Cas Holman

Cas Holman is the founder and principal designer at Heroes Will Rise: an award-winning independent toy company producing innovative toys that are designed for creativity and open-ended play. For two decades, she’s been designing playthings like the well-known Rigamajig—used around the world—and interactive play spaces that encourage children and adults alike to explore, imagine, and collaborate. When we play together, we learn to take responsibility for our own ideas and our happiness, and we learn to trust and work with others. Cas teaches us that when we take a playful approach to all aspects of life, we encounter unexpected possibilities and a deepening of our important relationships with our teammates and colleagues. When we play together, we come to understand each other.

Cas was featured in the award-winning Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design. Her motto? Easy is boring. She motivates us to notice the world around us, adopting a mindset of curiosity in everything we do. Her philosophy places play at the forefront of the design process, and she makes toys for kids to feel empowered and understood.

Her highly anticipated new book, Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity is a call for us all to add more play into our lives—and watch how it makes us more innovative, less stressed, and more fulfilled. In it, she draws on the science of play, psychology, design thinking, and more to make the case for unstructured play time, and to show us how to leverage play to find more meaning in every sphere of our lives.

As a consultant, Cas has worked with the leadership and design teams at Nike, Ford, Disney Imagineering, and MIT. She teaches the world’s biggest companies to integrate the benefits of play, open-ended processes, and new ways of thinking into their ethos. Cas also designs indoor and outdoor play spaces for schools, public parks, and museums, including the recently opened Wobbly World at Liberty Science Center, New Jersey. As an educator of twelve years and a former associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, she’s dedicated her life to challenging conventional ideas about how we learn, and what types of learning have value. She’s collaborated with thought leaders in design, early education, and play advocacy who share her passion for reimagining our systems for learning and play.

Cas designed a “prototyping play” exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2023, and created teaching tools for the Walker Art Center for 2024 and beyond. She was featured in a retrospective exhibition about play called the Object/s of Play: The Work of Cas Holman and Karen Hewitt at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT. Cas is also writing a book about play with science co-writer Lydia Denworth.