Tim Brown: Tales of creativity and play

Tim Brown

Video of Tim Brown: Tales of Creativity and play

The is a bullet point summary of the video above.

• Tim Brown and his friend,David Kelly,     studied under Bob McKim at Stanford.

• Bob McKim was a creativity researcher in the '60s and '70s and led the Standford   Design Program.

• Tim did an exercise with the audience,he asked them to draw somebody who was seated next to them within 30 seconds.

• the exercise was to see if the audience was embarrass about the drawings they did,which is the cause of conservation in thinking.

• Tim explained when that same exercise with kids,they have no embarrassment to show their friends the drawings they did.

• He later added when kids grew up they lose the freedom of not being embarrass.

• Tim suggested that for creativity to spark they should be in an environment which they feel relaxed and playful.

• Tim ran another experiment by giving everyone in the room a 'finger blasters' to 'give them a playful sensation' as he thinks playfulness helps get better creative solutions.
• He carried on by giving the audience another test to turn 30 circles into objects within a minute,he added on that quality wasn't important but quantity.
• It was to explain that when we change something for quality it affects our playfulness.
• The experiment was also done by Bob with psychedelic drugs and 27 professionals with a problem,after the experiment most of them actually found ways of solving the problems they had.
• Tim mentioned that play has rules to break the normal rules that blocks the creative ideas.
• Tim emphasize that using a physical prototype would be easier than verbally explaining how an object should look like.
• For services and experience Tim suggested role playing to get into further understand the solution better.
• Tim later pulled out that play is not disorder and that rules are needed in play.
• There are 2 different modes when it comes to design,divergence and convergence,divergence mode is where play is needed to spark ideas where convergence mode needs to be serious to focus on the ideas.

Creatively does have a relationship with play, in fact play boosts your creatively by removing the barrier of embarrassment and self questioning.

Playfulness is something that cannot be taught by others,they can only show you playfulness but you would have to learn to be playful by your own will.