Serious Play

More about Serious Play, the conference put on last week by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, USA.

It’s a gathering of 600+ creative professionals in a vast former wind tunnel in sunny California. However if that suggests hot air on several levels, don’t be mislead. It was a highly inspiring event.

Personal highlights?

George Smoot (Nobel physicist) and Charles Elachi (Director of the Jet Propulsion Lab) talking about the problems of driving on Mars and especially of landing the latest Mars rover on May 25th.

John Maeda (next President of Rhode Island School of Design) describing his experiment in building a computer out of human beings.

Stuart Brown (Director of the National Institute for Play) explaining how even a ravenous male polar bear will not eat you if you can persuade it to play a game with you first. “The opposite of play is not work; it is depression”. (Or being eaten).

Paula Scher (Artist) describing her personal development cycle from serious to solemn to dead - and her fight against it.

Oh and the guy that spent much of his life so far building slot machines for crows - if they pick up a coin from the street and drop it in the machine they get a nut.

Also key to enjoyment - the whole event was organised like clockwork so that you never felt the absence of professionalism or just enough discipline, absences that can make ‘play’ tedious.

The moral of the whole thing. Work less, play more - and everything will be all right.

Entry Filed under: Design, Media