Playfulness as Methodology
Two things happened this week that have caused the cogs turning in my brain. I was having a coffee recently with a colleague who invited me to explain my research to someone else - every mid-PhD researcher’s nightmare. Well, maybe not, but it’s certainly mine. Not the thought of having to describe the research, but trying to do it succinctly, and pull together the sprawling mass of threads and rabbit holes the research has led me down so far into a single concise description. They sat very patiently and attentively and listened to 5 or so minutes of whittering on about how it’s not about play, it’s about playfulness, and the importance of playfulness in my own practice and how playfulness is akin to creativity and how rules can facilitate playfulness and whatnot. They paused, took a second and reflected: “so it’s treating playfulness as a methodology”. This thought hadn’t actually occurred to me in quite that way before.
The second event was one of my supervisors asking about what it is we’re aiming for in terms of transferable knowledge for this PhD. Is it, he asked, about answering a central question on behalf of a wider community of practice? Or is it, in fact, about enabling myself and others to answer a central question in “personally divergent, but comparably meaningful and productive ways” (Murray, 2023) - and, either way, what is that question?
Playfulness - and play - is personal, individual. So it makes sense to me to focus on supporting both myself and others being able to engage playfully with their own work, in their own ways, rather than limiting the scope how I do it. This, however, requires some finesse to avoid the trap of suggesting that playfulness is so intrinsic that I couldn’t possibly comment on anyone else’s journey. In essence, a useful, potentially interesting way of justifying this research is not so much about creating a personally playful methodology for animation, but facilitating *others’ use *of playfulness as a methodology for animation. Which in practice is not just about treating playfulness as a methdology for making work - it’s also about methods for encouraging playfulness. So playfulness as a methodology, and methodologies for playfulness.
I’ve already written a bit about what playfulness is, and what playfulness is to *me - *it is an attitude, a frame of mind that focuses on pleasureable engagement with any activity. I am starting to understand the value of playfulness to the creative professional, and, by extension, to animators. Play is often described as a precursor, a path to creativity (Freud 1926; Vygotsky 1978; Huizinga 1949; Piaget 2001; Winnicott 2001 referenced in Mainemelis 2006)**. **Csikszentmihalyi (1997) and Gardner (1993) found that successful, exceptional creative professionals “maintained a playful attitude toward their work throughout their careers” (Mainemelis 2006, p82). Chuck Jones emphasised how animation directors “must respect the impulsive thought and try and implement it. You cannot perform as a director by what you already know” (Jones 1991, p101). To be a successful, creative professional you have to be playful.
What is less understood, really, is what that means, and how we can activate and encourage it. And this is where I believe the focus of this research comes - not so much on saying “hey, playfulness is personal, I did this but it’s so personal only you can figure out your version” - which is, to an extent at least, true, but unhelpful. What would be more helpful would be to say “here are strategies to engage with your own playfulness - here is a framework to help figure out what playfulness means to you, and this is the starting point for you using it in your own practice”.
In terms of personal, individual understandings of playfulness, perhaps this is where some of the structures I have discovered through research would be useful. Using Costello’s *Pleasure Framework *(2007), for example, we could chart the kinds of pleasure experienced when undertaking a particular project - pleasure being akey experiential indicator of playfulness. Further, Costello posits her frameowkr “might be a useful design tool to enable artists and other designers to think about the type of playful experiences they want their work to elicit” (ibid p371). Could this framework, then, be useful as an autoethnographic framework to understand *what types of play interest me or, possibly, whether a particular method of film-making engages me and continues that engagement throughout development? This positions playfulness as a key consideration when reflecting on a process. This falls into De Koven’s ideas on understanding playfulness restrospectively. Indeed, I have already used this framework when reflecting on creative practice (blog post to come) *and found it useful for understanding my own pleasure when engaging with that project, and how I would like to engage on future projects. If playfulness is about prioritising engagement over action/outcome, then using a framework such as Costello’s facilitates an understanding of that engagement; it “encourages detailed contemplation of an artwork’s experiential pleasures”, just from the perspective of the artist and their experience of practicing, rather than the audience.
