The kiss incorporate

The Kiss, incorporator from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.

http://kiss.entropy8zuper.org/the/incorporator/

REALTIME ART MANIFESTO

FROM:HTTP://TALE-OF-TALES.COM/TALES/RAM.HTML

Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn
Directors, Tale of Tales, ram@tale-of-tales.com

Gaming realities: the challenge of digital culture

mediaterra festival of Art and Technology

Athens, 2006

Abstract

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are new media artists who have embraced realtime 3D game technology as their artistic medium of choice. Realtime 3D is the most remarkable new creative technology since oil on canvas. It is much too important to be wasted on computer games alone. This manifesto is a call-to-arms for creative people (including, but not limited to, video game designers and fine artists) to embrace this new medium and start realizing its enormous potential. As well as a set of guidelines that express our own ideas and ideals about using the technology.

1. Realtime 3D is a medium for artistic expression.
2. Be an author.
3. Create a total experience.
4. Embed the user in the environment.
5. Reject dehumanisation: tell stories.
6. Interactivity wants to be free.
7. Don’t make modern art.
8. Reject conceptualism.
9. Embrace technology.
10. Develop a punk economy.

Keywords

realtime 3d
computer games
interactive storytelling
game design
artistry
non-linearity

REALTIME ART MANIFESTO

1. Realtime 3D is a medium for artistic expression.

Games are not the only things you can make with realtime 3D technology.
And modification of commercial games is not the only option accessible to artists.

Realtime 3D is the most remarkable new creative technology since oil on canvas.
It is much too important to remain in the hands of toy makers and propaganda machines.
We need to rip the technology out of their greedy claws and put them to shame by producing
the most stunning art to grace this planet so far.
(And claim the name “game” for what we do even if it is inappropriate.)

Real-time 3d interactives can be an art form unto themselves.

2. Be an author.

Do not hide behind the freedom of the user in an interactive environment to ignore your responsibility as a creator.
This only ends in confirming cliches.
Do not design in board room meetings or give marketeers creative power.
Your work needs to come from a singular vision and be driven by a personal passion.
Do not delegate direction jobs.
Be a dictator.
But collaborate with artisans more skilled than you.

Ignore the critics and the fanboys.
Make work for your audience instead.
Embrace the ambiguity that the realtime medium excells in.
Leave interpretation open where appropriate
but keep the user focused and immersed the worlds that you create.

Commercial games are conservative, both in design as in mentality.
They eschew authorship, pretending to offer the player a neutral vessel to take him or her through the virtual world.
But the refusal to author results in a mimicing of generally accepted notions, of television and other mass media.
Banality.
Reject pure commercialism.
Individual elements of many commercial games made with craft and care produce artistic effects
but the overall product is not art.
Some commercial games have artistic moments,
but we need to go further.

Step one: drop the requirement of making a game.

The game structure of rules and competition stands in the way of expressiveness.

Interactivity wants to be free.

Gaming stands in the way of playing.
There are so many other ways of interacting in virtual environments.
We have only just begun to discover the possibilities.
Games are games.
They are ancient forms of play that have their place in our societies.
But they are by far not the only things one can do with realtime technologies.

Stop making games.
Be an author.

3. Create a total experience.

Do not render!

All elements serve the realisation of the piece as a whole.
Models, textures, sound, interaction, environment, atmosphere,
drama, story, programming
are all equally important.
Do not rely on static renderings.
Everything happens in real time.
The visuals as well as the logic.
Create multi-sensorial experiences.
Simulate sensorial sensations for which output hardware does not exist (yet).
Make the experience feel real
(it does not need to look real).
Do not imitate other media but develop an aesthetic style that is unique.

Make the activity that the user spends most time doing the most interesting one in the game.

It’s not about the individual elements but about the total effect of the environment.
The sum of its parts.
In the end the work is judged by the quality of authorship
and not by its individual elements.

Models, textures, sound, interaction design, environment design, atmosphere, drama, story, programming.
Together without hierarchy.
No element can be singled out. All are equally important.
Create a simulated multi-sensorial experience. Not only a picture.
Or only a game.
Or only a soundtrack.

