Presentation at Design Creativity Conference

Conference on Design CreativityGareth Loudon presented work undertaken on  ‘Play, Autonomy and the Creative Process’ at the 2nd International Conference on Design Creativity in Glasgow, UK this month. The work explored play to understand more about the type of play and its affect upon the creative process, including physical, imaginary, social and non-related play, in relation to solving a creative problem. Surprisingly, the condition with the highest scoring and fastest completion times was the non-related play condition. This would suggest that there is more going on than just iterative feedback when a person is playing in the creative design process. Relatively new research has started to show that play may also be important because of the intrinsic motivation that is inherently part of the nature of play. This intrinsic motivation and elements of autonomy have also been shown to have an affect upon people’s feelings of well-being. This study supports the idea that play may be even more important to the creative process because of the affect it has upon a person’s ‘state of being’.