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Play, Autonomy and the Creative Process

ISSN: 978-1-904670-39-1

This peer-reviewed article published in the proceedings of an international conference explores different types of ‘Play’ to further understand its affect upon the creative process.

Play has started to be recognised as having an effect upon the creative design process, but mainly in terms of playing with prototypes, i.e. physical interaction. In this study, the authors looked at the effects of physical, imaginary, social and non-related play in relation to solving creative problems. Surprisingly, the condition with the highest scoring and fastest completion times was when the type of play was not related to the creativity challenge.

This would suggest that there is more going on than just iterative feedback when a person is playing in the creative design process. This study supports the idea that play may be even more important to the creative process because of the effect it has upon a person’s ‘state of mind’. The suggestion that a person’s ‘state of mind’ has an effect on creative problem solving has been discussed by Csikszentmihalyi in his theory of ‘flow’, and also by Wallas. However this research suggests that play can be a way of enabling a person to get into a ‘state of mind’ that is conducive to creative problem solving. This is of significance, because in a commercial environment (apart from companies such as Google and Apple) play is not usually seen as a tool that can support creative problem solving. This research suggests otherwise.