{"id":24067,"date":"2024-04-26T10:37:05","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T14:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/?p=24067"},"modified":"2024-05-09T08:50:06","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T12:50:06","slug":"design-matters-to-play-matters-to-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/blog\/design-matters-to-play-matters-to-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Matters to Play Matters to Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Design Play<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While play foreshadows culture, design shapes<\/em> culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, <\/a>designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they are introduced, to form the culture framing people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding how play and design shape culture enhances innovation practices. Play\u2019s engaging characteristics makes it a friendly conceptual \u201cTrojan hobby horse\u201d for design project stakeholders\u2014an inclusive way to think about problems for users, producers, or designers alike. Building on previous research and reflecting on my own shift from \u201cdesign for play to play for design\u201d as a designer, I identified various themes exemplifying the conceptual bridges linking play and design. Like playmaking, designing requires one to: think<\/em> (critically and analytically), care<\/em> (empathize and advocate), feel<\/em> (experience materiality, gestalt), act<\/em> (as a sociocultural agent), create<\/em> (manifest possibilities), shape<\/em> (articulate visual literacy), make<\/em> (model and produce), share<\/em> (communicate knowledge, tell stories), deliver<\/em> (implement innovation).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Fellowship<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While designers have applied play to their own ends, few play scholars have focused on the cultural relevance of this relationship. To ascertain how, if at all, play scholars examined the now obvious relationship between play and design, I reviewed writings available at The Strong National Museum of Play\u2019s Brian Sutton-Smith\u2019s Library and Archives of Play over a 10-day research fellowship. The fellowship aimed to help consolidate a conceptual framework that promotes \u201cdesignerly ways of knowing\u201d informed by play, and how an optimal, inspirational form of design for play, proposed as a \u201csuperlative\u201d form of design, could be useful as a transdisciplinary Design Play relevant to addressing contemporary challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research also aimed to enhance understanding of either discipline through the lens of the other; one uncertain<\/em>, the other ambiguous<\/em>. To compensate for the lack of research available linking play to design, I investigated references around play, discussing its multifarious nature, including imagination, creativity, storytelling, art, strategy, or social engagement, to connect play to design through their multidisciplinary manifestations. Brian Sutton-Smith\u2019s papers constituted my main references, along with others from fellow educationalists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists. Anchoring the research in practice, I also examined toy and game playmakers\u2019 testimonials to discern how their practice could exemplify or inform design innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sutton-Smith\u2019s Playful Design Paradox<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Picture
Sutton-Smith in his childhood home Island Bay\u2019s Waikato Street, New Zealand, ca. 1980s.\nThe Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A social science polymath and one of the foremost play scholars of the last 100 years, Sutton-Smith scrutinized much of his peers\u2019 work while meticulously documenting his own. The resulting library he bequeathed to The Strong provides a nonpareil resource for anyone investigating the multidisciplinary nature of play to contextualize it within broader networks of theory and practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His contribution to play studies, rooted in the games and stories of his New Zealand childhood, developed a consilience of the ways of thinking and speaking about play. He proposed playing evolved genetically as theatric representative forms of culture, mimicking or mocking real-world challenges, to aid us in our struggle for survival, to overcome life challenges, or just to feel life is worth living.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Image
Toys As Culture, 1986. The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In Toys as Culture <\/em>(1986), Sutton-Smith investigated the embodiment of play in toys and how, as manipulable mass-media, toys channel culture in modern family life, through technological innovation, as educational props, or as consumer objects. In the process, he critiqued how playthings acculture children to rational, information-oriented consumer societies and their alienating work practices. Paradoxically, Sutton-Smith barely broached the subject of design in his work aside from a brief consideration of whether a \u201ctechnology of toys (is) possible,\u201d given the technological and marketing motivations driving toymakers over the sociocultural factors driving toy and game designers. Nevertheless, his groundbreaking study is relevant to designers, for whom the play of semantics is a core concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the International Toy Research Association (ITRA)<\/a>, which he co-founded in 1993, Sutton-Smith saw an opportunity to refresh play studies. He felt the classic toy paradigm as conveying \u201cprogressive\u201d didactic, socializing, or therapeutic functions\u2014those set against (or within) a work ethic rejecting play as waste of time\u2014had dogged play research and rationalized an oversized belief in play stages and appropriateness where \u201ctoy play becomes a child capsule set to one side.