Build Your Own City | BMW Guggenheim Lab

A great interactive instalation that generated some discussion and got people thinking.



An online version can be played here.

Summary of Tim Brown's "Creativity and Play"

Many people tend to be conservative in their thinking because they fear the judgments of their peers. Kids tend to fear much less. A trusted environment, where people can explore with less apprehension, encourages people to play. That's why friendship is a shortcut to play—secure uninhibited exploration. This is why many creative firms like Pixar and Google invest so much in creating a friendly and playful atmosphere. Tim Brown elaborates on three types of play: exploration, building, and role-playing.

Exploration
Adults tend to want to categorize new things and situations very quickly. Kids are more open to exploring possibilities. For example: kids can generally find more uses for a cardboard box than a new toy that came in the box. An adult's desire to be original will often limit the number of possibilities they will explore before they settle on a solution to a problem.

Building
Kids learn through construction play—building a tower and repeatedly knocking it over. Building play is thinking with your hands. Quickly getting something into the real world in order to evaluate its effectiveness at doing whatever. It's quick prototyping.

Role-play
Kids do this all the time—they follow social scripts. They learn the rules for their social interactions. When adults act out solutions it helps them determine if it will work in the real world. I f designer lives through an experience it helps them develop empathy for the client.

Play is not anarchy—it has rules. It's important to know how and when to play—exploration and execution.

Idea for Field of Study

The following is a blurb from Wikipedia that really got me thinking:

Play and adulthood
Researcher Stuart Brown says that play isn't important to children, it's important to humans (or for that matter, all high functioning animals). The broaden and build behaviors it fosters may have even greater value for adults than children. The mental state of flow is also a major component of play, and has itself been associated with things like creativity and happiness. Brown often quotes Brian Sutton-Smith's insight: "the opposite of play is not work, it is depression." Examples of adult play abound (e.g. the arts, but also curiosity driven science).

Tim Brown explains that values like a bit of shamelessness during the creative process is extremely important in adult designers.

Play may allow people to practice useful habits like learned optimism, which might help manage existential fears. Play also offers the opportunity to learn things that may not have otherwise been explicitly or formally taught (e.g. how to use, and deal with, deceit and misinformation). Thus, even though play is only one of many habits of an effective adult, it remains a necessary one.
(End of excerpt)

That sucked me into Tim Brown's TED presentation where he discusses the importance of play for adults and children, and how he and the designers at IDEO Design implement play into their work and finished products.



I think it would be really cool to teach the importance of play to adults using an interactive exhibit.

Some Interests

Initially I wanted to wanted to do something implementing touch screen technology. I thought it would be useful to research because of all of the touch screen hype you hear of these days. I wondered the possibility of having a touch screen large enough to be used by multiple people. That led to touch screen tables, which led to learning about people who actually build their own touch screens. I learned that the technology revolves around infrared tracking. That developed into researching the possibility of using physical gestures to control content on a screen opposed to just touching a screen.