4. Embed the user in the environment.

The user is not disembodied in virtual space
but takes the body into the experience.
The avatar is not a neutral vessel but allows the user to navigate
not only through the virtual space
but also through the narrative content.
Interaction is the link between the user and the piece.
Provide for references
(both conceptual and sensorial)
to connect the user to the environment.
Reject abstraction.
Make the user feel at home.
(and then play with his
or her
expectations
-just don’t start with alienation,
the real world is alienationg enough as it is)

Reject the body-mind duality.
The user is the center of the experience.
Think “architecture”, not “film”.

Interaction is pivotal
to “put the user in the environment”.
The user is not disembodied but is provided with a device
(similar to a diving suit or astronout’s outfit)
which allows him
or her
to visit a place that would otherwise not be accessible.
You bring your body with you to this place,
or at least your memories of it.

Strictly speaking, our output media only allow for the reproduction of visuals and sound .
But real-time interaction and processing can help us to achieve simulation of touch, smell and taste as well, through visuals and sound.
In fact, force feedback already provides for a way to communicate with touch.
And the activity of fingers on the mouse or hands holding a joystick allows for physical communication.
Don’t underestimate this connection.
From the USB port to the joystick. Through the hand to the nerous system.
One network.

Soon as smell and taste can be reproduced, those media can quickly be incorporated into our technology.

The virtual place is not necessarily alien.
On the contrary:
It can deal with any subject.
References to the real world
(of nature as well as culture)
(both conceptual and sensorial)
create links between the environment and the user.
Since interaction is pivotal, these links are crucial.

Make it feel real, not necessarily look real.

Develop a unique language for the realtime 3D medium and do not fall in MacLuhan’s trap
(don’t allow any old medium to become the content of the new)
Imitate life and not photography, or drawings, or comic strips or even old-school games.
Realism does not equal photo -realism!
In a multisensory medium, realism is a multisensory experience:

It has to feel real.

5. Reject dehumanisation: tell stories.

Stories ground people in culture,
(and remove the alienation that causes aggression)
stimulate their imagination,
(and therefore improve the capability to change)
teach them about themselves
and connect them with each other.
Stories are a vital element of society.

Embrace non-linearity.
Let go of the idea of plot.
Realtime is non-linear.
Tell the story through interaction.
Do not use in-game movies or other non-realtime devices to tell the story.
Do not create a “drama manager”: let go of plot!
Plot is not compatible with realtime.

Think “poetry”, not “prose”.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle recognized six elements in Drama.
PLOT
what happens in a play, the order of events,
is only one of them.
Next to plot we have
THEME
or the main idea in the work
CHARACTER
or the personality or role played by an actor
DICTION
the choice and delivery of words
MUSIC/RHYTHM
the sound, rhythm and melody of what is being said
SPECTACLE
the visual elements of the work.
All of these can be useful in non-linear realtime experiences. Except plot.

But the realtime medium offers additional elements that easily augment or replace plot.
INTERACTIVITY
the direct influence of the viewer on the work
IMMERSION
the presence of the viewer in the work
AN AUDIENCE OF ONE
every staging of the work is done for an audience of a single person in the privacy of his
or her
home.

These new elements add the viewer as an active participant to the experience.
This is not a reduction of the idea of story but an enrichment.
Realtime media allow us to tell stories that could not be told before.

Many of the mythical fantasies about art can now be made real.
Now we can step into paintings and become part of them.
Now sculptures can come alive and talk to us.
Now we walk onto the stage and take part in the action.
We can live the lives of romance characters.
Be the poet
or the muse.

Do not reject stortelling in realtime because it is not straightforward.
Realtime media allow us to make ambiguity and imagination active parts of the experience.
Embrace the ambiguity:
it is enriching.
The realtime medium allows for telling stories that cannot be told in any other language.

But realtime is not suitable for linear stories:

Embrace non-linearity!
Reject plot!

Realtime is a poetic technology.
Populate the virtual world with narrative elements that allow the player to make up his or her own story.
Imagination moves the story into the user’s mind.
It allows the story to penetrate the surface and take its place amongst the user’s thoughts & memories.

The bulk of your story should be told in realtime, through interaction.
Do not use in-game movies or other devices.
Do not fall back on a machine to create plot on the fly:
let go of plot,
plot is not compatible with realtime.

