I spent years teaching in a design studio before I could name what was missing. Students learned to produce drawings. They learned technical skill, spatial thinking, compositional judgement. But when I asked them to explain how they had arrived at a decision — genuinely explain the process, not justify the result — most of them couldn’t.

That gap is where Arplaytecture was born. Not from a theory, but from a question I kept failing to answer: how do you teach someone to understand their own creative process?

The path that led me toward an answer was unexpected. I went to Designskolen Kolding in Denmark to study Design for Play — but what I found there wasn’t design for play. It was play for design. The difference matters: I wasn’t interested in making architecture more entertaining. I was interested in what play reveals about the way people think when they design.

What the Master’s gave me, above all, was clarity. I realised I had already been using design thinking tools with my students for years — asking “why?” five times until a decision could be truly explained, not just defended. I just hadn’t known that was what I was doing. The Master’s didn’t change my instincts. It made them legible.

I’m a PhD architect and play designer, a researcher, and a teacher. I’ve spent twenty years studying the creative process in architecture — first from the inside, as a student and practitioner, then from the outside, building tools that make it visible to others. The doctoral research sharpened what intuition had already found.

Today I design tools, frameworks, and learning architectures for architecture schools and professional studios. Each one is built around a simple conviction: when you understand how you think, you design better.