Shape-shifting studio Play Nice wants to use creative knowhow to elevate communities

Nate was born and bred down the road in Hackney, having a difficult time at school, labelled “disruptive” and kicked out at one point. During and after sixth form he channeled his irrepressible energy and social skills into promoting safe club nights and charity fundraisers, and later a streetwear brand. He also had a brief stint working in digital UX, all the while, trying to find his career path. Then Nate went through a tough period, experiencing homelessness and being wrongly diagnosed and medicated for bipolar. “My life was just melting,” he describes, then he remembers his good friend Dillon Bradley telling him “you’re a creative… and I was like ‘what the hell is a creative’”. Bradley sent him the application form for D&AD New Blood Shift, a night school run by the charity as an alternative route into creative careers. With one day left to apply, he got in. “I’d come from complete rock bottom,” he says, “and then I found a home. Literally, doors opened.” Around the time he landed a place on Shift, he also landed a spot on Wieden + Kennedy’s creative incubator programme The Kennedys, and somehow, did both pretty much at the same time.

Serendipitously, Ayo also got a spot on The Kennedys, and though the duo had met socially on nights out in Dalston and established a friendship, this is where the professional partnership truly began. On the course, the students learned a bit of everything, from copywriting to design, photography and coding. “It teaches you quite a good skill – generalism – which I think is super important,” says Ayo, citing David Epstein’s book Range, and lending some insight to the multidisciplinary ethos behind Play Nice. “The main point is to try stuff, and maybe there’s one thing that might click. Obviously it’s a good way for them, as an employer, to see who can do certain things, but as an individual it’s learning what parts of the process you’re good at.”

During Shift, Nate’s team won a Nike pitch that led to him being offered a placement with AKQA. There, he worked again with Nike, using his knowledge of London culture to build a whole new social strategy for Nike London’s Instagram, to reach younger audiences and develop “new ways of bridging the gap between the brand and the city”. Showing such prowess, the brand soon pinched him to work in-house, where he ran social channels, and later worked with talent to develop bigger projects. Meanwhile, off the back of the course, Ayo got a job at Wieden + Kennedy as a strategist where he stayed for three years, recently moving over to Mother.

In parallel, the two continued conversations they’d had during the Kennedys course, sharing ideas and philosophies that gradually built into Play Nice. Nate, the more extroverted of the two, remembers constantly nagging Ayo to start their own enterprise, while Ayo, the quieter of the two, believes this is a valuable quality in his business partner. “Nate will always push against the grain, against an institutional way of thinking to almost create your own new institution” – another hint to how the two define Play Nice.

From the outset, the duo’s entire reason for doing any project has been to support causes and organisations they believe in. Case and point is its first fully fledged project, a collaboration with the UK Student Climate Network and agency ILoveYou that saw Play Nice partner five designers (including It’s Nice That’s art director Will Knight) with five young activists to make protest placards. The Fridays For Future project was nominated for the Designs of the Year 2019 prize, no less, and established a relationship with the Design Museum that has more recently seen Play Nice create a film called The New Rave for its exhibition, Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers. The film explores the past, present and future of electronic music through a Black lens, featuring a cast including Errol Anderson and Shy One.

On the UKSCN project, Nate says much of the impetus was giving the proponents of the movement a visual voice. “At that point there was a shift from the youth from getting drunk to really caring about issues. Young people in our country weren’t being taken seriously, which was something that needed to be tapped into, supported and platformed.”

“We show our identity through our action,” Ayo adds, and in that respect, its latest endeavour The Pattern exemplifies the duo’s community focus. The Pattern is an initiative offering mentorship and funding to young people hoping to create their own community project, created in partnership with the Culture Mile. Aspiring creatives from underrepresented groups applied in their hundreds for a couple of dozen spots on the course, which is currently underway and aims to build skills in research, ideation, curation and production. Participants work with mentors including Lamisa Khan, founder of Muslim Sisterhood; Naeem Davis, co-founder of BBZ London; Lavinya Stennett, founder of the Black Curriculum; and Noga Levy-Rapoport – all of whom Ayo and Nate have connected with along the way in their own winding career paths. At the end of the course, there will be opportunities to work with institutions who are affiliated with Culture Mile including Barbican, LSO, Guildhall and the Museum of London. The mentees will be split into four groups, and each group will be commissioned with £5000 to bring their projects to life.

“It’s about handing skills over,” Nate sums up. “These people have the richest ideas and references, so it’s important to give them the resources to go and build something.” Ayo adds that it’s also about creating what he calls “radical transparency,” demystifying creative projects and making them more accessible and tangible by showing the reality behind the magic curtain. He describes feeling how the creative sector has opened doors to them, revealing its secrets as a consequence, but the industry still tries to make sure the door closes behind them. “We don’t just want to leave the door open, we want to knock down the walls and show everyone how it works and how to do it. The world is really just information and resources, so it’s important to us that, in our own small way, we bend those resources and that information for people to use for themselves.”