Voices

Over the past four months ART/PLAY/RISK has been gathering reflections, research and perspectives from key voices relevant to the field of playable sculpture.

Below is a series of six interviews.

Tim Gill

Tim Gill is an independent scholar, writer and consultant on childhood, and a global advocate for children’s play and mobility. He is the author of Urban Playground: How child-friendly urban planning and design can save cities and No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society.

Tim is an Ambassador for the Design Council, the UK’s design champion. He is a former director of the Children’s Play Council (now Play England). His work cuts across public policy, education, child care, planning, transport, urban design and playwork. It engages with academics, practitioners, policy makers, the media and the wider public.

Gabriela Burkhalter

Gabriela Burkhalter is an urban designer and political scientist based in Basel. She has been working in playground design research since 2008. She curated the exhibition The Playground Project, which was first presented at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (USA) in 2013, and has traveled to Switzerland (Zurich), Britain (Newcastle), Russia (Moscow), Ireland (Carlow), Germany (Bonn and Frankfurt), Italy (Venice), and Sweden (Lund) between 2014 and 2022. Her book The Playground Project has been of great inspiration to ART/PLAY/RISK.

Penny Wilson (Assemble Play)

Assemble Play is a specialist child-led, Playwork-supported project, operating as part of Assemble, a London-based multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art. Assemble Play was established as a collaboration between Playworker Penny Wilson and Assemble in order to deliver Play KX, which ran in King’s Cross between 2018 and 2020. Their ongoing work seeks to improve the wellbeing and happiness of children and families by building child-focused, playable thinking into our urban environments, and developing easily replicable, high-quality, free-to-access play opportunities within homes, towns and cities.

Sudeshna Chatterjee (World Resources Institute)

Sudeshna Chatterjee is the Program Director for Sustainable Cities and Transport at World Resources Institute (WRI) India Ross Centre for Cities. Sudeshna has extensive experience as a globally recognised urban practitioner, evaluation specialist, researcher, and published author. She focuses on enabling inclusive, resilient and child-friendly cities and communities and advocating for including child and youth perspectives in urban policies, planning and urbanisation processes. Sudeshna founded a non-profit Action for Children's Environments (ACE) focusing on action research to improve children’s environments, is a trustee on the global board of the International Play Association. She also recently led the research and writing of the Global Principles and Guidance for Public Spaces for Children supported by UNICEF, UN-Habitat, and the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Sudeshna was one of the keynote speakers at the IPA triennial conference in Glasgow, 2023.

Melanie Kress (Public Art Fund)

Melanie Kress is a senior curator for New York–based arts organisation Public Art Fund, whose ambitious free exhibitions offer the public powerful experiences with art and the urban environment. Kress was formerly a curator at High Line Art, where she has organized and commissioned more than 100 projects with artists including Maria Thereza Alves, Firelei Báez, Duane Linklater, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sable Elyse Smith, Lubaina Himid, and Zoe Leonard. She is also a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art in its painting and printmaking program.

Mika Kirk (youth voice)

Mika (age 11) is a student at Lindfield Learning Village in Sydney. Mika has participated in art events such as School of Water, a collaboration between the Biennale of Sydney and Hayball Architecture Studios for Rivus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. Mika is a lifelong Sydney resident, and shared with us her play experiences, her perceptions of her urban environment, and thoughts on playability in the city.