Playful Environments

30 yrs of environmentally sensitive, playful, outdoor space design and build.

30 yrs of participation, consultation and collaboration.

Creating space for play and connection with all ages, in diverse contexts, as part of a dynamic ecology.

36+ urban, semi-urban and rural built public realm projects created across UK and beyond.

Inc. project creation, eco-site investigations, client meetings (most importantly children!), technical detailing, planning applications, participation and training projects, project management, involving local craftspeople, using sustainable equipment and materials, protecting wildlife and insects, planting trees and shifting or NOT shifting dirt.

Agency

Tassy begin her professional interest in outdoor play as an Activity Worker for the Iona Community and at Camus Outdoor Activity Centre in 1991/2 and later as an outdoor city play worker with Glasgow City Council Children’s Services in 2001-3. Experiencing, enjoying and learning how to provide agency for self directed play in both urban and wild rural environments for children and young people. Using an artist’s process of curious playfulness, Tassy learnt through embodied processes and diverse solutions how to offer agency for play, freedom of movement and safety. Learning from the agency of natural matter and the elements; water, earth, wind, fire. The key reflection from this early training was the fundamental importance of reciprocal, reflexive relationships offering agency for play; friends, parents, neighbours, community, landscape and natural, unprocessed materials and objects.

Affordance

Using both her sculptural practice and experience as a commercial landscape designer, Tassy gained her first formal playground design commission in 2001. Mentored by some legends of play design including Gunter Beltzig and trained in commercial play industry expertise by Richter Spielgeräte GmbH, Tassy has designed and built playful landscapes for 20 years. She designed Glasgow’s first playground with water play in 2003 winning a Commendation from the Scottish Dynamic Space Awards. This first project provided early insight into the constraints and barriers to children’s wellbeing. More recently Tassy was lead designer of the 3 playgrounds at Dumfries House, Scotland. One of which, Harmony Outdoor Learning Area, a multi sensory playful education space won both a Civic Trust Award and the Nancy Owens Play Award for Learning in 2015. Truly playful affordance is often curtailed by urban planning regulations, cultural values and societal priorities not forgetting the pitfalls of professional play industry over-design. So began a career-long passion for overcoming those challenges to provide affordance for child-directed, beneficially risky, freely chosen, outdoor play.

Atmosphere

With over 25yrs of professional practice in visual and performance art and architecture, Tassy has gathered rich resources of inspiration and insight into how play and ritual form the interconnected web of human and more than human through the creation of ‘place and occasion’. Atmosphere is about how we, as humans, sense meaning and interpret matter, therefore a key element of play in all its moods. Tassy worked and shared part of her life with Dr Graham Maule, developing playful, visual ideas for ritual, atmosphere and occasion in their collaborative work in liturgy design, researched and published by Dr Carol Marples. Long inspired by the work and writings of architect and play space designer Aldo Van Eyck, Tassy is committed to a practice of reflexive sensitivity to people, landscape and context- to ‘time and space’, in her making, designing and facilitation of play and creative opportunities.