 and some of the ideas we will discuss tonight. Thank you. And now welcome, Cass. Let me hand things over to you. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Cindy. And thank you, Cooper Hewitt, for having me and the Smithsonian Women's History Initiative for this great opportunity to share some ideas and some kind of, I believe, quite timely ways of thinking about childhood education and play. I'm going to share a screen. So when we, this is a slight departure from what you may have read on the description, in part because when we initially started talking about this talk and the programming, it was a different world. It was about this time last year. And as a designer who designs for collaboration and designs for children to interact and play together and meet strangers and understand each other through play and making, it's been a tricky time to figure out. But I think we're any minute now to put it optimistically. We'll be coming out of this. We have a substantial percentage of our global population, and by our I mean kind of humanity at large, who've been raised with the understanding that strangers are dangerous. Touching people, even the ones you love, is dangerous. And they are absolutely not in the habit of collaborating, and being friendly, for lack of a better word, with strangers. So in my mind, of course, play is the perfect opportunity to kind of reacquaint children. And in some cases, I think about the ones and twos and threes that are coming up right now. It may not be reacquaint. It may be the first time that they're able to do that. And so I wanted to talk today and show some examples, both from my own work and from projects I've been involved in that have been evolving over time. And I should say are also a continuation of a lot of the types of education, alternative education, and play values that have been around for some time. So the title of my talk is, of course, three options. It's always a working title. But rather than designing for social distancing, which we're seeing plenty of, designing for social undistancing, right? And of course, that's not a word, but it is a specific situation, circumstance that is different than designing for collaboration or designing for social interaction. And I would also say that there's something that's important that I want to talk about, which is playing with uncertainty. And this is visible in a lot of the work I'm going to show, not only because they're primarily open-ended materials or appropriated materials that don't have instructions built in, that don't have a clear right and wrong way of using them, but that they also facilitate a collaborative figuring out and that uncertainty in being able to play with uncertainty as a way of embracing and being comfortable with failure, with cooperatively trial and error and doing it together and learning from each other's successes and mistakes, I think is something that will continue to be really, really important in the coming decades. I mean, in the coming months, really. And so really, I think what I'm going to be kind of talking about and of course, I'm thinking about, and I have a feeling many of you are thinking about, is designing for childhood in post-pagnemic times. And so my first example, and of course, I love this quote from Althea Gibson, one of the first Black athletes in international tennis who won the Grand Slam in 1956. And she said, no matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you. And I love that in particular in a kind of capitalist context where we celebrate the entrepreneur and the kind of hard work of one and this overcoming idea. So I love the reminder that in fact, we are all in it together. So in 2005-ish, I was working with the Rockwell Group and we started working with a woman named Penny Wilson, who was a play worker in the UK and a Joan Alman, who was kind of a play activist in New York City and a group of really incredible people who worked in early childhood and early education. And we were kind of doing and observing a lot of pop-up playgrounds where we would just bring cardboard boxes and loose parts or kind of found materials that children would appropriate for play. And in this, and these are some sketches that I made to kind of sell the idea to a few different parks and places that we wanted to do it. And oh, I guess this is a little later. That says 2010. So 2005 through 2010, we were kind of doing this. So what I think is meaningful or particularly relevant about this is the idea of kind of figuring out how to use something that is different than what it was designed for. So I call that appropriation where you would, in this example, who knows what the boxes and cardboard tubes are making. It may be a ship. It may be a monster. It could be a dragon. It could be none of the above. But with the transformation that happens in play, it's both a table and also a monster. So there's all kinds of different kind of like taking something and using it for kind of what you need. And of course, that happens through also a kind of resource management. So children sharing. Are you using that? Can I borrow that? Are you done with that? How about I build onto yours? And so the way that in playgrounds and in public spaces, children often wind up playing with children that they didn't know or maybe didn't know that they liked will be through these things kind of winding up being together or sharing resources. And this is a nice quote from Sir Ken Robinson, who we lost recently, unfortunately. Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth. And just a really kind of brief overview, a couple of points that in 2012, I worked with Liz Hirsch, who was the school director at the time. And Wendy Seligson, who was the executive director of the 14th Street Y and the Early Education Center. This was a rooftop playground. And this is on 14th Street in Manhattan. And so there's no yard. And this particular rooftop is tall enough that they had a really interesting, you could see kind of into the back of a lot of buildings. And so I wanted to give a vantage point that children wouldn't normally have. And so part of this play scape was intended to kind of get them even higher just to be able to see parts of the city that they may not be able to see usually. And then also, of course, give them a kind of open-ended way of mostly moving their bodies around the gross motor skills were kind of important, as well as these kind of plug-ins. So this whole thing was a wooden deck. And there are these kind of experiments that can be used in any number of ways. So they kind of wound up being like plug-in posts that had kind of color and light play could become a tent. They could collect water or snow, a wind chime. And so I think what was really nice about this is, again, the kind of playing with uncertainty, and in this case, rather than figuring it out with their hands and brains, they kind of came to understand through their bodies, through engaging this play scape, and in particular, these kind of curves and slopes with their bodies. And there was a whole, this curve was repeated in ways that they could, so there was like a, I had some kind of curricular ways that the teachers could also use it if they, so that it could be kind of an outdoor playground. And of course, a quote from Fred Rogers. Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. It is the work of childhood. And so with that in mind, just a quick, I want to talk briefly about Rigamajig, which was a pop-up playground that I designed for the Highline Park in New York City. And while it was being used on the Highline, I got feedback from quite a few educators that they really were finding some great opportunities in the classroom and kind of curricular specific uses for it. And I think that one of the design intents in this was that, A, it had the feel of something that was not designed, right? I didn't want this to feel like a toy, which it's solid wood. It has, it's larger. It's intentionally, each, the longest plank is larger than one child can kind of manage on their own. So they need each other in this way that I think is quite special. The hardware, these big nuts and bolts, and I designed them to not need any tools, because when I was seeing children playing with something that requires a tool, especially something where you're up and down and over and grabbing stuff, I want to narrow down the opportunity for frustration. And I know that as an adult, I set my wrench down and it's gone for 20 minutes before I can find it in. So I tried to make it very intuitive to use with in terms of that the nut and bolt are both really big and kids can turn them really easily. And it's kind of fun to watch the threes and fours understand righty, tidy, lefty, loosey with the nuts and bolts and the holes. And of course, all of the planks are modular. So two, they all line up. And it's, so it's very quick. I wanted them to spend less time understanding rigma jig as a system and more time being able to kind of make something bigger than themselves, right? So what this is about is whatever they want to make rather than, as much as it's the act of making, I didn't want learning the system to be the point. So I wanted them to be able to intuitively understand the system in order to make things that are bigger. So these are some images that I just grabbed off of our Facebook. And so if I was able to see kind of where they were from, I labeled them. But so these are from schools and you can kind of tell some boys and girls clubs. And one in particular, and this was a quote from someone who reached out and wanted to share, the increase in our group's cohesion since receiving rigma jig has been drastically noticeable. Working in varying degrees of disabilities, this type of play has helped the youth appreciate what their peers have to offer. And so this was in the city of San Bernardino Center for Individual Development. And it's a regional recreation center that focuses on providing programs for people of all ages with intellectual developmental and physical disabilities. And so Rachel K. Wirt sent us this and along with the photo of kind of one of her groups who have come back to rigma jig a number of times. And it makes me incredibly happy that of course, as well as children figuring out what to do with rigma jig, different centers are figuring out and different teachers are figuring out what to do with it. I designed for other people to design, right? And so in that way, not just designing with the parts but thinking about how to use the system and kind of who would this, who could this serve, who could use this type of play or this type of creating the Detroit public schools has quite a few kits that were gifted through a grant through Kaboom and GM, General Motors. And I love, again, this makes me so happy that school that the stool is incorporated because they needed to build something not only bigger than themselves but bigger than themselves. And some of these photos also, I like to use photos that are kind of on our social media and posted by the schools because when you often with toys and children's products in particular, when you see the image that they want you to see that's quite posed and from doing numerous photo shoots with children, they don't often smile when they're playing, when they're, especially if it's something that they're concentrating on, that they have a concentration base. And if you tell them to smile, it doesn't look like the kind of smile that you wanna have in here. So what I love about these photos is that you can see, first of all, that it takes six to eight hands to do any number of these things. And also just that kind of intense engagement and concentration as well as often kind of all needing to be in one little place in order to figure something out. And of course, like I said, kind of learning, I love this, the child in the background, kind of learning from what the others are doing in order to kind of help her figure it out. And this image I wanna include because there's an idea and I think even I had an idea of how much room, how much space classrooms or facilities needed in order to kind of use something, a material this large. And I love this because it's like, no, you fill the amount of space that you have. Again, you appropriate a space to use this material. And if you have only a little aisle way, then you build in a little aisle way, right? So the constraints are whatever you need them to be. Yeah, and again, just kind of the helping you hold this while I do that kinds of moments. And the other thing that I wanted to talk about that relates to, that can be kind of exemplified in Rigamajig, but also relates to the kind of playing with uncertainty and kind of figuring out or in kind of inventing as you go. This is an example of, oops, wrong one, hold on one second, sorry. Let me show you, oh, there it is, okay. I wanted to make sure I was seeing the same thing that you are. So this is actually a school in China. And so Rigamajig, I should say is now, it's now sold to children's museums and schools and libraries and maker spaces and after school programs and Boys and Girls Club all over the world. And we get videos occasionally and sometimes just through our own Facebook or I kind of will Google stock my own product to see how it's being used. I kind of spy on it and it's always exciting to see the things that I never would have thought of or necessarily designed it specifically for. But every once in a while, I can learn something about how it's being used and then designed to enhance that even more. So with that in mind, I started seeing, not just in China, there was a couple libraries that sent us videos somewhere in the Midwest. I apologize, people in the Midwest, I know that there's numerous places within that category. Where children were making these spinning tops with Rigamajig, this is actually Rigamajig Junior. It's a slightly smaller version for smaller spaces. And so what happened after I saw this is, I said, wow, well, what if there were colors and patterns and different shapes that when they made a spinning top, they could play with optical illusion and with sound and with kind of different ways of using a fulcrum point or the different types of bolts that might spin differently based on what they, so then we went ahead and made a smaller kit also because we're always trying to, it's high quality wood and we make it small comparatively, we're not a giant manufacturer. So we're always looking for ways that we can get some things at lower price points. So this is kind of a smaller kit with these colored parts and pieces that when they're spun, of course, like they make all kinds of illusions and different color patterns and things like that. And of course, just other critters like what you see here. And then my last kind of example of kind of my three themes, the social undistancing, playing with uncertainty, and designing for a post-pandemic existence, which will come, is in onji play. And quite honestly, onji play is in my mind an incredible example of most things that are ideal. But in particular, I think many of the themes that I mentioned relate. And this is a quote from the woman who kind of