Leikitään! Let's Play! Exhibition
What would your dream play environment look like? Play belongs to everyone – and so does the opportunity to shape the environment in which they live. Based on these principles, the Leikitään! Let’s Play! exhibition brings together scale models created by participants of all ages in a series of co-design workshops. The most inspiring ideas will be realised in Oulu’s urban environment in summer 2027.
Play belongs to us all, and so do the cities. We should all have a possibility to participate in designing our neighbourhoods. These thoughts led to the Let’s Play! exhibition, which features more than one hundred small-scale models for play environments.
Proto—Designers of Northern Finland has organised co-design workshops with diverse user groups—from small children and adults to ageing people—through the spring months in Oulu. The small-scale models tell endless stories of their makers, illustrating how play is connected to nature, forests, nesting, calming down, and hiding away, just as much as it is to water, climbing, adventures, animals, and love.
All is collaboration
The list does not end here. The workshops will continue during the summer, adding to the diversity of the scale models exploring what brings joy in play. Play for all is much needed, especially in our very restless world of today. We are proud to collaborate with The Association of Ukrainians in Northern Ostrobathnia to organise an animation course for Ukrainian children, facilitated by Olga Liashenko, an educator originally from the Kherson region of Ukraine.
We all need a space where we can be free to use our imagination, work together, and find our own voice. We at Proto want to do our share to make the world a bit calmer, and it can only be achieved together, in collaboration.
We wish to warmly thank all of you who took part in the workshops, and everyone who invited us and allowed us to organise a Let’s Play! co-design workshop with them and their clients. We thank everyone who supported us in exhibition design and setting it up, and all of you who helped us think about the endless elements of play.
Sometimes co-design stops at the design phase
We agreed with the City of Oulu some time ago that the most inspiring outcomes from the workshops will also be built as permanent structures in Oulu. If you wait until summer 2027, you’ll see what this means. The play goes on!
Open to public
12 June—15 August 2026
Thu–Fri 12–18 Sat 10–16
Design Centre Proto
Vanha villatehdas (Old Wool Factory)
Pikisaarentie 17, 90100 Oulu
In collaboration with Proto
Team
Proto: Päivi Tahkokallio, Hanna Savolainen, Annika Väisänen, Sanna Mäkelä, Tuomas Mujunen
Finnish Association of Design Learning: Mari Savio, Anna Kokki, Siri Lumme, Paula Susitaival
Design Ambassadors: Tiina Hyväri, Soili Junes, Mirka Kortesoja-Kuparinen, Janne Laitinen, Magnus Lange, Niina Martikainen, Sanna Mäkelä, Johanna Riepula, Annika Väisänen, Anna Äijälä
More information
Päivi Tahkokallio
Director of Proto2026 Design Programme, paivi@tahkokallio.fi
Annika Väisänen
Producer at Design Centre Proto, annika.vaisanen@proto.fi, 040 147 0022