The space to play
Matt Jones
 
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Matt Jones is a designer. From 1997 to 1999, he was creative director for the award-winning BBC News Online. After some time as a consultant at Sapient and KPMG, he returned to the BBC to design BBCi's web search and an ambitious social software service. For the past three years he has been at Nokia, firstly in design research and now as Director of User-Experience Design for Nokia Design Multimedia. In "The space to play" he explores themes from his research at Nokia into the universal human urge to play – and how it relates to the way we design our technology, our environments and our future.
 
 
 
At Ars Electronica this year I had the pleasure of listening to John Maeda speak about his explorations of "Simplicity" and how he arrived at the subject. He said that in the days after being granted tenure by MIT, he had been talking with an elderly professorial colleague and asked him what he had been working on. He replied that he had been studying a particular, very specific but fascinating problem in the field of linguistics.

"Maeda realized that he needed to find an area of study that would similarly fascinate ? that would never fully give up its secrets, but would never stop giving answers."

I'm beginning to see what he means – although for me the intellectual cornucopia might be "Play".

In my former role in design research at Nokia, we often looked to what anthropologist Donald Brown termed "human universals" – traits or behaviors seen in all human cultures, for instance, marriage, turn-taking, magic, etc. (the list runs to about 400 concepts). One of the concepts is not only a human universal, but a mammalian universal – play.
 
 
 
Play, like Maeda's chosen area of simplicity, is hard to pin down, but the chase reveals much. Play is how – and moreover, I would argue, why – we learn, explore, interact with each other, understand each other and develop together. Play is widely dismissed in many "developed" cultures as a childish thing, but think of its dominance of our metaphors. Whether it is love, politics, business, war – we look to the language of play.

This quote from Diane Ackerman encompasses what makes play so fascinating, I feel:

"Play is an activity enjoyed for its own sake. It is our brain’s favorite way of learning and maneuvering. Because we think of play as the opposite of seriousness, we don’t notice that it governs most of society… even in its least intoxicating forms, play feels satisfying, absorbing and has rules and a life of its own, while offering rare challenges. It is organic to who and what we are, a process as instinctive as breathing. Much of human life unfolds as play."

Through weak signals found by our trends research group we had a hunch that "play" as a force in the world was becoming stronger, so we got the go-ahead for a research and design conception project that was to absorb me for most of 2004.

The "Play project", as it was unimaginatively titled, was worked on by a small multidisciplinary team, which is our default way of working – myself, a technical consultant, Janne Jalkanen and a business consultant, Minh Tran. Our ranks were swelled by academics, independent experts, researchers and designers throughout the span of the project.
 
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