invented, slash developed, founded this onji play model of education. And one of her guide, like her, yes, this quote. Onji play is founded on deeply rooted trust in our children. It is at its core a movement of love, risk, joy and reflection. We owe it to our children, to ourselves and to our societies and the world to embrace these core principles and support true play. And true play is what she would consider play that is, and it's very similar to a definition that I learned from Joan Alman and Penny Wilson. It's also at the root of a lot of playwork and just still practice in the UK, but I think we have some play workers in the US as well. And if peppered throughout Europe, a lot of adventure playgrounds that have play workers. But the kind of underlying principles of free play, which Ms. Chung calls true play, is that it's freely chosen, intuitively driven and child directed. And so again, I just think that the five principles of onji play, love, risk, joy, engagement and reflection are going to continue to be more important than ever before. So this is a snapshot of any typical day at an onji play school. So there are now over 600 onji play schools worldwide. There are some really excellent people led by Jesse Cofina and who have been helping to bring the onji play model outside of China and kind of, I've been part of helping them imagine what it might look like in other places. In the interest of the part of the onji play principles is that things are context specific. So for example, when I visit an onji play school in densely urban area of the onji region or onji province in China, or even now there's an onji play school in Shanghai, it looks very different and the materials are very different than an onji play school that's up in a bamboo forest because there are also a lot of those. And a good example of this is that in the schools and I think in a couple of the videos I may show, like these are very common construction ladders and some of them are made out of bamboo and a lot of the ways that they might transport materials are with, say, a really woven bamboo basket. And so in their context, that's a very common material that is appropriated for play. Children see this woven bamboo basket all throughout the city. People are using them to bring everything around. And so our version of that is milk in the U.S. is milk crates, right? So a woven bamboo basket, if we brought that here, that wouldn't be in line with an onji play school because it's not a common material, it's not context specific, and it's definitely not in our context appropriated for play. It's kind of a precious special object which is what this model kind of doesn't make sense. So a lot of what happens as we're trying to kind of translate onji play into these other countries and other educational models is trying to understand what any one of the core principles would mean in one context versus another and kind of always coming back to the core principles as a like, okay, what material should our ladders be made out of? Like bamboo doesn't make sense because it's not a common, should it be this aluminum ladder that children see all over the world and in their garage? And so it's been a really interesting project and I continue to learn from it. And I just wanted to show, to share a video. I'm not sure if you have sound, I hope not. So these courses, all of these ladders and barrels and everything you see is brought out at the beginning of the day by the children. So all of this is put away. There's no instruction given. They come to school and immediately are kind of can do whatever they want. They take out whatever they want and obviously work together to build and climb and make these kinds, sorry about the video. This is me taking video with like whatever device I happen to have at the time and I'm terrible at it. But as you can see, and of course like problem solving, I see so much creating problems to solve and so much of how they play. And this of course relates to a theme that I have that runs through rigging as well, which is easy as boring, right? And I think in play, it's definitely create a problem to solve. Okay, we'll stop that video now. And so again, comfort with uncertainty, all of these children are making it up as they go. They're learning from each other, they're helping each other and they're responsible for these materials. So they take care of them. They take them out, they put them away and there's not a big difference between play and cleanup. And so this is Ms. Chung and I in one of many impromptu meetings where I brought all kinds of scale models and things around to try to kind of, as I said, standardize and try to make a system that similar to what I was describing with Rigamajig didn't require learning the system, rather facilitated the children learning or playing or doing other things with the system, right? So there was lots of, and these are my dream conversations to have, is if we have building blocks, of course we're all familiar with, and unit blocks in particular, if there's one really tall block, is that cheating, right? Should we instead give them two short blocks so that they have to stack them and therefore it's more likely to fall over? And when I say cheating, I just mean like, is that too easy, right? Do we want them to have to create a version of that in Rigamajig is that with two planks and a wheel, you can make a pulley, right? So a pulley is a simple machine and it is quite simple. And so at first I thought, I don't wanna include a pulley in Rigamajig, I want them to make a pulley. But in fact, there's moments where it's like, well, one in 300 times it's played with, someone will make a pulley, why don't we just give them a pulley and then it becomes a cue to make other things that will use the pulley, right? So actually in Rigamajig, there is a constructed complete pulley, which at some point I felt like I was cheating. So again, designing to facilitate comfort with uncertainty, right? What is this thing? How do I use it? And so this is just a kind of example of the materials. So this is now the kind of material taxonomy of on G play the model. And then I just wanted to show scale again, because so, you know, this is approximately a four year old. And let's see. And then again, I think I wanted to show another example of kind of invention, creative, collaborative, playful invention. In the process of standardizing or taking the appropriated materials that the teachers and principals and Ms. Chung had been so brilliantly using these barrels here. So these, the drums, these metal drums, as wonderful as they were, I suspected that we would have a hard time kind of productifying them so that as more and more on G play schools opened and needed to be able to kind of buy or source materials that were standard. And we didn't want every principal to have to figure out, you know, how to source these things. So in the process of doing that, it was kind of like, well, once you, if we are gonna design it, what else can it facilitate? So making the inside open, right? So in the barrels, there are lids, but with ours, we went ahead and left them open so that there could be this kind of the study of centrifugal force. I'm gonna play that video again, just because it's really great. The difference of, and we have different sized barrels so they can see it's much harder to balance and walk on a small barrel. If the difference, and again, exploring and figuring out and understanding with their bodies, centrifugal force really. And then also, of course, like balance and these two were yelling at everybody who was going