World Play Day with LEGO: Designing Space for Imagination

In 2025, I was invited to participate in World Play Day with the LEGO Group in collaboration with We Are Amplify—a global initiative centered on creativity, imagination, and the power of play as a fundamental human language.

World Play Day transforms public space into a site for exploration. Across cities like Boston and Berlin, LEGO partnered with artists, designers, and cultural voices to build large-scale interactive environments where kids and families could gather, build, and express themselves freely. These weren’t passive installations. They were living systems—meant to be touched, rearranged, and reimagined.

Play as a Design Principle

My contribution to World Play Day grew from the same place as my studio practice: form, color, and cultural expression as tools for connection. Working at an architectural scale, the goal wasn’t to create a finished object, but to design a framework—something open-ended that encouraged curiosity and collaboration.

Play removes hierarchy. It invites experimentation without fear of failure. That philosophy mirrors how I approach glassmaking: learning through doing, trusting intuition, and allowing process to shape outcome. World Play Day brought that mindset into the public realm.

Expanding Access Through Public Art

What made this project especially meaningful was its accessibility. World Play Day met people where they already were—on city streets, in shared civic spaces—offering a moment of joy and agency outside traditional institutions. Kids didn’t need permission or prior knowledge to participate. They simply showed up and played.

That kind of access matters. It reframes creativity not as something reserved for galleries or studios, but as something embedded in everyday life.

Looking Forward

Collaborating with LEGO and We Are Amplify reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time: design can be both playful and serious, functional and expressive. When artists are invited into conversations about community, culture, and public space, the results can be transformative.

World Play Day wasn’t just about building with LEGO bricks. It was about building confidence, imagination, and shared experience—one playful moment at a time.