future play lab transforming Cardigan Street in Naarm Melbourne into an urban LARP
future play lab is home to a diverse community of researchers, students, industry leaders, and policymakers focussed on the social, cultural, and economic opportunities of urban play. The lab was founded by Associate Professor Troy Innocent in a disused studio space in post-lockdown Melbourne with a vision to connect speculative design, creative placemaking, and varied forms of urban play. It is now the place for researchers and industry to bring creative experimentation into the urban landscape, and to nurture Melbourne’s best emerging play designers.

Reworlding City North
4–5 October 2026

We closed Cardigan Street for a weekend of urban play to reworld the neighbourhood. Cardigan Street became a civic square inviting participation in what shared, regenerative futures could look, feel, sound, and taste like. Remapped with Boon Wurrung knowledge and language, the street is transformed into an urban commons for learning with place led by N'arweet Carolyn Briggs AM in collaboration with future play lab, Regen Melbourne, and Yalukit Willam Nature Association.

Supported by RMIT’s City North Activation Challenge 2025.

Step into the year 2050, where Naarm Melbourne has become a sprawling megacity grappling with climate crisis, social change, and evolving technologies.

In this urban LARP, climate fiction meets urban adventure at a street party.

Join factions, gather resources, solve puzzles, encounter characters, and work together on creative solutions to regenerate the city during a climate emergency. Reworlding is playful and imaginative, both speculative and deeply connected to place. It embraces climate action for collective change, do-it-together skills, and community building to ask the question: when one world collapses, how do we build a new world together?

Who will we be in 2050? Play to find out.

Urban play connects people and place with design and cities, making them vibrant and liveable, reflecting their creative, linguistic, cultural, social, and urban diversity. The future play lab works with local government and industry partners connecting speculative design, creative placemaking, extended realities (XR) through urban play to explore new ways of being in the world. Working with reworlding as a transdisciplinary methodology for practice-led research connecting Indigenous knowledges and posthuman thinking, the lab frames play as dynamic and disruptive but also immersive, collaborative, and regenerative. It is home to a diverse community of researchers, students, industry leaders, and policymakers focussed on the social, cultural, and economic opportunities of creative play.

We are based in the School of Design in the city campus of RMIT University in Naarm Melbourne /// follow us for updates 💚🎶🌿