across and telling them, you know, when it was clear and you can stop or go. And one of the, this question always comes up anytime that they talk about on-jee play, which is as much as possible. What about cleanup? And the, as I kind of said earlier, there's not a large difference between the cleanup and play. In fact, there's kind of, and especially not speaking the language, I couldn't really ever tell. I just all of a sudden realized that all of the parts had been put away. And I asked the teacher, you know, do you ever, does it ever take too long? Or I think one time we were watching and there were two children that were just like bringing, for every block they put away, they'd bring out two ladders in order to carry back a plank, like the most elaborate system of putting parts away. Absolutely no efficiency whatsoever, which is play, right? And she said, why would I, I said, do you ever ask them to hurry up, you know, or do you ever kind of say like, enough, enough, let's go, just put them away? Cause most of the other class had gone back into the building for lunch or something like that. And she was kind of like, why on earth would we, why would I do that? You know, and I was like, well, cause you've got to go whatever is supposed to happen in the classroom. And she's like, why, why would that be more valuable than what's happening out here? And I was like, I realized like, of course, like I, after working with this model where play and exploration and failure are implicit in every part of it, it's, there was still this big shift to understand that the classroom is not more valuable than what happens in the yard, you know? And so that's all just to say, I wanted to kind of show a section and again, I apologize for my terrible videography, but this yellow cube that you see in this green and the pink cubes in the background, they're very heavy. This yellow one is the smallest actually and they get quite large. And they need to be put away often in kind of a specific order. And so not just kind of getting them there, but also fitting them into the spot requires an understanding of spatial dynamics that is kind of blew my mind. But so this is kind of a snapshot into the cooperation and play and joy that happens even in cleanup, which is something that in a lot of schools that I work with, the teachers assume that they have to do or the children aren't used to embracing it as part of the play. And therefore the teachers wind up doing it, whether or not they planned it that way. And so again, there's no designated way. You can see the blue one in the background, they put on a cart and somebody's pulling it. The yellow one, they were rolling into end. These two girls carrying the mat cooperatively above their heads. And it's a pretty exciting thing, the onji play cleanup. It's one of my favorite parts of onji play. And of course, another nice quote by a lady on her wood who's pivotal in early adventure playgrounds in kind of post-war Europe. And that's it. The one thing that I can't really show images of but that I'm very excited about and I think will be kind of the, I mean, it's in my mind a bit of a case study, even though I think we feel pretty confident and it's a success, whatever success will mean, which I think in this case, it means that it will engage the kind of cooperative play and the playing with uncertainty and the comfort and abstraction and things. Is I'm working with the Liberty Science Center and we are designing a, Liza Rawson and the team there, we're designing a new play space and the kind of early learners toddler center. And we can't say much about it, it's still under wraps but it will be opening in October of 2021, so somewhat soon. And similarly, when we started designing it, it was a completely different world and throughout the process, we kind of had to continue assessing what are our goals, what do children need, what does play look like? And it's been tricky and there's been a lot of trust and I think we've needed to be more brave even than usually what needs to be in designing anything or inventing something out of thin air. So here's a few resources and I do believe we're gonna open it up to Q&A. My guess, thank you. That was a great presentation. We have some very good questions from the audience. So I can read those out to you. Okay, let's start with Kenny Arnold. I'd love to hear if or how you like to engage children as co-designers, what types of questions or prompts do you use in your design practice? Yeah, so I would say the project where this is most seamless is with the Anji Play Schools in China because their principals and teachers are constantly prototyping. And so for example, at some point I was working with one of the principals and we were talking about ladders and I said, well, in the interest of easy is boring or just kind of having them kind of pay attention to what they're doing. What if we had the rungs at different heights, right? A ladder is, it's safe because it's the same each time. And so there's always like eight inches or 10 inches. And I was like, what if it was like different with each rung? And I went back the next day and she had the local carpenter make a few ladders with really inconsistent rungs and the kids were playing with them. At some point with the barrels I was like, what if we, is it gonna be too heavy if we make a wooden barrel kind of like a cedar water tank? But, and then we're like, well, it's very heavy so let's make it smaller. And before, so we brought out this kind of, it had a smaller diameter than the barrels that you saw but it was hollow and it was wood. So it was very heavy. And before they even got on it, the two or three children that one of the teachers had kind of pulled over to test it, they said it's gonna, we're not gonna be able to walk on it. It's gonna go too fast. So they understood the, you know, what the diameter meant in terms of them being able to, right? So again, yeah, it was these moments that my mind is just like they understood the circumference and what it meant for. And so in that case, it's kind of like a, in Angie play, it's kind of observing and kind of giving them different materials and seeing what they do with it and kind of putting things out, right? And again, that since a lot of it is appropriated, it's not necessarily designing for them. And it's different than a saying to a child like let's design a playground, which I've also done. And I've not personally figured out nor have I seen too many great examples of how that can, especially with playgrounds because there's so many tricky regulations. When you say to a child, let's design a playground that when it's like a community effort and the playground is going to be built and they draw, I mean, I like to do this exercise, but I never tell them it's going to be built because usually their ideas are that it's made out of cotton candy and it's almost always a water park. And so again, and then you kind of start to say, well, no, you can't have a, you can't make a playground out of candy. What if it rains? And then slowly it's like the child is like, this isn't even fun anymore, you know? So the collaborative design process with communities and playgrounds can work. With children, there's so many constraints that won't make sense to them. That it's less effective and I don't believe in saying, we're going to build this and then not being able to build or saying like design a playground and having them come up with these wonderful cotton candy water parks and then flip to a year later, we give them a metal structure, you know, that looks nothing like what they