Unit Playmaking

Unit Playmaking is both the name of the exhibition and a research and curatorial collective formed by practitioners from different disciplines. The group originated from an AaaM-initiated Design Trust Seed Grant project, bringing together members of the studio with collaborators interested in playgrounds, child participation, urban research, design, moving image and visual communication.
This collaborative framework moves playground research beyond a single disciplinary perspective. The team exchanges knowledge across architecture, design, children’s experiences, public engagement and cultural observation, presenting its evolving research through the Unit Playmaking — Public Playground Co-creation Exhibition, held at PMQ in 2023.

The project began with an everyday question: how do we come to know a city from childhood?
For children, urban experience often begins with the routes between home and playground. Repeated visits, encounters with friends, shared rules of play, and imagination around different facilities and spaces gradually form some of their earliest memories of the city.

Hong Kong’s mountainous terrain and dense urban fabric have produced hundreds of public playgrounds of varying scales, locations and environments. Through urban research, playground distribution, public space observation and international case studies, the exhibition explores the relationships between density, community life, local culture and children’s play. Playgrounds thus become an entry point for understanding Hong Kong’s urban structure and ways of living.

AaaM’s Together We Play campaign serves as a key research case within the exhibition. Developed in response to the Hong Kong Government’s initiative to renew 170 public children’s playgrounds, the project uses participatory design to explore how play, local culture and public life are understood across different communities.

The exhibition presents selected outcomes from the 2021–2022 engagement process. More than 800 children and parents, along with over 30 schools and organisations, participated in related co-creation activities. Their models, drawings, images, observations and play ideas form important material for understanding public playground space.
These contributions demonstrate how children observe their environments, organise play and express their needs, offering design insights that may not be anticipated within adult-led processes.

Unit Playmaking brings together children’s co-created content with research on Hong Kong’s urban condition, the distribution of public playgrounds, playground culture across different periods, and design examples from around the world. This forms a research framework that extends from local experience to broader discussions on playgrounds.

The exhibition design organises text, images, data, models, video and participatory works into a space that can be read and compared. Visitors move from the scale of the city to neighbourhood life and children’s everyday experiences, and from specific works back to public policy, design practice and the development of child-friendly cities.

The approximately 70-square-metre exhibition space becomes a public research platform. Knowledge that would otherwise remain within reports, workshop records or design processes is brought into the public realm, inviting audiences from different backgrounds to engage in discussion.

Hong Kong is entering a phase of developing a new generation of public children’s playgrounds. Beyond identifying which equipment is most popular, Unit Playmaking focuses on what kinds of play environments the city needs, and how children, communities, designers and public institutions can participate together in shaping them.

The exhibition brings play, urban research and public participation into the same space. Children’s experiences are made visible, while professional research becomes accessible through models, images and spatial narratives. This enables different stakeholders to develop a shared language for discussing playgrounds.

Through the collective and the exhibition, the team positions playgrounds beyond a question of facilities, placing them within broader urban and cultural discussions. When children’s play, memories and observations are recognised as urban knowledge, the future of public space can be shaped from a wider range of lived experiences.