Do not squeeze the realtime medium into a linear frame.
Stories in games are not impossible or irrelevant, even if “all that matters is gameplay”.
Humans need stories and will find stories in everything.
Use this to your advantage.
Yes, “all that matters is gameplay”,
if you extend gameplay to mean all interaction in the game.
Because it is through this interaction that the realtime medium will tell its stories.

The situation is the story.
Choose your characters and environment carefully
so that the situation immediately triggers narrative associations in the mind of the user.

6. Interactivity wants to be free.

Don’t make games.

The rule-based structure and competitive elements in traditional game design stand in the way of expressiveness.
And often, ironically, rules get in the way of playfulness
(playfulness is required for an artistic experience!).

Express yourself through interactivity.
Interactivity is the one unique element of the realtime medium.
The one thing that no other medium can do better.
It should be at the center of your creation.

Interactivity design rule number one:
the thing you do most in the game, should be the thing that is most interesting to do.

i.e., If it takes a long time to walk between puzzles, the walk should be more interesting than the puzzles.

7. Don’t make modern art.

Modern art tends to be ironical, cynical, self referential, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning
-other than the trendy discourse of the day-,
afraid of technology, anti-artistry.
Furthermore contemporary art is a marginal niche.
The audience is elsewhere.
Go to them rather then expecting them to come to the museum.
Contemporary art is a style, a genre, a format.
Think!

Do not fear beauty.
Do not fear pleasure.

Make art-games, not game-art.
Game art is just modern art
-ironical, cynical, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning.
It abuses a technology that has already spawned an art form capable of communicating far beyond the reach of modern art.
Made by artists far superior in artistry and skills.
Game art is slave art.

Realtime media are craving your input, your visions.
Real people are starving for meaningful experiences.
And what’s more:

society needs you.

Contemporary civilisations are declining at an unsurpassed rate.
Fundamentalism.
Fascism.
Populism.
War.
Pollution.
The world is collapsing while the Artists twiddle their thumbs in the museums.

Step into the world.
Into the private worlds of individuals.
Share your vision.

Connect.
Connect.
Communicate.

8. Reject conceptualism.

Make art for people,
not for documentation.
Make art to experience
and not to read about.
Use the language of your medium to communicate all there is to know.
The user should never be required to read a description or a manual.

Don’t parody things that are better than you.

Parodies of commercial games are ridiculous if their technology, craft and artistry do not match up with the original.
Don’t settle yourself in the position of the underdog: surpass them!
Go over their heads!
Dominate them!
Show them how it’s done!

Put the artistry back in Art.
Reject conceptualism.
Make art for people, not for documentation.
Make art to experience and not art to read about.

Use the language of your work to communicate its content.

The audience should never be required to read the description.
The work should communicate all that is required to understand it.

9. Embrace technology.

Don’t be afraid of technology,
and least of all, don’t make art about this fear.
It’s futile.
Technology is not nature. Technology is not god.
It’s a thing.
Made for people by people.
Grab it. Use it.

Software is infinitely reproducable and easy to distribute.
Reject the notion of scarcity.
Embrace the abundance that the digital allows for.
The uniqueness of realtime is in the experience.

Cut out the middle man: deliver your productions directly to the users.
Do not depend on galleries, museums, festivals or publishers.

Technology-based art should not be about technology:
it should be about life, death and the human condition.

Embrace technology, make it yours!

Use machines to make art for humans, not vice versa.

Make software!
Software is infinitely reproducable
(there is no original; uniqueness is not required
-the uniqueness is in the experience)
Distribution of software is easy through the internet or portable data containers
(no elitism; no museums, galleries, or festivals; from creator to audience without mediation -and from the audience back to the creator, through the same distribution media)

10. Develop a punk economy.

Don’t shy away from competition with commercial developers.
Your work offers something that theirs does not:
originality of design,
depth of content,
alternative aesthetics.
Don’t worry about the polish too much.
Get the big picture right.

“Reduce the volume, Increase the quality and density”
(Fumito Ueda)

Make short and intense games:
think haiku, not epic.
Think poetry, not prose.

Embrace punk aesthetics.

But don’t become too dependant on government or industry funding:
it is unreliable.
Sell your work directly to your audience.
And use alternative distribution methods that do not require enormous sales figures to break even.

Consider self-publishing and digital distribution.
Avoid retail and traditional games publishers.
Together they take so great a cut
that it requires you to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to make your production investment back.