were told that they got to design. So in terms of the kind of engaging them in the process, I do as an observer, I observe and talk to them about what they're playing with and how and I like to ask, tell me about what you're doing and have some insights into what they're imagining when they're making it what they're doing. And then lots of testing, lots of putting it out in front of, you know, we have some pilot schools and some friends who are teachers. So I'll go and again observe and then talk to the children and talk to the teacher. The teacher of course always has incredible insights. And then also designing it so that it's feasible in a classroom, yeah. We have another good question here from an anonymous attendee saying, hi, cast curious what you tell adults who may not understand play in the way you framed it, though kids always do. I often encounter folks who are dismissive of play and worry this will be heightened post pandemic. Yeah, me too. I do spend a fair amount of time, I hesitate to say educating because I don't think I'm telling anybody anything that they don't already know. I think that we all were born and as children we know exactly how to play and we understand the value of play. And then I think that we begin pretending to be adults and convince ourselves that play isn't as valuable or as important as I think that inherently we know that it is. So I wouldn't say that I educate people on the importance and the value of play but I think I try to help people remember and reconnect with what we already know about play which is that it is formative. And it is, I mean, I would say it's as important as sleep and water and any other types of stimulation, being intellectually stimulated, physically engaged. Play happens in all of those but I think even as its own kind of not just therapy but part of being human and way to experience ourselves. Yeah, so I think rather than educating or I think when talking to adults I try to help them remember. Okay, I'm a couple of more, some more good questions. What would you say is the most important thing or things to consider when designing for other people to design? Mm-hmm. I would say it's harder to design for other people to design. I find myself having to take it back a few steps. I usually take it too far and then kind of back up a little bit. And it requires enormous restraint really because I'm a designer so I do love designing things and I, but again, that kind of just seems too easy or just less interesting than designing something that I don't know how it'll be used or I might have an idea of like, ooh, this shape looks like it could either be a cloud or a wing or like a sandwich but I will design with that in mind like, oh, I would build it, I would build this or that with it and try to include like a broad range of things that could look mechanical or it could look kind of anthropomorphic. And then ultimately when I talk to the children who are play testing them, it's like none of the things that I would have thought of, which is again, when I know it's a success, it's working. Yeah, and I think in general, designing for others to design, I think requires trust and trusting that people will figure it out. Yeah, trusting that people are smart and capable, which I don't think a lot of design trusts people. I don't think a lot of things trust people. I feel like whenever I watched any TV thing, I'm like, wow, they really think we're dumb. This is what they think we wanna see, like this is how they think we wanna be talked to, I don't understand. And it feels similarly about quite a few products where I'm like, this is, we don't need it to be condescended to. So I think when you're designing for other people to design it requires trusting that they'll get it or they'll figure it out or they'll be excited or in the case of children, I think that they can feel seen when they realize that a material or a toy lets them be smart or knows that they're smart enough to do it, right? Thank you, Karen Fetter asks, what would you recommend design students to do to be able to take a child-centered perspective when designing for play? We'll start by, and this is an exercise that my colleague, Jesse Cofino, who works with OnjiPlay Global and Ms. Chung, also we learned this from Ms. Chung, but I think he does it most consistently and facilitates it most beautifully, is having people kind of talk about and draw or record or tell stories about their play memories or our play memories, right? And so like I was saying, I think that as adults we kind of forget more than don't know, we already know, we just need to remember how to play or the importance of play. And when you can have adults kind of connect with that part of themselves before they're starting a process of a design student or designers designing for children to kind of remember that they can still relate to children. And they are not another species, they are a complete human that is younger than you are, but they're not a tiny human, they're not, they are just a younger person, they are a complete thing. And which I think then helps to respect them, which then I think also helps to trust them to be able to kind of handle something large or heavy or might be commonly perceived as dangerous. And I think that it also, back to the principles of Anji play that love is a big part of that. I think that in a lot of these, a lot of the principles of in design where there's trust or respect, there should also be love for the people we're designing for. And I think that that is an important element for, I mean, for all design, but for design students designing for play or for other elements in childhood. Yeah, I think we start with kind of reacquainting ourselves with loving each other. Thank you. Oh, another question specific to Anji play, Samuel Square asks, how were the core principles of Anji play interwoven into your design process when developing Rigamajig and how the pandemic helped to create comfort with uncertainty, whether in this design system or in general. Yeah, and I designed Rigamajig before I was involved in Anji play. So I would say the, and I had been involved in a number of playground projects that were not brave and that in the end didn't really work because that as much as the, my partners wanted to do something that trusted children and was challenging and respectful end of the day, the kind of litigation, the fear of litigation and fear of having something that was too unusual, kind of one in the project. And so I was coming off of a few, of a few very discouraging playground projects and feeling like I was starting to not design for what I knew was ideal, I was starting to design for what I thought was possible. Which was disappointing, but also for me just began to feel like a constraint. Okay, so I might know what's ideal for children and maybe we had it in the 60s and 70s or we see it in these adventure playgrounds in Europe, but okay, whatever, we can't have that. So I'm gonna figure out some in between so that children have better play opportunities but maybe it's not gonna be ideal. And then I saw Anji playing was like, my mind was blown because it's ideal, hands down, right? And but I think similar things were happening with Rigam and Jig, where initially I had been told that it was dangerous and the children were gonna hit themselves or that the pranks were gonna become scissors, which is a terrifying thought as a designer that you're gonna injure the people you're designing for. But increasingly all of the educators and people, my colleagues who work in early childhood and have spent their whole