Playing Isn’t Just for Children
Play shouldn’t be reserved solely for children. Adults should engage in play often. Play engenders positive results in many areas of adults’ lives, including their creative capacities.
Tim Brown, the founder of the design company IDEO, is an expert on how play helps spark creativity in adults. He tells the story of Bob McKim, a creativity researcher, working throughout the ’60s and ’70s. During these years, McKim led the design program at Stanford University. One of the exercises he liked to do with his students was give them pieces of paper and ask them to draw their neighbor as fast as possible. There were no other criteria, just to draw as fast as possible.
As you would expect, since most of the students weren’t naturally great at drawing, when they were asked to show their neighbors their drawings of them, a lot of people would hesitate, uttering things like, “I’m sorry, this isn’t very good.” As Tim Brown explains, this hesitation and these apologies are an embodiment of the fact that we fear judgment from our peers. Showing someone the results of something we have little talent for is scary, because we know that other people, who do have talent in drawing, in this case, would have produced something much better. “And this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking,” says Brown. “So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.”
This fear of judgement is what inhibits our creativity.
When you try this same exact exercise with kids, however, the results are completely different. Instead of apologies and shy smiles like the adults, the kids just show their subject their piece without even thinking about it. There is no fear of judgement; there is no conservative thinking. There is just free flowing creativity.
I’m sure we all remember moments from our childhood when we would come home from school with something we had made in art class that we were super proud of and probably thought was one of the greatest pieces ever created. Today, if you were to look at that piece, you wouldn’t think much of it. As Tim Brown expounds, “as [children] learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment — they’re the ones that feel most free to play.”
“Almost all creativity requires purposeful play.” — Abraham Maslow (Psychologist).
Play removes the limits that we place on ourselves out of fear of judgement. Without limits, we are much more creative. Indeed, play-like activities put us into into a psychological state in which it’s acceptable to fail and to wonder, “What if?” The result is that our minds are better able to explore the unknown, and thus we are much more likely to think of things that are novel or different.
Although playful activities may seem purely fictional or pretend in the context of our real lives, they have real consequences for our adult lives. The aforementioned play theorist, Sutton-Smith, clarifies, “While play spaces are generally fantasy spaces, players often experience real stakes when inside them. By removing the strain and constraints of the real world, play allows us to more openly explore possibilities in our work. But play offers us more than mere escape from reality, it also offers us more exposure to diversity of perspective.”
Even though play involves a pretend world in which you can do anything and be free of judgment, the implications of this world are usually very real, because you may be more likely to think creatively at times when you are not in a playful environment.
“Creativity isn’t being afraid to fail.” — Edwin Land (Scientist and inventor).
So set aside the time to play. Whether that is playing a card game, building towers with blocks, or passing the ball outside. Just play — because without even trying, it’ll get your creative juices flowing.
