Where Work Is Play: The d.school’s Play Class

The Institute of Design at Stanford offers a play class “From Play to Innovation.”

Where Work Is Play: The d.school’s Play Class: [slide show]

At the Stanford d.school From Play to Innovation or “Play Class” is a design course that teaches students to integrate play into their everyday lives. Play is a natural state of behavior in all animals that involves movement, fun, and collaboration. With its large open spaces, the d.school offers an ideal environment for play. Students are able to dance, move and interact with each other which is a vital part of play. — Matt Sullivan

Play Class is taught by Brendan Boyle of IDEO, Stuart Thompson a Stanford professor of Neuroscience, Stuart Brown of the National Institute of Play, and myself, Matt Sullivan, of the Stanford Graduate Design Program. In true design thinking form, Play Class brings together students from all backgrounds ranging from philosophy to electrical engineering to business. This rich mix of backgrounds is perfect for stimulating innovation.

In Play Class, integrating movement into everyday life is a big part of what we do. Students actively investigate the human “state of play” to reach an understanding of its principle attributes and how important it is to creative thinking. The d.school offers a space where doing things different and acting silly is not only accepted, it is encouraged.

Design the Phone of the Future was an exercise where students used the design process to come up with ideas of what the future of cell phone technology would look like. The d.school offers students the ability to rapid prototype out of just about anything whether it be straws and aluminum foil to wood and vinyl to computer animation. Ideation through rapid prototyping is a big part of Play Class and the d.school.

Huizinga’s “Magic Circle” & Thoughts on Gameplay Information Feedback Loops

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens:

According to Huizinga, the consciousness of play as a separate and self-contained sphere is often reinforced by the pervasive tendency to enclose the players within a spatiotemporal frame, the so-called “magic circle”, which isolates their game from the more serious tasks of daily living. The separation often consists in a literal physical precinct: a chessboard, ring, arena, field, stadium, stage, altar, etc. There are also sharp temporal boundaries, a clear beginning and an end, which clearly mark the game off as a temporary interruption of ordinary life. The game unfolds within a temporarily closed world. Moreover, the existence of the magic circle is closely related to the existence of artificial rules or conventions that hold only within this enclosure.

There is No Magic Circle (in Video Games):

Video games have no magic circle, but board games do. The difference between these two media is, essentially, one of reaction and proaction.

… I want to address Huizinga’s famed “magic circle.” Recent scholarship agrees (seemingly unilaterally) that the magic circle is porous at best.

… I propose that we should view the magic circle as the information feedback loop maintained by the players of a board game. The magic circle implies that something special and distinct from ordinary reality is occurring during a game. When we play a board game this is exactly what happens: the objects we play with are imbued with a special significance. Paper money is “worth” something, flat discs can “jump” over each other, placing a token in a certain place earns “points.” The meaning and information we attach to these objects belongs to the other half of the information feedback loop, a loop drawn between the players-as-players and players-as-processors. This loop is the magic circle, a circle that transforms random cubes of wood into bits of information that we are then somehow able to act upon in a meaningful way.

With video games the feedback loop is fundamentally different. We do not need to attach any special meaning to Mario, the computer provides it for us. We see and interact with the objects in a video game without any special manipulation of our own cognitive processes. There is no magic circle here, only reaction to a state that is just partially under our control.

Gigaputt & “When All the World’s a Staged Game”

Make the world your golf course!:

With the flick of a button Gigaputt transforms your neighborhood into an exciting 3-hole mini-golf course, complete with popping manholes, treacherous fire hydrants, and giant coins. With each new game Gigaputt creates a course starting from where you stand and gives you the option to either walk the course like the pros using your iPhone’s GPS, or play from the comfort of your living room.

Gigaputt uses intuitive gesture-based controls that allow you to swing your iPhone like a real golf club and send the ball sailing over your neighborhood…

Gigaputt [video]

A recent New York Times article chronicles not only the development of Gigaputt but a variety of playful uses of the location-aware technology and accelerometers in smartphones. You may already be well aware of location-based games and location-based social media, but this article highlights a variety of fun examples you may have never heard of. There’s simply too many interesting things in the article to effectively excerpt here.

From When All the World’s a Staged Game:

With these new tools, designers are building mystical realms, orienteering courses, immersive fictions, and parallel universes in a way that may or may not have anything to do with the world around them. Mr. Trefry, for instance, is weighing the option of using a bar, a figurative watering hole, as a literal hole for his figurative golf course.

Kevin Slavin, a co-founder of another game company, Area/Code, started in early 2005, explained the allure, “It gives you something about a place that is legible to you but invisible to most everyone else. There’s a kind of beauty to that.”

(via Bernie DeKoven)

Amusement imagines game consoles, architected

The art/culture video game magazine AMUSEMENT has produced a new feature imagining game consoles and handhelds as life-size buildings (scroll right to see all three images).

(via BOING BOING)

Sandbox Summit: Toy action figures, transmedia and the future of play

Sandbox Summit is a “series of conferences designed to address how technology affects the ways kids play, learn, and connect.” Or, as the tagline for this year’s summit “iPlay YouPlay WiiPlay” says: “How play is changing media and media is changing play.” The summit was held last week at MIT’s Media Lab.

I’ve excerpted some choice bits from a post by attendees below. The whole thing is definitely worth a read.

Toy action figures, transmedia and the future of play:

The first day of the Summit kicked off with the father of Transmedia, Professor Henry Jenkins. Transmedia is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer’s understanding of the story world.

Jenkins explains that this type of integrated storytelling has been used since the 19th century. This tradition has continued with children using action figures, not to re-enact the stories they have passively consumed but to actively borrow the characters as a means to project their own ideas in the form of physical avatars. Jenkins argues that the recasting of action figures in this type of play contributes to the creation of new mythologies.

Although Jenkins emphasized that action figures spawned the creative and multi-faceted Transmedia movement, some presenters on the panel “Real Toys for an Increasingly Virtual World” were skeptical of overly designed or specified toys in fostering a child’s creativity.  Marina Bers, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Child Development Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, Tufts University, asked conference attendees to consider how we define a toy in the first place. Barry Kudrowitz, who started MIT’s Toy Lab at MIT, jumped in to say that there is a distinction between toys and toy products (when someone puts affordances around play or assigns play to a particular product).

Mattias, and much of the audience seemed to agree, that children have an irrepressible spontaneity for play that even in a hyper cultivated culture or environment, cannot be smothered. Children will continue to manipulate the toy as they see fit and to fit those toys into their own mythologies, as Jenkins suggested.

How do you see the future of toy design? As children’s toys seem to be more pre-packaged, do you think this will hinder children’s imagination or challenge our children to hack and transform their toys to convey their concepts?