Playability

"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow."
Oscar Wilde

The artist Jasper Johns summed up his creative process like this: “It’s simple. You just take something and do something to it.  Then you do something else to it.  Pretty soon, you’ve got something.”  Simple advice…if you just muck around with your materials, you will end up somewhere you weren’t before.

While it is true that creativity takes discipline, hard work, and focus, it is equally true that a spirit of mucking around – known more commonly as play – is at the heart of innovation.  I once heard a first-grade teacher say to one of her students who was in the art area: “don’t just smear the colors around.  Paint!”  I never quite understood the difference myself and I noticed that the kid kept doing exactly what she was doing before but with a more serious expression on her face.  In any case, kids know about this better than adults because play is part of the work to prepare for life while most adults think play is frivolous.  A leisure time diversion. 

Yet pure curiosity and idle exploration with no particular outcome in mind are an important part of the discovery process.  This also may be one of the most pleasing aspects of it because without judgment, with nothing at stake and no sense of significance or importance, you can discover all sorts of new things.

Therefore, an ability to play and a sense of playfulness – or playability – go right into our Ingenarium.

Fiddling around with gizmos, futzing with materials, fooling with words or sounds…these are all part of the playful process of making new stuff.  Doodling, dabbling, dribbling (material not saliva) and just gadding about in the work can all lead to creative breakthroughs.  In fact they are essential to it.

Robert Motherwell, the painter, talked about thinking of his paintings as doodles.  Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry, played with paper models to explore his ideas.  Frank Gehry, the architect of new forms, played with folded and crumpled paper and waxed-dipped fabric to record his playful experiments.  Henrik Ibsen, playwright of serious themes, played with dolls as an adult to work out ideas for his plays.

You have to be proud of aimless play, not embarrassed by it, and see it as a road to exploration.  Rigid logic, right answers, and dogmatic methods, although useful in their own ways, rarely lead to leaps of the imagination so crucial to creativity because they rarely lead outside the limits of the system.  Play, on the other hand, can and does.

Even the way we mull something over can become an important example of this in a kind of thinking you might call…thinkering.  This refers to thinking without a goal, daydreaming, noodling around.  Wondering what if.

We tend to think of Einstein, for example, working out his ideas through the cold logic of formulas and equations.  But the work that led to his Special Theory of Relativity, for example, began with thinkering…a series of playful thought experiments with no immediate answers.  What would a beam of light look like if you were traveling alongside it at the speed of light?  Would a flash of light on a train appear differently to someone on the train as opposed to someone on the ground?  If you were in a windowless elevator on the surface of the Earth or in one accelerating through space…how could you tell the difference? 

These were mental games, playful puzzles that could lead to insights.  Einstein always claimed that the gift of fantasy meant more to him than any talent for absorbing positive knowledge.  And as Carl Jung said: “Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.  The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”

So go ahead and doodle and noodle, scribble and babble, and thinker your time away.  It is not wasted at all; what you are doing is slipping the chains of reality and playing with the components of the system you are exploring, testing new approaches, going beyond the norm.

And that, of course, is what creative breakthroughs are all about.