Do not allow institutional or economic control of your intellectual property, ideas, technology and inventions .

Don’t depend on government support or the arts world exclusively.
Sell your games!
Communicate with your audience directly:
cut out the middle man.
Let the audience support your work.

Communicate.

References

Aristotle’s Six Elements of Drama
http://www.kyshakes.org/Resources/Aristotle.html

Fumito Ueda & Kenji Kaido: Game Design Methods of ICO
http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/ueda/

Realtime Art Manifesto presentation slides.
http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/RAM_files/ToT-RAM_presentation.zip

Design Patterns

Design Patterns

contents

• Creational patterns
  • Creational patterns
  • Abstract Factory Design Pattern
  • Builder Design Pattern
  • Factory Method Design Pattern
  • Object Pool Design Pattern
  • Prototype Design Pattern
  • Singleton Design Pattern
• Structural patterns
  • Structural patterns
  • Adapter Design Pattern
  • Bridge Design Pattern
  • Composite Design Pattern
  • Decorator Design Pattern
  • Facade Design Pattern
  • Flyweight Design Pattern
  • Private Class Data
  • Proxy Design Pattern
• Behavioral patterns
  • Behavioral patterns
  • Chain of Responsibility
  • Command Design Pattern
  • Interpreter Design Pattern
  • Iterator Design Pattern
  • Mediator Design Pattern
  • Memento Design Pattern
  • Null Object Design Pattern
  • Observer Design Pattern
  • State Design Pattern
  • Strategy Design Pattern
  • Template Method Design Pattern
  • Visitor Design Pattern

State Design Pattern

State Design Pattern
http://sourcemaking.com/

Story telling and story listening are important to the way we think

By Roger Costello

Stories are central to our mental processes for understanding, remembering, and communicating.

Plato said: “Those who tell stories rule society.”

The next time you are at a dinner with friends, sit back for a minute and observe the goings-on. What is everyone doing? Most of the evening will probably be taken up exchanging stories, funny ones, sad one, stories about friends, stories read in the newspaper, and so on.

Why is story telling and story listening so important to the way we think?

Stories are a way in which we learn. For example, by reading Shakespeare, we can learn all sorts of useful lessons about love and family relationships. The best selling business books are often stories of successful individuals or companies; everyone wants to read stories about how Jack Welch or Bill Gates “did it,” hoping to glean patterns of success.

– The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker

Why storytelling is important

October 08, 2005

Why storytelling is important

A colleague recently asked me for a quote about why storytelling is important. I came up with the following list of possibilities, that might be of wider interest:

• Storytelling is a key leadership technique because it’s quick, powerful, free, natural, refreshing, energizing, collaborative, persuasive, holistic, entertaining, moving, memorable and authentic. Stories help us make sense of organizations.
• Storytelling is more than an essential set of tools to get things done: it’s a way for leaders – wherever they may sit – to embody the change they seek. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating propositional arguments, which lead to more arguments, leaders establish credibility and authenticity through telling the stories that they are living. When they believe deeply in them, their stories resonate, generating creativity, interaction and transformation.

• Storytelling is often the best way for leaders to communicate with people they are leading. Why? It is inherently well adapted to handling the most intractable leadership challenges of today – sparking change, communicating who you are, enhancing the brand, transmitting values, creating high-performance teams, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, leading people in to the future.

• Storytelling translates dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence.

• Storytelling is a crucial tool for management and leadership, because often, nothing else works. Charts leave listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or front-line staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, storytelling is the only thing that works.

• Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won’t do the trick. But effective storytelling often does.

• Storytelling works better than the “Just tell ‘em” approach in most leadership situations. Management fads may come and go, but storytelling is a phenomenon that is fundamental to all nations, societies and cultures, and has been so since time immemorial.

• Narrative is the instrument of continuing creativity, a power that inexorably propels us forward into the future, the unknown, building new worlds and structures.

• Storytelling is part of the creative struggle to generate a new future, as opposed to conventional management approaches that search for virtual certainties anchored in the illusive security of yesterday.

• Narrative can help transform even gargantuan organizations through the unanticipated power of the imagination. It has the capacity to change tangible, hard realities through no more than airy nothings, mere gauzy thoughts.

