How we play how we make

Before Function, There Was Play

Play is the earliest, purest mode of human creativity. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued that play takes place in a "potential space" between the self and the world — a space in which an object is at once found and created, and it is here that culture, art, and the self are first opened up. The evolutionary anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake locates the shared origin of art, play, and ritual in the human behaviour of "making special" — the transformation of everyday, functional activity into moments that carry emotion and meaning, a behaviour rooted deep in human evolution, used to bind communities together and mark what matters.

Play as Expression

A group of designers in this exhibition inhabits that same potential space, each performing their own version of making special. For them, play has never been a way to entertain oneself — it is a form of expression. Beneath the functional surface of a piece of furniture lies intent: a negotiation with inherited norms, a refusal of efficiency, an embrace of uncertainty, an inversion of standardisation. In a design world governed by functionalism, this group of designers still plays from their first impulse — before function, before form, before the object had to mean anything at all.

A Dialogue Through Making

How We Play, How We Make is built on a single rule: a piece of furniture is divided into sections, and each designer builds only what the last one left open. The relay starts from a hand-carved, hand-cast hardware system — a flower-shaped nut and its matching wrench. From that first open joint, each designer completes their section in their own material and language, within a fixed 48-hour window, until the final designer closes the chain. The collaboration results in a piece that lives in two states: assembled, it functions as furniture; disassembled, its sections stand as independent sculpture. The relay is also a wager: can a method built on one designer's control over a single joint still hold together once it passes through hands and decisions no one fully controls? If it holds, independent practices fuse into genuinely hybrid work — a dialogue conducted through making, not talking. If it breaks, the break itself becomes part of the game.