uncovering the resources and gifts that already exist in a local community, to facilitate locally driven solutions to community needs. For one project we developed a community asset mapping tool in the form of a custom NZ Bird Personality Quiz which was used alongside a series of neighbourhood get togethers to help strengthen connection within specific central city neighbourhoods, facilitate community initiatives and reach people who might not traditionally engage in Council processes.

Based on the Place It! method developed by James Rojas and James Kamp, we use playful model-building exercises to foster a sense of collective values, and effectively build community members’ voices into the process of engagement for design. The PlaceIt! Model is a simple hands-on approach that centres people in the design process, activating parts of the brain that are more open to emotion, allowing creative ideas to flow. Everyone can participate without the need for previous design experience; community members who might otherwise be left out of more traditional engagement methods are welcomed and participants are empowered to see themselves as local experts at creating meaningful spaces.

The model building workshops can run alongside and complement the Sensory Walk.

The positive and productive results of this process reveal that when creative community engagement is integrated into the planning process and not simply a perfunctory step to get out of the way, the results can be infinitely more productive. Not only do you avoid the conflicts and negativity that often arise in a town-hall-style community meeting, but you also end up with a broader cross-section of folks participating, most or all of whom contribute creative and meaningful ideas toward a productive outcome.

The American Planning Association, California Chapter – Northern Section

The Sensory Walk complements the Place It! model-building exercises, it is a guided audio experience that helps participants to tune into the world around them and use their senses to see things in a different way. Through the sensory walk participants are able to provide real-time feedback on how they use public spaces and what they value most. This feedback can be used to inform urban designs and changes to streetscapes. The guided audio experience can be facilitated for groups of people or stand alone as an experience for individuals to participate in. 

A fun, fresh and customisable event or event series to improve wellbeing based on the Mental Health Foundation’s evidence-based Five Ways to Wellbeing. Evidence shows that building five simple actions into our day-to-day lives can boost wellbeing an support a flourishing community where people are happy, healthy, capable and engaged.

 We’ve undertaken Moodshift events in Ōtautahi Christchurch with the Christchurch City Council and All Right? that aimed to encourage inner-city workers pause and participate in a fun activity to boost their mental health. We adapted the concept for the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Play Symposium: Canberra as the Laboratory of the Possible running a public Moodshift event on each day of the symposium.

We can work with you to develop and deliver a customised Moodshift event/series, or support you with materials and expertise to deliver it yourself.