On 24 March 2026, the University of the Arts London Online (UALO) hosted a one-day symposium entitled Making playtime: an offline symposium about creative education online at the Central Saint Martin’s campus in King’s Cross, London. Attendees included representatives from UAL, universities across London and beyond.
The morning session centred on a panel discussion on the theme of ‘The Value of Playful Making’ facilitated by Dave White, the Dean of Academic Strategy for UAL and a Re:Play Co-Investigator, with Re:Play Principal Investigator Nic Whitton, Justin Spooner (Director of the education consultancy Unthinkable Digital), and Martin Newth (Head of the School of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art). As the panel offered their thoughts, attendees contributed to a collaborative wall of text in response to the discussion, before participating in a Q&A.
Discussion ranged from the power relations around establishing, enacting, and at times breaking the rules of play, the importance of establishing safe lusory spaces and breaking down the perception that games aren’t sufficiently ‘serious’ for creative higher education.
In the afternoon session, Georgia Steele, (Head of Design and Development at UALO), gave a presentation on Making playful learning online. She noted the inherently creative nature of lusory spaces, drawing on Susan Orr’s writings on the ‘sticky curriculum’. She described some of the basic structures necessary for creative, playful learning experiences including inspiration, motivation, safety and fun, and outlined how UALO is exploring ‘learning patterns’, taking inspiration from Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework and pattern languages used by Christopher Alxander and others in architecture.
Georgia then introduced five playful activities co-designed with colleagues from the UALO Learning Design team members Monty King, Wajahat Afzal, Jemima Collins and Ian Truelove (Research and Innovation Coordinator for UALO), which encouraged delegates to engage in some serious play. Delegates formed small groups and played with a deck of cards designed by Ian for the symposium, featuring key concepts from playful learning, creative arts education, as well as a series of image prompt cards inspired by the creative arts.
Playful activities included using the cards as prompts for broader discussions, a structured game with the aim of developing a sequence of creative online learning incorporating a set of concepts, a tongue-in-cheek game of ‘snog/marry/avoid’ encouraging critical reflection, and a ‘DIY’ activity table encouraging participants to construct an artefact using the cards as inspiration.
Above: Symposium delegates engaging with the playing cards in activities with variations on play.
The symposium provided a productive space for discussion and collaboration on adopting playful approaches to online creative education, and participants came away with plenty of ideas for further exploration. I really enjoyed the opportunity to present novel workshop activity ideas exploring the intersection of play, creative arts and online spaces. All too often this involves trying to reimagine in-person learning experiences online, whereas the symposium tackled this with online learning to the fore. Professor Whitton commented that it was a great opportunity to explore play within an environment which was both lusory and creative. As part of the afternoon activities, Nic prototyped a giraffe-themed video game to be released later in the year (patent pending).