Presenter: Sara Summers, User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft
Play is important, particularly in the workplace. Science (lead by Dr. Stuart Brown at The Institute of Play) has proven that a life without play leads to depression, rigidity, and dissocial activities. It’s critical, not just to our well being, but for adaptation and idea generation. It’s proven that play drives us to seek novelty and newness.
Play elicits our best qualities – it inspires empathy, helpfulness, hopefulness, and betters emotions. It’s crucial to visual thinking and processing. Dr. Robert Epstein’s “Shifting” suggests a period of individual ideation, followed by group building and generation produces significantly better ideas.
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” -Thomas Edison
It’s a short blog post, but most of this workshop involved hands on play and brainstorming to illustrate the points made.