lives working with children, they continue telling me, no, this is fine, like children, there's a perceived risk. If it's heavy, they're gonna play with it really differently than if it's made out of plastic, right? Like if you hand somebody a hollow baseball bat, they're gonna hit their friend on the head with it because they know it won't hurt. If you hand them a real baseball bat, they're probably not gonna do that, right? There's a perception of risk. So I may have forgotten entirely what the question was, I'm sorry, was it related to adults? I think I'm sorry, I'm not seeing the question anymore in the feed. Well, where did I start with that? Ronji, play Rigam. Oh, the principles, the principles of blood drive. So Rigam-a-jig, those specific principles, I didn't learn or kind of come to understand how they manifested in on-jee play until Rigam-a-jig was already in schools and things. And but in particular, so I, in playgrounds was to have been designing for reasonable risk, which is different than danger. And cooperation and problem solving, which is the kind of figure it out-iness and the open-ended and like don't give, no instructions, don't tell them what to do or how to do it, let them figure it out. That's part of not only what's valuable in kind of the learning part, but also it's just more fun, right? That's back to my motto, easy is boring. Everybody, children love a challenge, that's both play and learning. So, but the thing that I never thought of as directly was love. And I think, like I said, respecting the people that you're designing for, respecting, in my case, childhood and children, but in the on-jee play schools, because it's not just the materials, of course, like it's in all of the pedagogy, you see it the way that children treat each other is much different than anywhere else that I've seen. And it is love, it's not just respect or kind of empathy or, you know, you're my classmate. There's a care there that's very unique, very inspiring. That links it to another question from Robin Weidner. How would you manage the balance of frustration and rich challenges with differently skilled children? Yeah, and you mean the, I guess, I don't know if we can ask a clarification question. So I'll respond to that as if you mean the frustration of children using the materials, not my frustration, because who cares about that? Yeah, I think that's what I'm here. So, yeah, and this is a beautiful, you know, when I was showing the images of Rigamajig, a couple of those classrooms in my friend, Mary Cunningham, who founded the new school in Syracuse, that was one of the first schools that Rigamajig is, and it's an inclusive school. So the children in the kindergarten through eighth grade are both on the spectrum and not on the spectrum, various levels of physical disabilities and all in one track of learning all working together. And she, and we'll see if I can tell this without crying, she had a boy who was on the autism spectrum and was not, he didn't play with other children and he'd been there for a couple of years. So she'd known him for a year and something. He didn't play with other children, you know, he was incredibly smart, but not at all social. And when they brought Rigamajig out, he took to it right away and the hierarchy in the classroom kind of shifted, it flipped because whereas before, you know, nobody knew how to engage with him and he seemed so not interested in engaging with anyone else, the other children, but he was the expert, he was so good at Rigamajig and everybody, you know, would kind of like ask him to help them. And all of a sudden like, you know, popular is a strange word, but he, they understood his value in a way that maybe they couldn't before because we often use our social skills as a way of understanding each other. So to be able to kind of work with somebody or play with somebody in that way I think with Rigamajig and a lot of the materials I've shown create and explore and there's no right or wrong answer. So nobody can kind of do it, make a better thing. Like there's, it's not a competition, right? But some people with the example of this boy he'd figured out kind of how to engage it or how to make things work in a way that was much faster than the other children had. So she just, she said that it was like he understood himself in ways that she hadn't seen and then similarly children understood him in ways that they never would have otherwise. And they kind of come to value all of the different, you know, our neurodiversity as well as the diversity of abilities. So I think that any material that is open-ended in that way and facilitates cooperation and particular kind of creative imaginative engagement can do that in ways that other learning materials can't. Very good. I think we'll take one last question from the audience. There's so many good ones here. It's my turn to choose. And then we'll go into the conversation. There, Javier Salman asks, have you interacted, sorry, have you interacted in any way with generative design while designing for play? I probably can't ask a clarification question, can I? Oh, okay. I have a couple of different understandings of generative design. It's, in my understanding, it's a little bit like the term design thinking in that it's used in a lot of different ways. And like architecture would use the term differently than graphic design might. So, and there's some ways that I would just say, not really, depending on what the clarification would be. But there are other definitions or uses of that term that I would say maybe are quite what you mean, but the kind of, that each version of Rigamajig gets the next that through iterations of that are used and therefore kind of, I wouldn't, of course they're prototype, but by the time we kind of sell them, we've already prototyped in like our version of mass produced. It's not very mass, but, and so in a way, the play generates the next designs. Like the example of the spinning tops, I think is a good one. That I put something out there. Children figured out a way to use it and I said, oh, cool, you're doing this. What if we make that even like richer, like other opportunities within that thing that you discovered so you can now play with sound and centrifugal force and patterns and optical illusions, right? So I don't think that's probably what you meant by generative design, but that would be a way that I could say, yes. Thank you. There's so many more questions. I'm sorry, we can't get to them all, but if it's a good time, I just wanted to shift to a more conversational segment and there may be some viewers who aren't really familiar enough with your background and your design philosophies. Could you talk a little bit about how you, your interest in play and how long you've had that and what led you to become a designer in that area? Yeah, so I think I had a very playful childhood and I was raised kind of in the woods of Northern California and I was outside constantly and usually, you know, like there are things like the bike and maybe occasionally kind of an object that I would bring out to play, but I mostly remember kind of just being around in the woods. Mom and I were recently talking about this tree that I used to climb that now the stubs that I would climb up on are 40 feet in the air and I can't really imagine how I was. But so I don't think I think somehow I feel very lucky that I don't know that I really ever forgot how to play. And that may be a little bit because the, in my experience of school was learning how to like be, I don't wanna say this, basically learning how to act like, oh, okay, so