As I write this, I am reminded of a workshop task I was given at the Royal College of Art that I have since adopted for my own teaching (although, shamefully, I can’t remember who ran the workshop so can’t appropriately cite them). The task was to find three words that represented the kind of work you would like to make as an artist - not the kind of work you make now, but aspirationally. These three descriptors were to highlight not individual works, but the artistic portfolio as a whole. The only rule was that you weren’t allowed to make abstract value/quality judgements such as “good”, which would be so unspecific as to be unhelpful; what is “good” to you? Visually satisfying? Commercially succesful? etc. The time alotted to this task was ten minutes - a purposefully long amount of time to write three words. The point being, the first draft of the words was never “right” - on discussion in classes when running this exercise, it is very easy to challenge the initial round of suggestions by asking students “what do you mean by that?” and them not having a response. However, on further iteration, the words typically move away from talking about the work itself to either talking about the artist’s relationship with the work, or the work’s relationship to the world; in essence, the descriptors become less about the work, and more about the values of the artist.
The reason I mention this specific task is because this kind of activity appears to become part of a methodology for an artist understanding their own value system and, consequently, the way they engage with their own creative practice. In fact, this activity in itself demonstrates engagement with Nørgård et al’s implicit structures of playfulness, used in their ‘signature pedagogy’ for playful learning (2017) in its focus on value-setting for a participant.
Taking this further, I wonder if this model for playful pedagogy actually sets a structure that I could follow when building a framework for plork. In fact, three phases mimics the general process of film-making: pre-production, production and post-production. However, Nørgård’s implicit structures exist even before the process of ideation, which occurs in the Deep structure. As such, perhaps there are other structures necessary. A hypothetical mapping of a framework that begins with Nørgård et al’s signature pedagogy might be as follows:
**Signature Pedagogy StructureCharacteristicsFilm-making Structure**Implicit (playful) structuresCulture and value setting
Intrinsic motivationInitialisationDeep (play) structuresIdeation
Imagination
CollaborationPre-productionSurface (game) structuresMovement/progression
Involving "other things" (e.g. game mechanics, game making)ProductionReflection (e.g. analysis via a pleasure framework)Post-productionFig 1. Signature pedagogies for play/signature practices for plork
How useful is this observation? At this stage I’m not sure. On the surface this seems to be devleoping a framework that involves more paperwork than actual playfulness. Whilst I believe analysis is important, it would not be fruitful to deliver a playfulness framework which felt like…work. But I can see potential in a project structure that encourages engagement with the notion of playfulness. Perhaps there are two strands - playfulness in the context of work/plork, and a more general attitidunal encouragement of playfulness. One thing we do know though - once you get the ball rolling on playfulness, it becomes almost self-fulfilling: play does, after all, encourage more play. So perhaps it’s important to begin at the beginning.
References
COSTELLO, B. 2007. A Pleasure Framework. Leonardo, 40**,** 370-371.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, M. 1997. Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention, New York, HarperPerennial.
FREUD, S. 1926. Creative writers and daydreaming. In: VERNON, P. E. (ed.) Creativity. New York: Penguin.
GARDNER, H. 1993. Creating minds, New York, Basic Books.
HUIZINGA, J. 1949. Homo ludens; a study of the play-element in culture, London,, Routledge & K. Paul.
JONES, C. 1991. What’s up down under? Chuck Jones talks of The Illusion of Life conference. In: CHOLODENKO, A. (ed.) The Illusion of Life. Sydney: Power Publications & The Australian Film Commission.
MAINEMELIS, C. & RONSON, S. 2006. Ideas are Born in Fields of Play: Towards a Theory of Play and Creativity in Organizational Settings. Research in Organizational Behaviour, 27, 81-131.
MURRAY, J. 2023. RE: Week off(ish). Type to CASTRO, D.
NØRGÅRD, R. T., TOFT-NIELSEN, C. & WHITTON, N. 2017. Playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy. International Journal of Play, 6,** 272-282.
PIAGET, J. 2001. *Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood, *London, UK, Routeledge.
VYGOTSKY, L. 1978. *Mind in society, *Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
WINNICOTT, D. W. 2001. *Playing and reality, *London, UK, Brunner-Rutledge.