The project, Play matters for children in distress, was a transdisciplinary project with collaborators form the Department of Architecture’s Honours Interface Design Studio and the Centre of the Study of Resilience from the Faculty of Education. The project addressed the play emergency by considering innovative and progressive low threshold interventions toward social inclusion and sensorial integration. The Outreach Foundation provided insights into different perspectives on play spaces. The design process included deriving informants from literature (child development, multiple intelligences and capability theory), investigating contextual realities, and considering personas in the analysis of a diverse group of children and caregivers. Literature sources were used to develop a theoretical framework of different ways children learn, contextual analyses of potential places where designs could be used, and a focus on the child and caregiver to identify specific user requirements and needs. The process of prototyping allowed the construction and material investigations to be considered as deployable structures, which can be assembled, disassembled and reassembled as a kit-of-parts. The Earthworld Educational Trust, York Timbers and Terre des Hommes supported and funded the realisation and construction of prototypes. The real-life nature of the project allowed for design development and refinement, by critically reflecting on the potential for positive impact from a multi-scalar approach – now, soon and later, after Hamdi (2004). This approach allows for a catalyst intervention as a base module, with the interactive capacity for change (now), the possible expansion of the intervention by the users themselves (soon), and how it can grow and become more permanent when ownership is taken over time (later). The work contributes to the current discourse on a Right to Play, by incorporating sensorial integration and social inclusion – where differences do not matter.