• Narrative champions freedom, interaction, and organic growth. It operates beyond the scope of simple, linear logic. It is as interested in the unknown as in the known.

• Narrative is a key tool for leadership, because it helps us deal with organizations as living organisms that need to be tended, nurtured and encouraged to grow. It thrives on inspiration rather than administration, fostering change rather than stasis.

• Storytelling liberates innovation, by generating the energy needed to change.

• Narrative helps us make sense of a world that is rapidly mutating, as compared to conventional management,which is more suited to a activities that are stable, linear and predictable.

• Narrative is interested in the next generation of change, not just an extrapolation of the present. It copes with swirling, new, emergent phenomena and phase changes that by definition escape the predictable frame of yesterday’s conceptions.

• Narrative helps us cope with a future that is evolving unpredictably. Conventional management techniques miss the fact that we cannot measure tomorrow when we don’t know what it will involve.

• Narrative is the natural instrument of change, because it draws on the active, living participation of individuals. It dwells in the experience of the people who act, think, talk, discuss, chat, joke, complain, dream, agonize andexult together, and collectively make up the organization. By contrast, conventional management focuses on lifeless elements – mission statements, formal strategies, programs, procedures, processes, systems, budgets, assets – the dead artifacts of the organization.

• Narrative is a tool that gives privileged access to the living part of an organization, and so can be used to elicit decisions to create organizational artifacts and generate support for them.

• Narrative is a tool for the instigators of change, who aim at continuing transformation and the creation of a fruitful tomorrow. Those whose goal is merely that of control will find that storytelling is not a very useful or important tool. For them, the important thing is accommodation to the preoccupations of a well-behaved yesterday.

• Storytelling is more than just a tool. It is beyond any implement–almost a requirement of being alive. Insofar as it has anything to offer, it generates fresh depth and breadth of perception. It enables us to surmount a humdrum world where everything makes sense and is logical, and get to that realm where deeper meaning is revealed.

• When we hear a story that touches us profoundly, our lives are suffused with meaning. As listeners, we have transmitted to us that which matters. Once we make this connection, once a sense of wonder has come upon us, it does not last long, and we inevitably fall back into our daze of everyday living, but with the difference that a radical shift in understanding may have taken place.

• A story is something that comes from outside. But the meaning is something that emerges from within. When a story reaches our hearts with deep meaning, it takes hold of us. Once it does so, we can let it go, and yet it remains with us. We do not weary of this experience.

• Once we have had one story, we are already hungry for another. We want more, in case it too can transmit the magic of connectedness between the self and the universe.

• Through narrative, we can let go the urge to control, and the fear that goes with it, learning that the world has the capacity to organize itself, recognizing that managing includes catalyzing this capacity, as well as sparking, creating, energizing, unifying, generating emergent truths, celebrating the complexity, the fuzziness and the messiness of living.

For more, go to The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

And my website http://www.stevedenning.com/

Forward from:http://stevedenning.typepad.com/steve_denning/2005/10/why_storytellin.html

Play Science - the Patterns of Play

http://nifplay.org/states_play.html

Storytelling by Design

Storytelling by Design (scenarios talk at Confab 2011)

View more presentations from Kim Goodwin

Story and Emergent Design

Story and Emergent Design

View more presentations from Hugh Graham

Quotation: Clark C.Abt, Serious Games

A Game is a particular way of looking at something, anything.

—Clark C. Abt, Serious Games

Posters: A way of storytelling

http://www.jonarneberg.no/graphTheories.html
A project done by Jon Arne Berg

A way of storytelling

Tim Brown on creativity and play

So this guy, this guy is a guy named Bob McKim.And he was a creativity researcher in the '60s and '70s, and also led the Stanford design program. And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley,who’s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. And he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paperand draw the person sat next to them, their neighbor, very quickly, just as quickly as they could.

And in fact, we’re going to do that exercise right now. You all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper. It’s actually got a bunch of circles on it. I need you to turn that piece of paper over, you should find it’s blank on the other side, OK? And there should be a pencil. And I want you to pick somebody that’s sat next to you, and when I say, go, you’ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor, OK?So, everybody ready? OK. Off you go. You’ve got 30 seconds, you’d better be fast. Come on, those masterpieces. OK? Stop. All right, now.

