Marie Williams

Marie Williams is a playful chartered engineer, design lecturer, TedX speaker and CEO of Dream Networks.  Her design practice is situated in co-designing playful, regenerative, and culturally resilient spaces. Her work seeks to deconstruct notions of what play constitutes and open up sustainable, regenerative spaces where all people can experience joy and connection. She does this by positioning users as design partners and partnering with technology to alleviate inequity. She specialises in co-designing with children, young people, communities and neurodivergent groups.

She is the founder and CEO Dream Networks, a social enterprise that collaborates with businesses, schools, and communities to co-design and create inclusive play spaces. Providing play for over 60,000 people in the UK and Africa to date. She is on the energy, environment and sustainability committee at Institute of Mechanical Engineers,/ policy paper author and a thought leader on how to mitigate against and adapt to climate change through open space and circularity. 

Through her Ph.D. at the UCL Institute of Global Prosperity within the Bartlett School of Architecture, she has developed a critical co-design framework for cultivating outdoor play in urban poor and refugee contexts through design plurality and decolonisation, with a deep understanding of place, culture and materiality.

Marie has taught on design, innovation, and play at Universities in the UK, Kenya, and the USA such as Bristol University, Royal College of Arts, Yale University, ArtCentre College of design, and the University of Nairobi.