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Play
Play is an ancient, voluntary, “emergent” process driven by pleasure that
yet strengthens our muscles, instructs our social skills, tempers and
deepens our positive emotions, and enables a state of balance that leaves us
poised to play some more.
(Eberle, 2014, p. 231)
This is significant for the design/art professions: can we as adults play with
some ulterior purpose, i.e., a design assignment? What are external objects?
Are they games, computer programs, toys or symbolic objects? Do their uses
imply manual dexterity manipulations and crafting methods and skills? Is
open-endedness the same as the “uncertainty” principle? When play is
inserted into the CPS process, I argue that these challenges are positively
resolved.
Let me reinforce and expand the above definition from others compiled
from numerous psychology study sources that have direct application to the
design/art fields:
Attributes of Play
Attributes associated with play as opposed to work include humor, joy and
spontaneity.
Play enables the processing and flow of information insulated from “failure”
or fear because in part it embraces failure. Play also introduces the simulative
mode of thinking where play assists in uncoupling a process output from its
normal relations to other systems at multiple levels, enabling experimentation
without failure. Feedback is maintained, fear is not a factor, there is no
finality, and the decrease in fear enables an increase in confidence and quality
of engagement.
Psychologists agree that play is crucial for normal social, emotional and
cognitive development. Play is a mechanism to cultivate creativity, solve
problems and generate ideas (Brown, 2009). One key function of play is the
opportunity it offers to reassemble behavioral sequences for skilled action
(Bruner, 1966), reconfiguring convention sequences into creative
experimentation. This underscores the need to reduce goal-directed actions
that can be predetermined or so structure the process that the outcome is
predictable or limited in possible outcomes. The push or pressures to
successfully accomplish something can lead to fear or pressured
manifestations, raising barriers to creativity. Play can reduce excessive drive
and related frustrations (Bruner, 1966).
As play is explored for adults in the design fields, rules must not dominate as
in video games, sports, etc., reducing the essence of play. The state of design
education and the professional office, immersed as it is in a digital-
technological fascination, can bifurcate learning and playing, trivializing play
in the process. Design education and practice can “transform not knowing
into a deficit; creative imitation into individualized accomplishments, rote
learning and testing, and completion into correction and competitiveness”
(Connery et al., 2010, p. 36). Imitation is necessary in creative problem-
solving as a starting point at a minimum, since it is critical in skill
development. In adults, continued imitation can give way to copying or clip-
art; losing the creative edge. Imitation is explored in the suggested exercises
in Chapter 7.
Combinatory Play
Combinatory play is the conscious and unconscious cognitive playful
manipulation of two or more ideas, feelings, sensory experiences, images,
objects, sounds or words. Players experiment with hypotheses, possible
outcomes, and even “failures”; they then compare, contrast, synthesize and
break apart disparate elements or constructs in re-envisioning a larger whole
(Stevens, 2014). I remember an exercise from undergraduate school where
the instructor placed disparate ideas and concepts in a hat and had each
student pick out three and begin a design process with those three ideas—
quite challenging to say the least. It aided in eliminating clichés and set
patterns in the design process.