future of play (keynote:mit:2010:sandbox summit)

June 17, 2010

© 2010 frog design. Confidential and Proprietary.

THE MEDIUM DOESN’T MATTER Shaping the Future of Play

Keynote: Laura Seargeant Richardson

June 17, 2010

2 © 2010 frog design. Confidential & Proprietary. Client Name Project Name

Speaker Notes This 45-MINUTE presentation was given as the keynote at the 2010 MIT Education Arcade/Sandbox Summit. Find out more about Sandbox here: http://www.sandboxsummit.org

Note: What you are missing in this presentation: the presentation is very participatory: attendees experienced a demo of a “paint and play” turntable (Fisher Price hack by frog technologists), smelling a scent alphabet, listening to urine analysis, experiencing touch, and launching a paper airplane. This pdf is 10% of the overall keynote experience.

Find out more in my interview with Ypulse Magazine: http://www.ypulse.com/ypulse-interview-laura-richardson-frog-design

Title Slide: ask audience if they still have toys they played with as children...ask one or two to describe. Mine is the “anti-coloring” book...from the author, “coloring books cheat kids. Passively coloring in lines instead of creating.” Because of this book, I have spent my life trying to color outside the lines, break barriers, and make my own rules – and that’s ultimately why I’m a designer. Fast forward 30 years…where are we today? Does our play call for passive filling in or coloring outside the lines? Is it more like a coloring book or an anti-coloring book?

Slide 6: In 2007 Howard wrote this, “children less able to transform their playthings”... Could this be true?

Slide 7: Consider this handmade ball– this wasn’t made in America…or Asia – rather it was made in Africa...for the African child play started when he had the idea to make a ball out of whatever he can find; often for our kids play starts when an existing ball is kicked.

Plato once said, necessity is the mother of invention. What do our children really need to create for themselves when we o!er such a packaged, formed, curated and designed world? There is a consequence in removing the “need.”

Throw Down Consequence Cards: 1)  In just 5 years the amount of time the average 6 – 8 year old

spends on creative play has diminished by 1/3rd. 2)  Harvard: by the time they are around 6 years old they slow

down asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.

3)  Fast Company: the art of being bored is lost. They want their fun to be quick and easy.

4)  TIME: Today’s students are less tolerant of ambiguity and have an aversion to complexity

5)  The Futurist: A critical challenge facing our children: their inability to think realistically, creatively and hopefully about the future

Slide 8: From education to play consumption, I think we have ultimately created more game players than game designers… Why is this distinction important?

Slide 9: Players feel empowered in the game, designers are empowered by making the game. While players may feel capable of changing a virtual world, designers believe they are capable of changing the real world. The medium doesn’t matter. Whether it’s o"ine or online, we need more kids making their games designing their futures.

Slide 10: Working at a company like frog design, surrounded by a design community, one thing becomes pretty apparent. We all want our children not simply to be designers, but to think like designers. And often this starts by designing their play.


Speaker Notes Slide 11: I think this interview with Eric Zimmerman is rather striking. GCG: What do you like best about being a game player? EZ: A game player? Wow. I have to say that I think I like being a designer more than a player. Maybe that's because as a designer, you're also playing (Examples of kids creating their own games and how powerful that can be. John DeMatteo)

Slide 12: Several years ago when I was at M3 Design, we ran an experiment – can we make a game player a game designer? What is the outcome, what skills do they need? First, we had them individually collage an ideal game…

Slide 13: then we took them through a series of game inputs

Slide 14: and finally they designed their own game. Let’s step into their world for a moment and see what they designed…

Slide 15: but they didn’t stop there…by the end, here is the game they created. A two-sided book that accompanied the game, holes in the game board to drop them into other dimensions, an epic battle between man and machine, one wrong move and they would be forced to change sides – to understand another view point. Unknowingly, they had created as a part of the game the very real constructs they needed as designers. So, what are these constructs, what can we do to help game players become play designers?

Slide 16: We need to provide them the open environments, flexible tools and the opportunity to make their own rules. This in turn helps develop their design skills – which I like to call “super powers.”

