STAFF

Meghan is the founder and executive director of Studio Ludo. She has degrees in architecture and landscape architecture, is a certified playground safety inspector, and a licensed landscape architect.

Her research focuses on how the design of play environments impacts physical health and social behavior, and has been presented at conferences worldwide. To date, she has collected data on over 60,000 people in 100 play environments around the world. This research informs all of her play designs. She has designed over 30 destination play environments across the US and has provided play safety and risk guidance for over 40 play installations and children’s museums around the country and world.

She is a training instructor for the Certified Playground Safety Inspector course through the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA) and a studio professor of play and landscape design at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, Curbed, Dwell, Popular Science, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and World Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Taryn believes that all communities deserve sensitively-designed spaces, and that these spaces strengthen people’s relationship to the outdoor world. She has worked as a design consultant for over a decade. Over her diverse career, she has planned and designed public landscapes and community resources both domestically and abroad. Standout projects include public playgrounds in Philadelphia, town greens in Vermont, waterfront resiliency parks in central China, and recreation resource planning in the mid-atlantic United States. Taryn enjoys co-oping at her daughter’s preschool and learning how children explore the world. She also has taught printmaking and screenprinting workshops to preschool and school aged children.

Through her professional experience, Taryn has found clear communication is at the center of all successful projects. Her experience coordinating across multidisciplinary and multicultural teams provides a unique background. Both her professional and volunteer projects have won recognition and awards in the United States and Europe.

Taryn has extensive experience planning and leading community engagement approaches on a wide range of project scales. Her people-first design approach guides her design work. She welcomes any opportunity to build a more community-informed, playful world.

Emily is motivated by the way the design of public space can affect the physical, social, and emotional well-being of all people. She has had architecture and planning roles in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, in the US and abroad. She also has vast experience in childcare, working or volunteering at schools and daycare centers.

Through her professional and educational experiences, Emily has worked on design projects at a multitude of scales, from district plans to art installations. Her focus on design through a planning lens helps her see site-specific projects in the context of large-scale neighborhoods and systems.

Emily’s background in design, research, community engagement, and childcare gives her a unique approach to play space design. Working in the ADA office with the City of Pittsburgh also provided an in depth understanding of how to design spaces for people of all ages and abilities.