(Laughter)

Yes, lot’s of laughter. Yeah, exactly. Lots of laughter, quite a bit of embarrassment.

(Laughter)

Am I hearing a few, sorry’s? I think I’m hearing a few sorry’s. Yup, yup, I think I probably am. And that’s exactly what happens every time, every time you do this with adults. And McKim found this every time he did it with his students. He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s.

(Laughter)

And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about, kind of, showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us.And it’s this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.

OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.

And if you’re starting a design firm, let’s say, then you probably also want to create, you know, a place where people have the same kind of security.Where they have the same kind of security to take risks. Maybe have the same kind of security to play.

Before founding IDEO, David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as a designer.And so that kind of decision to work with his friends -- now he has 550 of them -- was what got IDEO started.

And our studios, like, I think, many creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed. Familiar with their surroundings,comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that, you know, creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment.So whether it’s this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at IDEO, or at Pixar where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves. Or at the Googleplex where, you know, it’s famous for its volley beach ball courts, and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it. Don’t know the reason for the pink flamingos,but anyway, they’re there in the garden. Or even in the Swiss office of Google, which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all. And my theory is that’s so the Swiss can prove to their Californian colleagues that they’re not boring. So they have the slide, and they even have a fireman’s pole. Don’t know what they do with that, but they have one.

So all of these places, you know, have these symbols. Now, our big symbol at IDEO is actuallynot so much the place, it’s a thing. And it’s actually something that we invented a few years ago, or created a few years ago. So it’s a toy. And it’s called a "finger blaster." And I forgot to bring one up with me. So if somebody can reach under that chair that’s next to them, you’ll find something taped underneath it. That’s great. If you could pass it up. Thanks, David, I appreciate it.

So this is a finger blaster, and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair. And I’m going to run a little experiment. Another little experiment. But before we start, I need just to put these on. Thank you. All right. Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to see how -- I can’t see out of these, OK. I’m going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage. So the way they work is, you know, you just put your finger in the thing, pull them back, and off you go. So, don’t look backwards. That’s my only recommendation here. So I want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage. So come on! There we go, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. I have another idea. I wanted to -- there we go.

(Laughter)

There we go.

(Laughter)

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not bad, not bad. No serious injuries so far.

(Laughter)

Well, they’re still coming in from the back there;they’re still coming in. Some of you haven’t fired them yet. Can you not figure out how to do it, or something? It’s not that hard. Most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds, when they pick it up. All right. This is pretty good; this is pretty good. Okay, all right. Let’s -- I suppose we'd better... I better clear these up out of the wayotherwise I’m going to trip over them. All right. So the rest of you can save them for when I say something particularly boring, and then you can fire at me.

(Laughter)

All right. I think I’m going to take these off now,because I can’t see a damn thing when I’ve -- all right, OK. So, ah, that was fun.

(Laughter)

All right, good.

(Applause)

So, OK, so why? So we have the finger blasters, other people have dinosaurs, you know. Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.

Now, an adult encountering a new situation -- when we encounter a new situation we have a tendencyto want to categorize it just as quickly as we can, you know. And there’s a reason for that. We want to settle on an answer. Life’s complicated. We want to figure out what’s going on around us very quickly. I suspect, actually, that the evolutionary biologistsprobably have lots of reasons why we want to categorize new things very, very quickly. One of them might be, you know, when we see this funny stripey thing, is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us? Or is it just some weird shadows on the tree? We need to figure that out pretty fast. Well, at least, we did once. Most of us don’t need to anymore, I suppose.

This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily.

(Laughter)

Kids are more engaged with open possibilities.Now, they’ll certainly -- when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of themmight get to a really, kind of, interesting example.And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?

We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense.Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.

So another one of Bob McKim’s favorite exercisesis called the "30 Circles Test." So we’re back to work. You guys are going to get back to work again.Turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on,back over, and you’ll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper. So it should look like this. You should be looking at something like this. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to give you minute,and I want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can, into objects of some form. So for example, you could turn one into a football, or another one into a sun. All I’m interested in is quantity. I want you to do as many of them as you can, in the minute that I’m just about to give you. So, everybody ready? OK? Off you go.

