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 spaces where all people can experience the joy of play. She does this by positioning users as design partners and specializes in co-designing with children, young people, community groups, and neurodivergent groups.

She is the founder and CEO of Dream Networks, a social enterprise that collaborates with businesses, schools, and communities to co-design and build engaging and inclusive play spaces around the world. To date, Dream Networks has adopted sustainable design practices to create inclusive play spaces for over 60,000 children in the UK and Africa.

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