we're supposed to sit here and it was like pretending to be in school. So I would kind of perform school, right? Okay, so now I can do this, I'm gonna sit still and I'm gonna do this thing and then I'm gonna write when I'm, so that felt like play in a way because it seems so ludicrous that it was like sunny outside and we were in this classroom sitting in rows and so I think that that's always been kind of odd and I very early on knew that that was the pretend part and the rest was real, right? When I was outside playing, that was real life and when I was in school, I was pretending. And so that kind of like made its way into a lot of things that I did in life and I didn't know there was such a thing as a designer. When I was in high school, we had a wonderful career center but we had a filing cabinet, you'd open it up and it was like feature, plumber, engineer, like the little folders of these are the 75 things you can be when you grow up and artists certainly wasn't there and I think my family kind of encouraged my creativity but I don't think any of us knew it could be something that I could be when I grew up, right? Certainly not pay the bills with it which was always important. So and a giant concern of my mom's understandably was like, okay, you're weird, we love you but like are you gonna be able to support yourself? So it wasn't until I was 28 that I kind of realized like, ah, I wanna be a designer. So I went back to school, I went to Cranbrook which is an incredible design school that I would say also kind of exemplifies a lot of the principles of onji play and that it's very self-directed. You have an enormous agency over what you do and how you do it and it's intuitively driven. There aren't grades, why would you put a grade? Like what's good work and bad work? Are you in your studio because you want a grade or are you in your studio because you wanna do amazing things, right? So the removal of all of these kind of extrinsic motivators I think gives people a chance to really do the kind of work that we're driven to do. So I went to Cranbrook and a lot of what I was doing was playful and I think kind of considered sculpture at the time and ultimately when I was part of my thesis project became GMO and that was kind of with my interest in making an interactive sculpture that people would interact with that could have multiple interpretations. So I wanted it to be void of identity, right? It's not clear with GMO, it's not, you know some people think it's a bone, some people think it's a tiny alien some people see it as part of your, right? And so I did a lot of, you know I spent a year developing different shapes in different ways that could work or connect and at some point in the process of doing that I started reading about education and started thinking more about toys and my own experience as a child of being so frustrated by gendered toys by the time I was six I think I was pissed off about it. And then also just kind of being aware of that as an adult and maybe kind of just taking it as like it's just this stupid thing that we have that's socialized the same like all gender is a performance it's socialized the way so we're like now used to this thing and then kind of saying like, oh wait no actually maybe I could do something about this, right? Maybe there's an opportunity that other people feel similarly and more importantly that if it's kind of if it's interesting enough then it will engage children and the adults won't care if it's kind of breaking some other rules of normalcy. So yeah, I kind of unfolded from grad school I kind of just was able to, I worked at the while I was launching Gimo and that kind of took me on a world tour of design fairs which was incredible and I was working at the Rockwell Group on a bunch of really fantastic projects and including the imagination playground and while I was also doing a Gimo and starting some other projects of my own so yeah, it's just kind of always made sense. I know you've talked about now going to different sites and working with educators and designing for specific sites do you, in doing a little reading about your work I also know you have your own company and a place where you also prototype and design called Camp Fun, can you talk a little bit about that experience, what it's like to work in that setting and what your process is? Well, I'm here now so I live most of the time in Brooklyn and then part time in Camp Fun in Rhode Island and when I live here, when I live at Camp Fun full time it's like it was when I bought it, it was off the grid so it's a lot of work and it is five acres and seven structures and a pond that last year we got a beaver that flooded things and we've got, my dogs keep bringing deer legs back from the woods, like it's not a predictable work environment in a way that owning a business requires so yeah, and we ran out of water this year we had a well that was fine for eight years and then out of the blue we didn't have any water and then, because my well was hand dug so we had to get a new well that's 400 feet deep so it's amazing in that that's interesting to me but it's also easy's boring so I do a different kind of work in both places and as a designer it's interesting when I'm at Camp Fun and so I have a toy library behind me I've got a book library over there, it's a mess but there's a model shop and a wood shop downstairs and all of those things are part of my process so when I'm here I'll sketch and then I'll go down in the wood shop and kind of prototype something really quick with a nail gun or I'll go over cardboard and whatever to help figure it out and that's great and I love that as my process but and when I'm in Brooklyn because I don't have a big shop I figure out a lot more things through sketching and I think there are big advantages to both so yeah, that's kind of the best thing about Camp Fun and kind of the reason that it's the reward for that it's a lot of work and even though I also love taking care of things and obviously problem solving and I learned how to do plumbing because there's also an absurdly giant pool in the woods that the plumbing was broken and I was like well I guess now I'm gonna learn how to do plumbing you know, so although I wouldn't say that's plumbing it's like a pool is not full plumbing but I have a really wonderful group of friends artists and designers and just wonderful people and many of them have children but most of them don't and we have a few gatherings every year where people will come either for a weekend or for a whole week and we'll sometimes we'll have a project running throughout where all of us are collaborating on something either for the property or somebody's work and often we'll just play there's a swimming pool in the woods and we have a giant trampoline and this pond and I've put up a bunch of swings and we had a sky platform for a while which was this big platform we built in the very specific spot to Stargaze. So it's kind of, it's an adult artist queer summer camp, which is I mean the dream in my book and so it kind of makes the rest of, you know, like having a drill drilling a well 400 feet into the ground for with the thing going for 10 days that only is worth it when I know that my friends and I will get to benefit from it. I'm just thinking about this, what you've described and also this sort of leads me to a question about materials I've noticed a lot of your work turns to wood, plywood, other natural materials pattern and bright colors. Could you talk a little bit about what attracts you to those materials and visual elements? Yeah, well, children deserve