\u201d Encouraging researchers to focus their attention beyond toys as cultural text or on players as social agents, he urged ITRA to broaden play\u2019s research scope to look for larger patterns in Homo Ludens\u2019 life, new forms of leisure intelligibility. Seeing that \u201ctoys are for child researchers the particular nets through which all of the rest of this leisure map can be brought to light,\u201d he proposed the Festival of Toys as a metaphor for an ongoing, reflective event amplified with episodic bouts of reflexive engagement to raise issues about the adequacy of research assumptions. He envisioned the festive \u201cprocession of variegated toy events\u201d as a monumental cybernetic merchandising involving adults, children, media, and industry, leveraging gift giving and fantasy characters to invigorate toy research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years later at ITRA\u2019s 9th<\/sup> conference<\/a>, held at The Strong in August 2023, members corroborated his 2008 realization that \u201call of a sudden, (play) had become among other things a sociopolitical matter of some complexity.\u201d The scope of topics, under the umbrella \u201cToys Matter: The Power of Playthings,\u201d comprised sociopolitical conflict, cultural identity, sustainability, toying with museums, research through toymaking, and the ever-widening reach of design as an academic field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Image
Kindergarten Gift No. 2, about 1900. Early modern designers, including Bauhaus design school Masters, acknowledged being influenced by Fr\u00f6bel\u2019s \u201cGifts\u201d learning aids.\nGift of David Ridley of Denver, Colorado and Jennifer Mabardy of Acton, Massachusetts in memory of their parents, Anne and John Ridley of Acton, Massachusetts, in honor of their lifelong love of antique toys and commitment to learning. The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Playmaking for Design Play: Tools and Props and Rules and Tropes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research through design entails researchers reading and<\/em> writing, empathizing with stakeholders while thinking and making. As critical\u2014playful\u2014makers and transformers, they harness the human sciences to probe culture, map contexts and adapt to circumstances to facilitate the creation of preferrable ones. They leverage art to access the subconscious, playing with surrealism, nonsense, whimsy, and pleasure, to discriminate value and explore affordances. They organize resources and harness technology to optimize interactions between humans and images, objects, bodies, and spaces, thus shaping our artificial environment: culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do toys help? While toys are the tangible tools for or props of play, games are the intangible rules of or tropes for play; the former embodying materiality, the latter channeling storytelling, both serving as twin metaphors promoting design research. Designers tamper the effects and temper the affects of technology: comfortably navigating the uncertainty of design processes, they are well suited to embrace the ambiguous nature of play. Alternating divergent and convergent modes of thinking\/playing, designers iterate between letting go and maintaining control, focusing on changing current conditions into preferred ones. Balancing a situationist urge for authenticity and a celebration of the moment \u00a0designers may counteract design\u2019s rationalist envy and its cybernetic illusions of control over nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Echoing The Strong\u2019s curation of things play, especially its Toy Halls of Fame, Tim Walsh\u2019s interviews for his 2004 The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys<\/em>\u2014a \u201cbook about entrepreneurs who dreamed about creating fun and who did it!<\/em>\u201d\u2014<\/em>and his Toyland <\/em>videos produced with Ken Sons are all celebrations of \u201cdesigned play,\u201d viewed through the lens of opportunity manifest in capitalistic individualism. This is encapsulated in the book\u2019s selection criteria: 1) high sale numbers (over 10 million), 2) market longevity (more than 10 years), 3) identifiable inventors, 4) inventing outside institutions or corporations, and 5) significance to the author or his friends. Enlisting individual players-as-users, starting with himself, to define plaything success, mirrors that projected by the playmaker, as in his Author\u2019s Note whereby Rules of the Game are described as \u201cHow I Chose the Toys I Chose.\u201d Whether book, video, or museum, such interpretations of playmaking success read like a situational assessment chart plotting the internal, external, desired, and happenstance forces enabling an individual inventor\u2019s potential to create for play:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • Personal passions: He-Man was a childhood dream; Etch-A-Sketch, an engineer\u2019s pet project.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Accidental inventions: Play Doh, a serendipitous chemical discovery; Slinky an engineering one.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Marketing adaptations: Barbie, of risqu\u00e9 merchandising; Ant farm, of mail order trading.