Why Asking Better Questions is the Most Radical Design for Play
Play is intangible, loose and elusive. You know it when you feel it, but trying to pin it down feels impossible.
This is never more clear than when designing for play. Even the best conceptual design, the most colourful equipment, the most imaginative layout, may not actually create play in practice. A playground can look beautiful on paper and yet feel strangely flat in reality.
That is because play does not rely only on the physical environment. It also depends on the wider societal environment it sits within. Children need more than climbing frames and soft surfaces. They need time. They need cultural permission. They need adults who tolerate risk, streets that allow lingering and communities that welcome noise and mess.
The Harvard Center on the Developing Child puts it simply: “place matters.” Early environments, both physical and social, shape the foundations of healthy development, including play (Harvard, 2023). And Play England’s recent ‘It all starts with Play’ strategy (2025) stresses that unless we shift policies and attitudes, play provision will always fall short, no matter how well-designed.
This is the humbling truth for me as a designer. You can shape the conditions, but you cannot guarantee the outcome. Which is why designing for play is never just a design challenge. It is also a cultural and political one. And it is why I have become more interested in play not only as activity, but as a way of questioning the world.
The Sentience of Play
In recent years, play has started to feel more visible in the political landscape, almost as if it were gaining a kind of sentience. Organisations such as Play England and the Raising the Nation Play Commission have framed play not as a pastime, but as a right. I have seen articles calling out a “play crisis,” MPs debating “play sufficiency duties,” and campaigners arguing that planning law should require playable spaces.
Play is beginning to act like a stakeholder. We are learning to see it as infrastructure, alongside housing, transport and health. When we talk about mental health, community resilience or even democracy, play is there in the background, quietly insisting.
But here lies the paradox. In recognising play’s importance, we also risk over-engineering it. Designers, educators and policymakers often try to guarantee play: playgrounds with rubberised surfaces, colourful equipment, urban “play interventions.” These efforts provide for play, but do they capture it, or do they tame it?
The temptation is to engineer outcomes, to install the perfect structure or concept that promises play on demand. Yet real play resists control; It flourishes in looseness, unpredictability, in between the gaps.
So the question is not simply whether play can be engineered. It is whether we are willing to create the cultural and social conditions in which play can take root. Because the wider forces that shape daily life do more to support or suppress play than any climbing frame ever could. To take play seriously is to accept that it depends less on the structures we build, and more on the freedoms we allow.
Play as Questioning
Play cannot be manufactured on a product line. At its heart, it is about creating time, space and permission for children to play, and crucially, holding back from dictating what that should look like.
This is why play through questioning is so powerful. A question does not prescribe a single outcome, it opens a possibility. To ask “what if?” creates time and freedom, because it invites open-ended exploration. A simple prompt; What if the city floated in space? What if gravity switched off for a day? is enough to turn a street, a classroom or a corner of the home into a place of play.
Approaching play through questioning avoids the trap of over-engineering and the reliance on place. It shifts the emphasis from designing equipment or prescribing tasks to creating conditions in which curiosity can flourish. Questions allow children to take ownership, to imagine, to take risks, to transform their environment in ways you can not plan for. Play is not bound to playgrounds, it can be carried anywhere. When questioning is the method, play becomes a practice rather than a spatial product.
At The Wonder Why Society, this is the method we have been exploring: weaving play into learning through prompts that encourage noticing, wondering and imagining. What I have seen is that when children are given permission to ask, they quickly blur the line between play and learning. For them, questioning is play, and play is learning.
If we provision for play in this way, not as entertainment or reward but as inquiry, then we are provisioning for curiosity itself. Wonder matters, and society is healthier when its people feel free to ask questions and experiment with answers.
If play is political, then perhaps the most radical thing we can do is not to prescribe more, but to build an environment where better questions can be asked, and where the answers can emerge freely through play.