real materials. They can again, back to respect and kind of love and trust. They know when they're holding something that's plastic and cheap and when they're holding something that's wooden and real and well crafted. And I think that when we give them like cheap disposable plastic things we're communicating something to them that I don't think is what we wanna be saying. And so giving them quality materials and well crafted objects that are challenging and I think that we're kind of telling them you deserve this and you can handle this and you should expect this. And I think that it also of course like that impacts how they make decisions later in life around what kinds of like how much disposable how many disposable things they do I wanna invest in this one thing once or do I wanna buy it for half price 13 times and hate using it? Curse every time that I go to use it cause it doesn't feel good to use, right? And then the other part of that is that a well crafted and wood in particular allows taking care of, right? There was a school that I worked with in Seattle I think it was the university child care center maybe that might not be the right name but some version of that. They really wanted to put rigma jig outside and so I had a kind of a special kit made for them that was Cedar and Cedars tricky. It's a great outdoor wood but it and it doesn't splinter it so it's a lot of problems with wood. Like I think about how things will break and I designed them to break in a way that won't be dangerous, right? So different woods splinter and if it like wood inevitably is gonna get some dings, right? So when it dings is it gonna stab you or is it just gonna be a little bit furry, right? So Cedars kind of great with that but they needed to oil it or it would start to check to crack and at first that was kind of that was considered an issue and we were trying to get the cost down and if I were gonna finish it then it would, you know, whatever. So I said to one of the teachers I was working with I said, this might be kind of a fun activity is there could, you know, maintaining their toys be part of their year, right? Like why do we assume that when school shuts down then, you know, the neighborhood woodworker or the maintenance crew comes in and fixes everything. Like, no, children should know how to fix things. They should know how to maintain things, right? And if it's maintained, it doesn't really need to be fixed. It just can last longer. And so we talked it through and I kind of figured out a kit of parts that they could use to kind of inspect the planks and low VOC or a non-VOC because of course, like we weren't gonna give these children polyurethane. Like an oil that they could use that wouldn't be fuming and they love it. And I think they do it, I haven't talked to them in a while but I think they do it every year. And I love the idea that they take care of their materials and often they're done. So a lot of those children are graduating out of either the grade that uses that playground or they're going to like the junior high or something. So in many cases, they're taking care of the toys for the next class to use, you know? Which is, I think again, that might be a nice example of where one can design for love, right? I think to prepare something for the your peers that will come in after you is a really nice gesture that I feel has love. Okay, that actually, this idea about materials too led me to think about the group of museum objects that you chose for the workshop coming up and thinking about the museum collection. What I'm very curious as to why you chose this group of objects was it didn't have to do with materials, the choice of materials along their longevity, what they were or was it an element of storytelling or narrative that attracted you to the group of objects you've selected? All of those things. I think primarily, and maybe all of those things, like my initial reaction to an object which is kind of at its core all of those things but my initial reaction is often curiosity. You know, if I see something and say like, oh, that's curious, what was that, right? Or when you're in an old building and you can see, I call them industrial scars but you can see a place where there once was, like there's like a big mark in the beams where it's like, oh, there must have been another beam there. Where would that have gone or sometimes in a friend studio there's this random track and a couple of pulleys and we still can't figure out what would have been what that would have been used for. And so again, that kind of like, I love figuring out or even imagining even if I'll never know what the answer is kind of imagining what it might be. And so these objects that we're gonna play with next Wednesday, I are all very curious and you could describe them as kind of antiquated or obsolete in a way that I also think is very pertinent right now because it took decades or centuries for things to become obsolete 100 years ago. And now things become obsolete like within a year. We like design for like what we need right now and we don't seem to be like considering do we actually need this? Like what is it, what is it, what is need right? What do we, and what problem are we even solving? Is that actually a problem, you know? So that I think thinking about what it means for a product to be obsolete is really important for designers and everybody. I mean, it's interesting for everybody. Just as consumers, I think it'd be good to think about that more and by, I think it'd be good. I mean, wow, we really, really need to. But in particular, designers, which we could, you can frame it as sustainability, you can frame it as good design. But it's, in a way, I think our products and the objects around us are kind of their cultural artifacts, they tell us something. So I have to hear this to go mug, right? And I would bet that, I'm not an anthropologist, but I would bet that 50 years ago, this would have been so strange, right? Like why would you, why would you need a to-go cup for your, like you sit down and drink your coffee, right? Like, and also like you have it in the morning with your breakfast. Why are you having coffee in the middle of the day? Like just, and the answer is like, well, because I need to work more and it's like, we'll get more sleep or we'll stop working, right? So all of these, like they're culturally very low, like they're so telling in ways that I think is interesting. And again, like facilitates kind of a self-reflection that we don't often do until we kind of look around and we're like, what is this? Why, you know, and in 50 years, will anybody understand what this is? So yeah, we're odd. Yeah, that sounds great. As a design historian, I really love hearing some of these questions that you're asking. And I think the group you chose is fascinating. So good. And I can't wait to hear you elaborate a bit on what they actually are and what kinds of contexts they lived in or sometimes still live in. Yeah, well, I can't wait to see what the participants and what their temporary take on some of these things are. So that's going to be fascinating. Yeah. Very good. I think we're about at 6.30. So I think that we are at the end of our program for tonight. And I want to thank you and everyone for joining us. And I hope that everyone will join us again next week for the workshop that you're going to lead Tools for Imagination. Yeah, I hope so too. That'll be fun. Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you to the Will Cooper Hewitt team that was so incredibly organized and fun to work with. Thank you. Oh, thank you.