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Breaking rules: Twister allows close-up body play; Nerf permits indoor ball play.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Unlike their toymaking counterparts\u2019 stories of opportune invention, game designers, while also often solo inventors, appear to be motivated by more predetermined objectives. The conceptual, strategic, abstract (if only visual) nature of games requires their creators to plan and articulate narrative structures for player engagement and experience, allocate resources, rewards, obstacles, and to balance skills and challenges in order to sustain players\u2019 interest in the game. This applies to less strategic games such as digital art gameplay, for which designers also need to specify intent and encode play in software on the get-go to create ludic aesthetic experiences. Game design practice is often an independent one, reinforced by the fact that games can be produced with fewer resources than those needed to produce a toy. While toy production requires more resources (materials, tools, processes, labor), games can be created with a pen and paper or on a personal computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Image
    \u201cConstruction Game\u201d by Bauhaus student Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, 1923.\nPhoto courtesy of Flickr user Rolf-Dieter through Creative Commons License Attribution.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    These aspects of playmaking have several agentic implications for the relationship between design and play:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n
    • Toy invention<\/em>, the ability to identify in one\u2019s environment novel possibilities for play, is a tangible manifestation of a keen sense of observation and creativity, fundamental assets for any designer and a way of seeing the world that nurtures design fluency.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Game design<\/em> builds experience. A game is always free, freeplay is always bound by rules\u2014somewhat. No activity, however much \u201cfreely\u201d performed for its own sake, is devoid of operational steps, environmental factors, social rules, or interpretive codes. Designing a game forces one to plan the architecture of experience, from resources to usage.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • People play.<\/em> Design for play inspires creative practices in design because of the nature of play: there is no designing for play without playing for design. When applying such cues to other disciplines, innovation becomes a social practice bringing together motivated actors, quirky characters, and engaging personalities, helping other stakeholders to open and thrive, contributing diversity, variability, redundancy\u2014enabling creativity to organize and develop.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Playmaking is meaningful<\/em>. Inventor, designer, maker, seller, curator, scholar, player\u2014play industry individuals create meaning, market allowing. Playmaker successes read like stories of personal affirmation and empowerment, offering everyone the opportunity to broaden perspectives on design\u2014including inclusive, creative, or agentic alternatives to established practices.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

      Perhaps the latter point could be emphasized by turning the spotlight on one of The Strong\u2019s unique assets. While the past century abounds with male playmaker success stories, the Archive\u2019s testimonials of female playmakers, including in the Women in Toys and Women in Games Initiative papers, mirror male player practice and celebrate inclusive playmaking\u2019s common and complementary values. This includes validating body and life choices (Barbie\u2019s Carol Spencer), engaging with deduction and narratives skills (Her Interactive Nancy Drew games), designing for social interaction (multiplayer game designer and programmer Dani Bunten Berry), sustaining a successful business (Slinky\u2019s Betty James), stimulating artistic expression (computer artist Ruth Leavitt Fallon), revealing design\u2019s political nature (Barbie Liberation Army), or reclaiming home economic traditions (doll creator Patricia Biasuzzi). Each tells a tale of personal perseverance and affirmation, claiming a place in the fun and fantasy industry, ipso facto<\/em> celebrating personal herstories for everyone\u2014community allowing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      By R\u00e9mi Leclerc, 2023 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Design Play<\/strong>
      \nWhile play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"8388,9018,9355,9063,7880,6765","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,41,369,368,45,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-brian-sutton-smith-library-and-archives-of-play-at-the-strong","category-classic-toys-of-the-national-toy-hall-of-fame","category-guest-blogger","category-research-fellow","category-toys","category-uncategorized","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDesign Matters to Play Matters to Design - The Strong National Museum of Play<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/blog\/design-matters-to-play-matters-to-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Design Matters to Play Matters to Design - The Strong National Museum of Play\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Design Play While play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. 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