Slide 17: Originally toys were tools…like a stick, a ball, even LEGOS. But manufacturing has transformed these toys in two significant ways:

Slide 18: 1) narrowed their scope, making them quite literal interpretations (chris’ example of farm blocks); and

Slide 19: 2) made them complete and often closed environments

Slide 20: If we look at a simple two axis matrix showing open to closed (running horizontally) and physical to digital (running vertically), We can see that play started in the lower left – fairly open game play and interpretation. Then the industry moved counterclockwise more to physical and closed. We have toys, like Furby or a tool like a cellphone, which are moving closer to digital, but still closed systems. Even the Wii and ipad were created as consumption (not creation) platforms. With the advent of digital, such as video games, we still stayed closed and I would suggest we’ve been there for awhile. Much is a game or game environment defined by someone else – we just get to play the game. As cool as webkinz is, for example, the world was created by someone else entirely and you play their games to get points for outfits they designed. As we move forward we are seeing games like Ridemakerz and Xtractaurus, which bridge the physical/digital divide, but also enable creators to design some aspects of their play. Both came out in 2009. Where we need to be, and where we are starting to see more play is in the open and digital space – with Shidonni, Spore and Scribblenauts, we have closed environments, but play that is so open no one cares that someone else wrote the rules. And with Scratch, Kodu, Kerpoof and Alice, kids get to make their own games in real time. In the open digital quadrant we see LEGO, Pleo and a very recent entrant – the Spy Trackr from Wild Planet, which enables kids to write their own applications for a remotely controlled vehicle.The sweet spot, I believe, is in the webjects space – a term coined by a frog colleague regarding the overlap between physical objects and the web.


Speaker Notes Slide 21: Screen 1: My colleague, Alis Cambol and I, took on the challenge of concepting the ideal future webject – one that might embody an open environment, flexible tools, and spontaneous rule making and that had no literal interpretation. The result is wearable in the form of a gloved sleeve. Run through tech components.

Slide 22: Screen 2: It would be supported by an open ecosystem of flexible components

Slide 23-25: Screen 3 – 5: and enable various scenarios of game play – like paintball, hide and seek and enhanced game board play that is not bounded by time.

Slide 26: While role play serves an important purpose, at some point children realize they cannot be superman. It makes me incredibly sad to hear my daughter tell me she is not a hero or that she doesn’t have super powers – that is reserved for Spiderman. When Wild Planet Toys was developing their Spy Game, they asked kids who they wanted to be (Spy Kids, James Bond, etc.) and kids answered, “I want to be me. I want to be the spy.” which is why their packaging shows regular kids, not a character.

Slide 27: So after leveraging my own research and the research or sources of 50 others, I created a framework to demonstrate the real super powers kids need to develop. This is your chance to experience with some of the super powers.

Slide 28: Let’s take the first one. Everyone should have a piece of paper. The goal is to see if any of you can reach the stage with the paper. The idea of flexible thinking is probably best represented by the book “Paper Airplane: Flight of Change.” Read excerpt.

Slide 29: How many of you remember what the periodic table of elements looks like? Like this, right? How many of you also learned that there are another 450 valid representations of the periodic table that look nothing like this? How are our minds to be flexible when we are told there is only one way?

Slide 30: it means the toy is so formed that you need to hack it to get the magic out of it. Hacking has a purpose though – it sets our imagination free, it answers the question, “what if?” and in the world of post consumption and DIY crowd, hacking is even seen as healing.

Two of our amazing technologists at frog – Gregg Wygonick and David Wood asked the question “what if?” of a Fisher Price turntable. The result is a paint and play turn table. Instead of playing records it plays paintings…LEGOs…and anything else you might have that is colored red, green or blue.

Slide 31: Frank Wilson in his book The Hand describes how the brain and hand are linked. New York Time article, Taking Play Seriously. In it they discussed that students who hadn’t worked with their hands were no longer able to solve problems. And both NASA and Boeing will no longer hire engineers who fail to demonstrate a history of working with their hands (fixing cars, playing instruments).

My colleague, Kate Canales, has created an entire class based on the idea of thinking with your hands. The kids have taken apart household appliances, feel with their eyes and see with their hands.


Speaker Notes Slide 32: To send the point home, I thought we all might try to see with our hands. Everyone has an envelope marked with a black 1. without looking at the object, tear open the envelope, feel your object and try to draw what you think you feel.