Okay. Put down your pencils, as they say. So, who got more than five circles figured out? Hopefully everybody? More than 10? Keep your hands up if you did. 10. 15? 20? Anybody get all 30? No? Oh! Somebody did. Fantastic. Did anybody to a variation on a theme? Like a smiley face? Happy face? Sad face? Sleepy face? Anybody do that?Anybody use my examples? The sun and the football? Great. Cool. So I was really interested in quantity. I wasn’t actually very interested in whether they were all different. I just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible. And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas.

And some cases. our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to, kind of, go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play.So now, Bob McKim did another very -- another version of this test, in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s. Anybody know what this? It’s the peyote cactus. It’s the plant from which you can create mescaline, one of the psychedelic drugs. For those of you around in the '60s you probably know it well.

McKim published a paper in 1966 describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted,to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity.So he picked 27 professionals. They were, you know, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers even, artists. And he asked them to come along one evening and bring a problem with them that they were working on. He gave each of them some mescaline, and had them listen to some nice, relaxing music for a while. And then he did what’s called the Purdue Creativity Test.You might know it as, how many uses can you find for a paper clip? It’s basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that I just had you do.

Now, actually, he gave the test before the drugs,and after the drugs, to see how -- what the difference was in people’s, sort of, facility and speed with coming up with ideas. And then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they’d brought. And they’d come up with a bunch of, kind of, interesting solutions, and actually quite, kind of, valid solutions to the things that they’d been working on. And so some of the things that they figured out, some of these individuals figured out. In one case a new commercial building and design for houses that were accepted by clients. A design of a solar space probe experiment. A redesign of the linear electron accelerator, an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder. You can tell this is a while ago. The completion of a line of furniture, and even a new conceptual model of the photon. So it was a pretty successful evening.

In fact, maybe this experiment was the reason that Silicon Valley got off to its great start with innovation. We don’t know, but it may be. We need to ask some of the CEOs whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment. But really, it wasn’t the drugs that were important, it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking. And getting them to, kind of, forget the adult behaviorsthat were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits.

At IDEO we have brainstorming rules written on the walls. Edicts like, "Defer judgment," or "Go for quantity." And somehow that seems wrong. I mean, can you have rules about creativity? Well, it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process. And we’ve certainly learnt that over time, you get much better brainstorming, much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules. Now, of course, many designers, many individual designers, achieve this is in a much more organic way.

I think the Eames are wonderful examples of experimentation. And they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind. They were exploring following what was interesting to them. And they went from designing splints for wounded soldierscoming out of World War II and the Korean War, I think. And from this experiment they moved on to chairs.

And through constant experimentation with materials, developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today, and eventually resulting in, of course, the legendary lounge chair.Now, if the Eames had stopped with that first great solution, then we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of so many, you know, wonderful designs today. And of course, they used experimentation in all aspects of their work. From films to buildings, from games to graphics. So they’re great examples, I think, of exploration and experimentation in design.

Now, while the Eames were exploring those possibilities, they were also exploring physical objects. And they were doing that through building prototypes. And building is the next of the behaviors that I thought I’d talk about. So the average Western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what’s called "construction play." Construction play -- it’s playful, obviously, but also a powerful way to learn. When play is about building a tower out of blocks, the kid begins to learn a lot about towers. And as they repeatedly knock it down and start again, learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play. It’s classically learning by doing.

Now, David Kelley calls this behavior, when it’s carried out by designers, "thinking with your hands."And it typically involves making multiple, low-resolution prototypes very quickly. You know, often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution. One of his earliest projects, the team was kind of stuck, and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll on deodorant. Now, that became the first commercial computer mouse for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh.

So they kind of learned their way to that by building prototypes. Another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons. They were meeting with them, they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device. And one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister -- which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium -- and a clothes pin. Taped them all together, ran back into the room and said, you mean something like this? And the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said, well, I want to hold it like this, or like that. And all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object.And in the end it turned into a real device.

And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world, and having your thinking advanced as a result. At IDEO there’s a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment. The prototyping carts filled with colored paper and play dough and glue sticks and stuff. I mean, they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them. But the important idea is, everything’s to hand. Everything’s around. So when designers are working on ideas they can start building stuff, kind of, whenever they want. They don’t necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it. And we think that’s pretty important.

