Thank you Eastman Innovation Lab for sponsoring our much needed Coffee (read: brain) break. Hockenberry now asks, “how can we theoretically understand play without destroying it?” Our speakers this session - a play psychologist, a reluctant architect, and an origami virtuoso - are primed to inform us just how.
Dr. Stuart Brown, Founder of the National Institute for Play, challenged us to look beyond our adult, social constructs to see the world at play that surrounds us. It’s got to be serious if the New York Times dedicates a Sunday Magazine cover story to play, right? Play is so strong that it can override the carnivorous instincts of a polar bear to frolic with the would-be-dinner husky. And so too does the lack of play, as Dr. Brown learned in studying the Texas Tower Murderer, leave humans dangerously vulnerable to tragedy. Brown illuminated the eruption of joy and elation that can come from a mother and child locking eyes, or the random, purposeless body play. “If you’re having a bad day try this, wiggle around and you’ll feel better. [But] if it’s purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it’s probably not play.” Play informs our social constructs. If you want to belong, you need social play, a by-product of the play scene. Rough and tumble play develops our social, cognitive, emotional and physical traits. Spectator play, ritual play, imaginative play, the list goes on.
Perhaps most stark was the experiment suppressing rats’ play time: if you place those rats in the presence of cat odor, at first both groups hide out, but the non-players never venture away, dying. Meanwhile the player rats will emerge to explore their environment, testing things out. “That says to me that play may be pretty important for our survival.” And yet you don’t hear anything like cancer or heart disease associated with play, but Dr. Brown sees it just as basic and key to survival long term.
“The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression,” asserted Dr. Brown. No humor, no flirtation, no games, no fantasy. “Try to imagine a culture or a life with play and the thing that is unique is that we are designed to play throughout our life time.” Dr. Brown’s class at the Stanford Design School investigates the state of play and its importance in creative thinking to explore play as its basis, to encourage play in the corporate world and to work in real life situations. He so encourages us not to engage in the work-play differential we are accustomed by setting aside time to play, but where life becomes infused with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play and you’ll have a better and more empowered life for it.
Th reluctant architect, Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, demonstrated how we should embrace and incorporate our atmosphere, allowing it to inform our built environment. There’s something essential about architecture that is about play, beyond just keeping the rain out. One wonderfully quirky example of this play is Diller’s No No Smokers Project in Amsterdam, where smokers unite via dedicated columns of air and interconnectivity through the internet where smokers can share where are the best places to share a drag. The Blur Building can hardly be understood as a conventional building. “It’s not about space, closure or skin,” Diller points out, rather “it’s all about screwing around a little bit with your expectations of the dominance of vision and the ability to operate through your visual sense.” Diller also embraces atmosphere in the forthcoming project combining the essences of Venice -
water from canals and espresso - to create the best, most atmospheric, cappuccino for the upcoming Biennale. And then Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art creates a wall of water to incorporate the site’s historic importance, editing Boston Harbor, “and you can just, atmospherically, get lost in the digital work you are in.”
The Highline Project is revitalizing a long abandoned track creeping through the west side of Manhattan. Diller’s vision welcomes the atmosphere, those astounding microclimates that are products of the tracks’ history as a channel of distribution for exotic goods. The public will traverse the natural clines of the tracks that will evolve and over time, attracting flora and fauna. The result will be more a living, breathing, growing organism than an actual man-made structure, the architects reveling in natural development over control.
Talk about surrendering control and then harnessing it back again, Dr. Robert Lang basically forced us to question our basic understanding of a most ordinary material: paper. Lang’s appreciation of the discipline of origami lead him to reinvent and revolutionize the practice.
Lang’s scientific background and keen insight into what origami was truly all about allowed him to boil an infinity of shapes, sizes and textures into mathematical algorithms, virtually blowing our minds with his snake of one thousand folds, minute medical devices and expansive space technology…all from a single sheet. As Frank Lloyd Wright said: art, design and excellence are born out constraints. Lang’s constraints are derived from the software program he created to allow any shape to be reduced to a crease pattern, a sort of map of the folds. And not just any folds, folds yielding scales on a fish or plates on a turtle.
Though most profound are the applications of origami to our most pressing contemporary problems. That includes the folds required to compact a solar panel in a satellite. But who would have thought that the same folds required to pack an airbag into a car are exactly the same framework used to build an insect. Or a medical stent device based in the same folds as our childhood delight of the water bomb. As he puts succinctly, “things that you pursue because they are fun turn out to have practical applications, it might even save a life, which is pretty cool.”