Slide 33: Describe analogy. Consider this sound…what do you think you hear? Dr. Charles Sweeley found that he could better determine diseases in urine samples by hearing what his eyes could not see. Visually, we can only scan one line at a time, but aurally we can hear a complete song or the 57 unique instruments that may make up the song. This has also been done for DNA.

Slide 34 and 35: Games as framework, Scientific American article, 2010. mold for micro-fluidics work, such as stem cell research. Made micro fluidics chips directly from shrinky dink plastic.

Slide 36 and 37: Crayola glasses - thinking about math and english di!erently. What FAMPS should do is let us combine powers – insight combination. It’s in the multi-dimensional that we learn.

Slide 38: First, a simple experiment…Everyone close your eyes. Can you imagine what the letter A looks like in your mind? can you hear the sound A makes in your head? Can you imagine how A feels in your hand? Can you smell A?

Why doesn't "A" have a smell associated with it, just like a visualization, shape, or sound? There's no reason actually. We just haven't considered it yet. As a matter of fact, as humans we never forget a scent. What would we get from a scent alphabet, even if its unique to each of us?

Continued: We would get a deeper and enhanced understanding of this man-made construct. It would aid in memory, in learning, in association, in appreciation. For the visually impaired, "A" which they cannot "see" (but which they can sound and feel) would now have another sensorial element for interpretation and recognition. It would be a deeper way of knowing and being intimate with "A.”

Sir Francis Galton, known for many eminent distinctions, including being the half cousin of Charles Darwin, decided to do a little experiment and taught himself "smell arithmetic." Galton associated specific smells with specific numbers; - for example two whi!s of peppermint = 1 whi! of camphor - and claimed that he could add and subtract quite well with imaginary scents, but that multiplication was too di#cult.”

Slide 39 : This is my daughter’s painting…and this is what a color painting sounds like (play clip). Lottolab studio is using its Synaesthetic software to enable users to create and control an orchestras with colour -which we call 'colour scores'. The 'mapping' between notes and colour is also predefined by the user. The basis of our workshops is the patterns we see and hear and the possibility to create a never previously experienced relationship between them.

Slide 41: Yawns Are Yellow is a story I co-wrote with my daughter. It meant to introduce synaesthesia to kids, but to also help them see di!erently. What if there is more than one right answers/ What if there is more than one way to see?

Slide 42: Read Excerpt: “And yawns, oh yawns, they were yellow. She loved to see someone yawn. Can you yawn right now? Her father’s yawn was the deep golden color of marigold flowers. Her mother’s was the light yellow of lemon drops. Her teacher, Ms. Nuttenbutter, had the lightest yellow of all – like squinting into the bright sun and seeing just the rays. Sometimes, Charlotte would try to yawn just to see the yellow mist it made. “

June 17, 2010



players > designers


“[Game players] are people who believe they are individually capable of changing the world…

The only problem is they believe they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world.”

Jane McConigal, game designer & futurist

June 17, 2010


What do you like best about being a game player?

“A game player? Wow. I have to say that I think I like being a designer more than a player. Maybe that’s because as a designer, you’re also playing.”

Eric Zimmerman, game designer Author, Rules of Play

Photo Credit: Vincent Lam, M3 Design

June 17, 2010


What do you like best about being a game player?

“A game player? Wow. I have to say that I think I like being a designer more than a player. Maybe that’s because as a designer, you’re also playing.”

Eric Zimmerman, game designer Author, Rules of Play


rules environments tools

design skills “super powers”

June 17, 2010


June 17, 2010

© 2010 frog design. Confidential and Proprietary. Photo Credit: igniteseattle.com

Morph: Flexible Sight

June 17, 2010


Morph: Flexible Sight

June 17, 2010


Manipulate: Hacking


Move: Body Thinking

Photo Credit: Kate Canales

June 17, 2010


What do you hear? Stretch: Analogy


Stretch: Analogy

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Combine: Dimension


Combine: Synthesis

June 17, 2010


Combine: Synthesis

Combine: Synthesis

June 17, 2010


Combine: Synthesis


Yawns Are

Yellow

June 17, 2010



Play is the greatest natural resource in our creative economy.

Let’s help kids make more.