Nomad Play
Eduard Herrmann
Klára Koldová
We are a team of a designer and an architect, both interested in sustainable principles and the way people interact with their environment. By combining our expertise, we can manage our projects from the bigger scale to the smallest details.
Eduard Herrmann has many years of experience in creating furniture and furnishings for indoor and outdoor use. Recently it makes sense for him to only produce new products by reusing or upcycling things and materials that have outlived their previous lives. He’s interested in the DIY phenomenon and has held several hands-on-creating workshops for the public.
His designs are featured in the collections of leading Czech brands, in urban public spaces, as well as conceptual art installations. Over the years, they have been awarded the Red Dot Award, Czech Grand Design Award, Elle Decoration International Award, and others.
Klara Koldova is a practicing architect and a current Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Architecture at CTU in Prague. Her research deals with free play and the possibilities of its integration in urban environments. Her background is in environmental architecture (Masters from the University of Bath, UK) but after becoming a mum she decided to focus more on making cities child-friendly and promoting adventurous play in Czechia - a country where all spaces for children are designed strictly according to safety norms and not the children’s needs, preferences or abilities.
Our cities are facing an environmental and social crisis while growing rapidly in population. Many children are born to live through an urban childhood where real play is struggling to find a place in their overly controlled schedules. Free outdoor play is being restricted due to traffic danger and parents' worries about safety. Playtime is often limited to segregated play areas with fixed equipment which not only exclude their users from public space but also fail to offer enough opportunities for different types of play and children of different ages and abilities. There is not much space for free, unstructured, or even risky play, although research suggests that it is crucial for healthy physical and cognitive development.
The Nomad Play initiative promotes the integration of free and adventurous play into urban environments, combining it with environmental principles. We believe that incorporating play into cities can help them become more friendly to people as well as the planet, as planning for play combines social and environmental priorities into one.
Neighbourhoods that offer many different options for playful interaction let their inhabitants form meaningful relationships with both the built environment and other people. Where children are present, their adult caregivers and potentially other residents gather. Play spaces that offer direct contact with natural elements help to build respect for nature from a young age and create pleasant living environments for everyone.
We research, design, experiment, play and talk about it. We believe in educational impact as a positive externality of play. All the things we make are made of reused or waste materials in order to use what there already is. We try to enrich cities and start a social paradigm shift, where children’s active free play is seen as the most meaningful way of spending time.