I have worked for many years now as a Play Designer. Explaining what this means is never a simple thing but I’ll try here as it may inform the rest of what I write which is still bubbling up for me as I type this.
I work for a company that makes digital play and learning products for very young children. I design open playful and playable digital toys with a cast of cute characters that primarily end up on phones and tablets and are mostly played with by preschool-age kids.
The job is empathy balanced with function and it requires me to keep kids and how they play at the forefront of my thinking.
I wanted to preface this post by mentioning my job because I wanted to talk about play as an adult. I’ve mentioned play as a part of art making a few times in passing but it’s worth dedicating a whole post to how it manifests for me.
For little kids, play is a powerful tool that helps them acquire mental and physical facility and understanding. Play is a way to use all of their senses to collect new experiences and test current knowledge — a continual call and response, action and reaction. It extends and builds new mental models by applying labels and contexts to objects and testing the boundaries of what their minds and bodies can do while also discovering core things like “oh! I exist as something called a person!” Just the basic forming buds for all future blooming existential joys and crises.
So… my work is to understand those frenzied childhood developmental years in my present adult state and to work with artists, developers and technical artists, sound designers, researchers, and more folks to design for play.
I have been designing professionally for over 30 years now and at least half of that time has had some focus in design for kids media. My education was in neither child development or even design. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree but my true education has always been in following tangents and interests to see where they lead me and how things connect and associate with each other.
…
Art making for me begins from this place of play and discovery. But first, like most adults, there is an unlearning.
We move through childhood education and then on to adult work and responsibilities and what gets taken from us at each stage by increments is an openness to experience. As adults, we are meant to maintain a distance and to come into things with plans and purpose. Not the open eyes and hands of a child.
I don’t count myself as free of those adult constraints. Each time I approach a blank sheet of paper or the refined surface of a birch panel it takes mental effort to make the first mark. But I have tried over the last decade or so especially to re-teach myself that the first marks are freeing — they cut through preciousness and remove the tunnel vision that can come from the blank surface.
The first scribbled lines I make may not have the unburdened nature of a child’s marks but they establish the beginning of a path, a connection that can lead to a network of other marks.
I don’t sketch. Or I don’t sketch in the sense that I don’t make marks to prepare for greater more substantial marks. It’s all a sketch or alternately, it’s all artwork in its own form, scale, time, and place.
…
When a child draws they aren’t without goals either. They are looking to capture, through one of the means of expression provided to them, things they have discovered, things from their current world, and things they maybe hope to discover still.
My drawings are an attempt to discover the space between my mind and my hand and to use the tools of play to make and see something that wouldn’t have form without that play.
I say this simply as a thought for others that feel held back by what we are told are adult concerns but are actually just a set of false structures built around us. Letting yourself play in even the most subtle way can reveal our internal and external worlds to us in interesting ways.
I’ll end with some recent drawings where the play has been with accident and intention. There’s a recurring grid that lets a range of looser marks and washes connect with spontaneously applied text.
Where do you let yourself play?