what we learned: PLAY
WHAT IF FORM DIDN’T FOLLOW FUNCTION, BUT PLEASURE?
When we opened our PLAY chapter, we borrowed Charles and Ray Eames’ invitation to ‘take your pleasure seriously.’ It was a deliberately simple proposition in a culture increasingly organized around optimization, productivity, and measurable outcomes. Over the weeks that followed, though, PLAY revealed itself as something more complicated than fun. It appeared as a design method, a social permission, a productive loss of control, and sometimes even a refusal to arrive anywhere at all.
Across architecture, art, and design, the projects we encountered suggested that PLAY does not necessarily remove us from reality. Quite the opposite: it can make us more alert to how spaces are organized, who gets to participate in them, and how tightly our behavior is usually scripted. From basketball courts and labyrinths to swinging bells and experiments with chance, here is what PLAY taught us.
courtyard of Bajza Elementary School, located in Budapest | image by Yanep Lust Collective
PLEASURE CAN BE SERIOUS
Achille Castiglioni and Bruno Munari understood this long before playfulness became a design-world adjective. At Fondazione Achille Castiglioni, an exhibition bringing the two Italian designers into conversation revealed curiosity as part of a rigorous working method: Castiglioni collected toys, glasses, gadgets, and everyday curiosities, while Munari experimented with the photocopier through his Xerografie Originali. Their pleasure in things was not separate from their practice. Looking, collecting, testing, and occasionally doing something simply because it was amusing became ways of generating ideas.
The same freedom appeared when children were asked to draw faces without worrying about anatomy, proportion, or good taste. In Draw Me A Face, their drawings were translated into makeup looks, preserving misplaced eyes, irregular lines, and strange combinations instead of correcting them. The experiment exposed something adults spend years learning to suppress: an idea does not need to be reasonable before it can be interesting. PLAY makes room for the unfinished, the absurd, and the apparently wrong — precisely the places where something new can begin.
collaborative project Draw Me A Face | image by Pierre Testard
SOMETIMES DESIGN JUST NEEDS TO GIVE US PERMISSION
Public space is full of quiet instructions. Benches tell us where to sit, paths where to walk, fences where to stop, and signs what not to touch. Looking at projects by designers and artists working differently, we found another possibility: architecture can signal that unusual behavior is not only tolerated but welcome. Thoughtful interventions can give adults permission to climb, linger, splash, balance, wander, or simply behave less predictably in the city.
Sports courts demonstrate how little it can take to change that relationship. Basketball and tennis courts are among the city’s most standardized environments, governed by familiar dimensions, lines, and rules. Yet artists and architects have repeatedly treated those same surfaces as civic canvases, using color, material, landscape, and construction to turn ordinary sporting infrastructure into recognizable pieces of public space. The rules remain, but the atmosphere changes. A court can still tell you how to PLAY while simultaneously suggesting that the city belongs to you.
image courtesy of Felipe Pantone’s Casa Axis
GOOD PLAY LEAVES SOMETHING UNRESOLVED
Carsten Höller pushes that idea further by removing one of PLAY’s most comforting qualities: knowing what game we are playing. At UCCA Beijing, Two randomly sends visitors through one of two parallel versions of the exhibition, one in color and another in black and white. Mirrored corridors, slowed carousels, roaming beds, games of reward and punishment, and other experiments continually destabilize certainty. Visitors cannot experience the exhibition in full because another version is always taking place somewhere beside them. Höller calls it a ‘Laboratory of Doubt,’ proposing uncertainty itself as something worth experiencing.
That loss of certainty also runs through the labyrinth. From Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to Franco Maria Ricci’s monumental bamboo maze, labyrinths give architecture a wonderfully inefficient task: getting us nowhere quickly. They replace the straight line with hesitation, repetition, wrong turns, and time apparently wasted. In doing so, they remind us how unusual it has become to encounter a path whose value lies in the experience of following it rather than the destination waiting at its end.
Borges Labyrinth, Venice, Italy, 2026 | image courtesy Fondazione Giorgio Cini
INTERACTION IS NOT THE SAME AS PLAY
During the chapter, we also asked a less comfortable question: if contemporary public art is so eager to call itself playful, why can so much of it feel strangely dull? Interactive installations routinely invite us to touch, enter, pose, or press something, but participation alone does not create PLAY. The difference often lies in agency. Cj Hendry’s colossal inflatable Keff Joons, for example, offered a three-dimensional tangle without the usual railings and prescribed choreography, allowing visitors to climb through it according to their own curiosity. The thrill was not simply that the artwork could be touched, but that its use had not been completely decided in advance.
PLAY needs enough structure to begin, but enough openness for something unexpected to happen. Otherwise, interaction becomes another instruction to follow. Perhaps the most memorable playful spaces are therefore not those that perform playfulness most loudly, but those willing to surrender a little control over what their users will actually do.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot © Adagp, Paris 2026 | all images by Martin Argyroglo
THE BODY CAN BECOME PART OF THE DESIGN
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s Ring makes that surrender audible. Installed at FRAC Normandie in Caen, the work connects swings with bells of different sizes so that visitors produce an evolving composition simply by moving. There is no audience sitting quietly on one side and finished artwork waiting on the other. Bodies, motion, sound, and chance build the piece together.
Perhaps that is where many of the ideas explored throughout PLAY eventually meet. PLAY can temporarily soften the separation between designer and user, object and participant, rule and improvisation. It reminds us that spaces and things do not become meaningful only because someone has carefully determined what they are for. Meaning can also emerge through what people decide to do with them.
inside the hand-painted animations bringing Isamu Noguchi’s unrealized playgrounds to life
We began this chapter asking what might happen if form followed pleasure. What we found was not an argument against function, seriousness, or the realities pressing around us. PLAY offered something more useful than that: a way to loosen their grip just enough for another possibility to appear. A wrong turn, an unnecessary gesture, an uncertain outcome, a court painted differently, a swing that makes a sound. Small disruptions, perhaps, but also reminders that a life designed entirely around efficiency would leave very little room for invention. Taking pleasure seriously, then, might mean protecting precisely that room.
This interview is part of designboom’s PLAY chapter, exploring what would happen if form didn’t follow function, but pleasure. Discover more stories that celebrate joy, imagination and playfulness here.
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