Dear Playspace Community,
I’m writing to you all to announce that this week’s session will be a little different than usual as it will be Playspace’s final session. We hope you come spend one last Sunday with us to help bring Playspace to a close together and celebrate what has been at the core of the space: you all, all the people that showed up week over week and shared your worlds with us :’)
To give a bit of color as to why we came to this decision, the short and maybe not very satisfying answer is that we want to pursue the things we first came to Playspace to explore in ways that are hard to balance with hosting. What follows is the longer answer.
I came out of 2023 really lonely. I didn’t feel like I had many people super close in the city who cared about side projects, hobbies, or honestly anything outside of their job or their school work. I feel like I had been stumbling around waiting for a space like Playspace to exist so that I could go to it and realized that damn, I can also be the one to make that space exist.
70 weeks ago, Scott, Kai, and I first got together for the first session of what we hoped would become a space for exploring, learning, and building based on curiosity and intrinsic motivation and no ulterior or external gain. I remember coming out of that session both ecstatic that it happened but also so excited to iterate on what we could have done better for Playspace 002. Notably, I cared. I cared so much about making this space work because I needed it to exist first and foremost for myself.
Dozens of sessions passed and some people found it an equally important part of their schedules, enough so that they also wanted to help be a host in the space. I tried to learn jazz with some friends. Others wrote heartfelt letters to their family, made chicken sandwiches sometimes, journaled about moving on, worked on their first personal website. Whatever it was, the important thing is that 1) they cared about doing things for the sake of doing them, and 2) they showed up week after week to do it. And for a while, we wanted nothing but to spend our Sundays at Playspace doing the things we care about with each other.
I think there is a natural evolution path for Playspace attendees. You begin by discovering what interests you, what makes you curious. Playspace becomes a place to explore and nurture that spark as you find others who share your interests, while also being exposed to a multitude of other hobbies and curiosities. Many became cohosts because they cared about the continued existence of the space as one that brought people together to explore what made their worlds brighter. As hosts, we were fortunate enough to both participate in and steward the existence of this space for exploration. We learned so much from seeing all the ideas you brought in and explored many rabbitholes of our own – some projects and hobbies have continued for over a year.
Unfortunately though, there eventually reaches a point where an intentionally broad space like Playspace no longer becomes the ideal container to delve deeper in specific interests. Many of us found ourselves slowly gravitating towards smaller, more dedicated spaces for our interests—often with the very people we met at Playspace. In this way, Playspace served as a kind of ‘hub world’ where people discovered both their passions and their people before venturing out to create more focused spaces together.
As we’ve grown and evolved, many of us original hosts have felt the pull to host and organize more specialized gatherings outside of Playspace, dedicated to the specific things we want to pursue more deeply. This feels like a natural progression, but it also means our energy and attention have gradually shifted away from the broader container of Playspace itself.
I’m of course still really proud of each and every session we host. Week after week, we get to meet new people and learn a little bit about what brings color and joy and play to their lives. We hear stories about how someone made their first friend in SF through Playspace, or that they moved around travel just to make it to Playspace. These stories and experiences give us hope that it’s still very important in people’s lives. The fact that Playspace is such a cornerstone in many people’s schedules made this decision much much harder.
Bill Watterson famously discontinued “Calvin and Hobbes” after he felt like he achieved everything he wanted with the comic strip and wanted to end it while he still loved drawing each and every frame. For similar reasons, we wanted to sunset Playspace while it still represents the best of what we imagined.
While this chapter is closing, I hope the spirit of Playspace lives on in how you approach craft, hobbies, communities, and friendships. We’ve always said that “Everyone who attends Playspace is, in many ways, a host of the space as well” and we hope that you live that fully even as this container may no longer exist. Playspace would not have existed without all of you being part of it – what you brought to the space to share, and the fact that you made the time to show up, whether it was one week or all seventy. In a city where everything is always go, go, go, it is so special that you chose to spend your Sundays here, with us. Our scrapbook is testament to that – this space was shaped by all of us, and is something we created together.
Our last intro circle question at Playspace 070 was “If you could start a [blank]space, what would it be and what would it look like?” Perhaps you’ll start your own versions, adapt the format to serve different communities, or simply carry forward the practice of making room for play in your life. The concept of ‘Playspace’ is yours to take and transform.
I’d love to hear your reflections, memories, stories, or what Playspace has meant to you. Feel free to share at our final gathering this Sunday, May 18th or, if you can’t make it, email me your thoughts!
With deep appreciation for all you’ve brought to this (play)space,
Jacky and the cohost team