Design & Play
‘Let us enumerate once more the characteristics we deemed proper to play. It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted.’
‘Making music bears at the outset all the formal characteristics of play proper: the activity begins and ends within strict limits of time and place, is repeatable, consists essentially in order, rhythm, alternation, transports audience and performers alike out of ‘ordinary’ life into a sphere of gladness and serenity, which makes even sad music a lofty.’
‘Take language, for instance – that first and supreme instrument which man shapes in order to communicate, to teach, to command. Language allows him to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit.’
‘In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually “sparking” between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.’
‘The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc. Play casts a spell over us ; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.’
—Johan Huizinga, 1938, Homo Ludens
‘Architecture and Art are the generating cores of design thinking and therefore of Design thought. The former provides it with the dialectical unity of form-for-a-function, function-for-a-form that has a secular tradition; and the latter confers upon it the vital and eternal energy of beauty. From that supreme fusion of Architecture and Art, of science and technique, a new conception of industrial objects was born through the processing of factors of function, use, scale, space, form, and style.’
‘Design is limiting because its objective implies restriction. However, limitation does not mean the loss of freedom, surprise, or the purpose of experiencing a playful (ludic) event. Freud considers this playful, mobilising component of the creative act to be an extension of childhood play.’
—Guillermo González Ruiz, 1994, Estudio de Diseño.
‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop
playing.’
—George Bernard Shaw