And then the sad thing is, although preschools are full of this kind of stuff, as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away. They lose this stuff that kind of facilitates this sort of playful, and building mode of thinking. And of course, by the time you get to the average workplace, maybe the best construction tool we have might be the Post-it notes. It’s pretty barren. But giving project teams and their clients who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily.

This is a nurse using a very simple -- as you can see -- plasticine prototype, explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital. And just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way. And of course, by building quick prototypes, you know, we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we’re trying to describe them through words.

But what about designing something that isn’t physical? Something like a service or an experience? Something which exists as a series of interactions over time? Instead of building play, this can be approached with role play. So if you’re designing an interaction between two people such as, I don’t know, ordering food at a fast food joint or something, you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time. And I think the best way to achieve that, and get a feeling for any flaws in your design, is to act it out.

So we do quite a lot of work at IDEO trying to convince our clients of this. They can be a little skeptical, I’ll come back to that. But a place, I think, where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems. Things like education or security or finance or health. And this is another example in a health care environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care. But you know, many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role play. Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, that’s just happening because they’re acting it out.

Research into kid’s behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role playing seriously. Because when children play a role they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays store, and another one’s playing house, then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to, quite quickly, to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken.

So when, as adults, we role play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized.We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life. And they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity. So role play is actually, I think, quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences. Another way for us, as designers, to explore role play is to put ourselves through an experience which we’re designing for,and kind of project ourselves into an experience.

So here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a, kind of, confined space on an airplane. And so they grab some very simple materials, you can see. And did this kind of role play, this kind of very crude role play, just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes.

This is one of our designers, Kristian Simsarian, and he’s putting himself through the experience of being an ER patient. Now, this is a real hospital, in a real emergency room. One of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him,because he didn’t want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later.So anyhow, he went there with his video camera,and it’s kind of interesting to see what he brought back. Because when we looked at the video when he got back, we saw 20 minutes of this.

(Laughter)

And also the amazing thing about this video, as soon as you see it you kind of immediately project yourself into that experience. And know what it feels like, all of that uncertainty while you’re left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms, wondering what the heck’s going on. And so this notion of using role play, or in this case, kind of living through the experience as a way of creating empathy, particularly when you use video, is really powerful.

Or another one of our designers, Altay Sendil, he’s here having his chest waxed, not because he’s very vain, although actually he is. No, I’m kidding.But in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they’re having dressings removed. And so sometimes these analogous experiences, kind of analogous role play, can also be quite valuable.

So when a kid dresses up as a firefighter, you know,he’s beginning to try on that identity. He wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter. We’re doing the same thing as designers. We’re trying on these experiences. And so the idea of role play is both as an empathy tool, as well as a tool for prototyping experiences. And you know, we kind of admire people who do this at IDEO anyway. Not just because they lead to insights about the experience,but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to, kind of, unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play.

So playful exploration, playful building and role play. And those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I kind of admit, that this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers,they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play.

So remember the sketching task we did at the beginning? The kind of little face, the portrait you did? Well, imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub. But everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks. That framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing, difficult situation, into a kind of a fun game. And as a result, you know, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time -- but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together.

But there aren’t just rules about how to play, there are rules about when to play. Kids don’t play all the time, obviously. They transition in and out of it. And teachers, you know, good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences. And as designers, we need to be able to transition in and out of play also. And if we’re running design studios we need to be able to figure out, how can we transition designers through these different experiences? I think this is particularly true if we think about the, sort of…

I think what’s very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation. We go through a sort of generative mode, where we’re exploring many ideas. And then we, kind of, come back together again, and come back looking for that sort of solution, and developing that solution. I think they’re two quite different modes. Divergence and convergence.And I think it’s probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness. Perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious. And so being able to move between those modes is really quite important. So it’s where there’s a, kind of, more nuanced version view of play, I think, is required.

Because it’s very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute. You’re either playful, or you’re serious, and you can’t be both. But that’s not really true. You can be a serious professional adult, and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and.You can be serious and play. So to kind of sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative, so there’s a connection. And there are a series of behaviors that we’ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers.They include exploration, which is about going for quantity. Building and thinking with their hands. And role play, where acting it out helps us both have more empathy for the situations in which we’re designing, and to create services and experiencesthat are seamless and authentic.

Thank you very much.