Serious Play..

I'm attending the Art Center Design Conference in Pasadena this week, and the theme for the entire conference is "Serious Play."  In the opening session last night, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, spoke about some of the fallacies of Play.  He was addressing the popular idea that real Play is unbound by rules, that play happens when we are totally free.  In some cases that may be so, but anarchy in human endeavors rarely produces useful ideas or natural energy.

One of the things Tim Brown said was "We need some rules to break some old rules.  Play isn't anarchy" 

We engaged in an exercise where we had thirty seconds to draw a picture of the person sitting next to us.  At the end of the thirty seconds, the room filled with the sound of laughter, embarrassment and surprise, with many of us apologizing for our quick sketch.  Tim explained that we fear the judgment of our peers and our own inner critic so much, that we are compelled to apologize for our creative expression.  He goes on to say that when children are asked to do the same exercise, they do so without hesitation or fear, in fact celebrating the chance to create and play. As children get older, they become less inclined to risk exposing their gifts to the harsh light of their peers.

If we are to propagate playfulness and creativity in our service engagements, we need to design environments with an architecture that supports freedom.  While rules can help define where we can play and what isn't appropriate for the environment, too much control and a demand for compliance can strangle playful expression.

Comments

[Butch]

if you watch children play (especially 6 year old boys, prime example) you can see that they never follow the rules of the game and, in fact, at a certain point breaking the rules becomes the game.
it's the old -
"I shot you"
"I've got a force field"
"I've got force-field piercing bullets"
"I'm magic"
- scenario. it becomes meta-play in which the action never moves but the rules of the action fly like crazy.

game that kids play is a key part of their development, "the game" is almost never actually played but is an exercise in flexing, bending and breaking the rules as fluidly as possible. for fun.