BIRMINGHAM, 25 March 2025. Play Moments has been selected for funding through Innovate UK's Design Foundations Round 6, supporting the venture to use people-centred design to better understand the challenges families face when trying to support their young child's development and to shape a more accessible, practical model of early support.
The competition, delivered by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is investing up to £2 million in projects using people-centred and systemic design methods to inform and de-risk future research and development. Funded projects are designed to explore unmet needs, generate or improve innovative ideas, and ensure future solutions are desirable, responsible and more likely to be adopted.
For Play Moments, the award marks an important next stage in understanding what families genuinely need before building the technology around them.
Across the early years, parents and carers are surrounded by information about how their child should be developing, but knowing what to do in practice can be much harder. Advice can be fragmented, generic or difficult to translate into everyday family life, particularly when a parent has concerns about their child's development or is waiting to access professional support.
Play Moments will use the funded project to work directly with parents, carers, early-years practitioners and other stakeholders to understand those experiences in greater depth and co-design approaches that make early support easier to access and use.
The work will explore how practical, personalised guidance can fit naturally into everyday routines and play, while identifying where technology can genuinely add value rather than creating another source of information for parents to navigate.
"This funding gives us the opportunity to do something incredibly important before we scale Play Moments: listen properly," said Ioana Axinte, Founder of Play Moments. "Parents already know their children better than anyone, but they are often expected to navigate an overwhelming amount of information and work out what is relevant on their own. We want to understand those moments deeply and design support around real family life, rather than asking families to fit around another service or app."
Ioana Axinte, Founder of Play Moments
Designing with families, not just for them
The Innovate UK Design Foundations programme places particular emphasis on involving the people and organisations affected by an innovation early in the design process. Projects are expected to consider stakeholder experiences, motivations and behaviours, alongside the wider social and technical factors that influence whether a solution will work in practice.
Over the six-month project, Play Moments will use research, co-design and rapid prototyping to test assumptions, explore different approaches and understand what parents are most likely to find useful and sustainable in everyday life.
The team will also work with early-years professionals to ensure that future support complements existing services and reflects appropriate developmental practice.
Rather than starting with a fixed product, the project will allow Play Moments to refine both the problem it is solving and the model through which support should be delivered.
"The most exciting part of this project is that we are not starting with the assumption that we already have the answer," said Axinte. "We have a clear ambition, to make high-quality early support easier for families to access, but this programme allows us to challenge our assumptions, learn from parents and professionals, and build the right solution around what we discover."
Ioana Axinte, Founder of Play Moments
Building the foundations for Play Moments
The project will run from 1 June to 30 November 2025, in line with the Design Foundations Round 6 programme timetable. Projects funded through the competition can receive between £40,000 and £80,000 and are fully funded for eligible project costs.
Insights from the project will inform the future development of Play Moments, including how support could be personalised to a child's stage of development, how activities can be incorporated into everyday routines and how families can be given clearer guidance without increasing screen time or parental pressure.
The longer-term ambition is to create a model of early support that helps parents feel more confident, gives children more opportunities to learn through everyday interactions and can work alongside early-years and specialist services.
What happens next
From June, Play Moments will begin working with parents, carers and early-years professionals through research, interviews, co-design and testing.
Families and organisations interested in contributing to the research or following the development of Play Moments can register their interest at playmoments.app.
