Design for play

 If you’ve ever had to settle down at a desk to work from home, this shuffle to prepare for the event may be relatable. Make fresh cup of tea, sit down, open sketchbook, rearrange desk, get up, let cat out, rearrange shoes, sit down, reject pen, get up to find better pens, put socks away, sharpen pencils, sit down, get up to get water, look for phone charger, sit down and then….sometimes it clicks.

 This morning, I’m looking at a page of lines and numbers, thinking about beginning to translate my scrawl onto a neatly measured plan and wondering why I feel so constrained. It’s often a satisfyingly meditative practice to methodically draw up a base map and loving my job as I do, I know it’s not a reflection of the task but some kind of inner dissatisfaction.

 I have a brief daydream back to messy art classrooms and crave to be surrounded by torn paper, cluttered tables, the smell of paint and pen smudges up my arms. And I look at the sharpened pencil, precise fine-liner and crisp paper in front of me and realise the feeling of confinement is reminding me of something important.

 That the joy is in the process. The creative, swirling, incoherent soup of playing around with materials and ideas is where the magic happens. Measuring, plans and research are crucial ingredients, but equally important is the play-time.

 There’s a brilliant paper by Liane Gabora (‘Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Creative Process’, 2002) identifying four stages of creativity, describing it as a cognitive process. ‘Preparation’ being the acquisition of relevant knowledge and skills; ‘Incubation’, the time taken to think over ideas; ‘Illumination’, making unusual links between ideas; and ‘Verification’, the form of an idea which can be proven and communicated.

 The incubation stage, in which she describes ‘the creator does not actively attempt to solve the problem, but unconsciously continues to work on it’ is often downplayed. Not by people working in the creative industries, who I think would recognise their own meandering behaviours in this process, but its significance is undervalued in wider society. People may have different ways of inhabiting this stage, through play, exercise, making, daydreaming, writing; but as a culture we are notorious for rushing or minimising these activities. In his book ‘Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative’ (2001) the legendary Ken Robinson confirms that our ‘modern worldview is dominated by the ideology of rationalism, objectivity and propositional knowledge’.

It feels pertinent to highlight and celebrate this 'incubation' as a crucial stage of the design process, an important behind the scenes glimpse into the nature of creativity. And a gentle reminder that without play we wouldn’t have discovery, without reflection wouldn’t have clarity and there wouldn’t be beauty without a bit of chaos.

 So on this grey Sunday, I’m deciding to honour this stage with some messy, no outcomes attached play. And thoroughly recommend that as artists, designers, thinkers, writers, musicians, poets, dancers, human beings, we all do this a lot more!