Creativity and play 1 - Tim Brown

Ted Lectures - LINK
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play.

[After first exercise - face drawing]
He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s.

And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about, kind of, showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And it’s this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.

But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.

David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as a designer.

creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed. Familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that, you know, creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment.

playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.

This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily.

[Picture of child dressed as an alien in foil]
(Laughter)

Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly -- when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really, kind of, interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?

We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.

And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas … And some cases. our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to, kind of, go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play.

And getting them to, kind of, forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits.

who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily.

Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, that’s just happening because they’re acting it out.

Research into kid’s behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role playing seriously. Because when children play a role they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays store, and another one’s playing house, then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to, quite quickly, to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken.

So when, as adults, we role play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life. And they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity.

Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to, kind of, unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play.

So playful exploration, playful building and role play. And those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I kind of admit, that this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play.

And as a result, you know, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time -- but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together.

You can be a serious professional adult, and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. You can be serious and play. So to kind of sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative, so there’s a connection.