When the idea for a chapter on play first came to me, I had no stiff framework in mind, and no significant industry moment to tie it to. It was an instinctive decision, born perhaps from a need to look for some light while the news provides us so bit of it, or from a quieter reflection on what designboom has actually always had to do with. Not to avert from the weight of the world, however to keep in mind what makes it worth carrying.
This pull toward happiness and playfulness evoked a preferred Eames expression: ‘Take your satisfaction seriously.’ The line sounds like a paradox, considering that enjoyment, after all, is what we allow ourselves once the serious work is ended up, if we permit it at all. For the Eameses, though, it was a working method. Play was a form of rigor rather than a break from it, and the joy that went through their movies, their toys, and their chairs was never incidental to the work, however rather how the work itself got made.
However someplace along the method, the majority of us lost the knack for it. Seriousness hardened into restraint; a great life became something to enhance, enhance, and save. Delight became a reward for performance instead of a reason to make anything at all. And yet, I feel designboom has constantly leaned the other method. For the past twenty-seven years, we have followed our curiosity and imagination out loud, experimenting and trying things simply since they appeared like enjoyable, without ever taking ourselves too seriously. And we have actually tended to conserve our hottest attention for individuals vibrant enough to do the same.
illustration by Philippos Avramides © designboom Boldness like that has always run versus the grain of design’s own rulebook.’Form follows function,’Louis Sullivan wrote, and modernism turned the expression into something close to scripture: a discipline of efficiency, honesty, and usage, with little persistence for the ornamental or the unreasonable. This chapter proposes a small heresy: what if form didn’t follow function, but satisfaction? What if a structure, an area, or an item made its location worldwide not by how efficiently it carried out, but by how much life it invited in?
To be clear, the play we are interested in is not frivolity, and it is certainly not the smooth, gamified diversion the attention economy sells back to us. It is closer to what the child knows intuitively and the adult needs to relearn: an open, unscripted, faintly defiant method of being in the world, one that treats spending quality time as better than saving it. It is the spirit Isamu Noguchi chased for the much better part of his life, envisioning playgrounds not as equipment to be utilized however as landscapes to be read, open enough for a child to develop the video game, and extreme enough that his own city kept turning them down. And it is what Continuous Nieuwenhuys pressed to its limitation in New Babylon, his decades-long design of a city where machines manage the labor and people are left totally free to wander, construct, and drift, set loose to become what he called Homo Ludens: human beings at play. Neither one was creating amusements so much as drawing a freer method to live.
Isamu Noguchi, designs for’Playground Equipment,’1941, image through @noguchimuseum Long before we developed anything
, we played. It is arguably our first imaginative act: the kid who turns a cardboard box into a spaceship, a stick into a sword, a patch of flooring into an ocean, is doing what every artist and architect does after them, utilizing creativity to make one thing stand in for another, and a whole world out of practically nothing. Play is where we first rehearse the concept that truth is flexible.
What follows in this chapter is less a manifesto than a collection of proofs. We go to playgrounds doing the quiet work of holding a neighborhood together, manage things made to awaken the kid in us despite age, and loiter, unapologetically, in areas created for spending an afternoon rather than conserving one. And we ask what occurs when the disruption of our daily routines, through something as little and spontaneous as play, begins to rebuild a more understanding, human world: little, intentional arguments that a life measured in time conserved is not the only kind worth creating for. None of this is escapism. To pick joy when the world feels heavy is not to overlook its weight, but to firmly insist that imagination is still one of the most effective forces we have for shaping our truths. So consider this an invite to take your enjoyment seriously, and to join us in doing so.
This post becomes part of designboom’s PLAY chapter, exploring what would take place if kind didn’t follow function, but pleasure. Discover more stories that celebrate happiness, imagination and playfulness here.