BOUNCE x A Playful City // Showcase & Panel on 17–18th November 2025
THIS EVENT IS A SHOWCASE OF OUR CO-CREATION LAB PRESENTED AS PART OF THE BOUNCE CHALLENGE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH A PLAYFUL CITY, AS PART OF IRISH DESIGN WEEK 2025.
The BOUNCE Design Challenge is an opportunity for people, from all walks of life–not only designers–to collaborate for a single purpose. In partnership with A Playful City participants have re-imagined placemaking and co-design with a focusing on Drury Street, Dublin. They have developed thinking for a community-first design strategy that supports local life, intergenerational inclusion, and sustainable tourism. Surfacing insights, behaviours and challenges that require intentional interventions, care and consideration. The work aims to reimagine contested public spaces as inclusive, vibrant destinations, and expose the process of critical design-led problem solving throughout. The hope is to apply methodologies from this project beyond to other contexts, cities and spaces who are seeing similar challenges.
The Showcase & Panel explores how design connects us and can play a more active, collaborative role in shaping civic life and public space—not just as an aesthetic tool, but as a method for inclusion, dialogue, and systems-level change. Through the Challenge, we brought together multidisciplinary teams of designers, creatives, and community-minded changemakers to reimagine how we engage with shared urban environments, specifically focusing on Drury Street in Dublin.
The event will open on Monday 17th with presentations from the participants followed by a panel discussion featuring Richard Guiney CEO Dublin Town, Neasa NiBhriain A Playful City and hosted by Irish Times Journalist, Una Mullally. The audience is also invited to explore the outcomes, presented across three tiers of ambition: visionary ideas for long-term transformation; proposals that could be piloted in the next 12–18 months; and immediate, actionable interventions. These ideas will be displayed on boards and prototypes throughout the space.
We invite attendees to approach this showcase as an opportunity to engage deeply with the creative process itself—observing our methods, understanding our mindset, sharing your feedback, and anticipating that the work will evolve further—rather than presenting a finished artefact.
We hope that those outside the design community come away with a sense of just how powerful design thinking can be, it’s not about making things look good, but about solving complex problems and shaping real change in culture and society. And for those within the creative community, we hope this serves as a reminder: designers possess a rare ability to think differently, to see connections others might miss. That perspective is a superpower, one that can and should be used to make a lasting impact.
Participants
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