Playful by Design

To explore ‘what good looks like’ for children’s play in a digital world, the Digital Futures Commission consulted children, companies, policy makers, regulators and academics. Responding to public scepticism that play online could match the benefits of traditional free play, our research compared insights from play in non-digital and digital contexts and integrated them within a holistic account of how play possibilities emerge from the intersection of people, products and places, conceived at micro, meso and macro levels. This very complexity helps to transcend reductive judgments about digital play and suggests multiple levers for design innovation, synthesised as ‘Playful by Design’ principles. We operationalised these by co-designing an interactive tool for developers and designers of children’s digital play. Finally, by mapping the principles to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we position play as a use case for the broader agenda of Child Rights by Design.