About the Session
The BOUNCE Design Challenge brings people from all walks of life, not just designers, together around a shared purpose. In partnership with A Playful City, participants reimagined placemaking and co-design on Drury Street, Dublin, developing a community-first design approach that supports local life, intergenerational inclusion and more sustainable forms of urban tourism.
Conceived as a design-led urban experiment, the Bounce Challenge united designers, local businesses, residents, civic leaders and everyday street users to address one of Ireland’s most pressing yet often overlooked issues: loneliness. Ireland now reports some of the highest levels of loneliness in Europe, driven by housing precarity, migration, increasingly commercialised public spaces, and a lack of accessible “third spaces” places to gather that are neither home nor work, and don’t require spending money.
The outcomes of the challenge, and the participants behind them, will be presented and discussed on stage, offering insight into both the ideas generated and the process that shaped them. At a time when Irish cities are losing vital creative and social spaces, the Bounce Challenge proposes a compelling alternative: treating the city itself as a living laboratory, where new ideas can be tested with real people, in real time.
More than a one-off placemaking project, Bounce functions as a methodology for thinking differently about complex social and civic challenges. Rather than relying on top-down policy or long-term infrastructure commitments, it offers a faster, more human-scale approach — prototyping ideas, observing behaviour, gathering feedback and iterating. In doing so, Bounce provides governments, councils and organisations with a practical way to trial policies and interventions, reducing risk while grounding innovation in lived experience.
