The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Some rough but subsequently edited speaking notes for my presentation to the Creative Clusters conference - organised by the Huddersfield Media Centre, and taking place at the stunningly beautiful Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Delighted to meet you all - be great to hear any responses in comments below, or directly.

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

I'm fascinated by the premise of your event: what makes for a good 'creative cluster', that is, a place, space or locality where cultural industries can flourish?

Certainly as a working musician in Glasgow I know the enabling conditions of a good 'creative scene': a vibrant gig circuit, a density of art schools, music courses and big universities, a non-panicked official attitude to a culture of hedonism, many urban zones for convivality, public display...

But another enabling condition is a sense of trust and reciprocation between musicians: favours and collborations are as much a 'social' currency as money. I think we can look at 'clusters' of hackers/new media, fashion and design, and say the same thing. 

So there are some growing rules and disciplines that guide what makes a creative scene, which can then be the foundation of creative industry - Richard Florida's three t's - talent, technology and tolerance - are to me still pretty good advice.

But I've become interested in the deeper roots of creativity. What justifications can we find in human nature - in psychology, biology and anthropology - for a visionary creative industry policy?

I picked this up from your own Creative Cluster conference website: "businesses that trade in creative goods and services often have a profile that is hard for government and investors to recognise, and their needs can be very different from those that trade in physical goods"

Creative-industry policies may indeed seem to the outsider to be lacking in obvious outcomes, or involve a degree of imprecision or process, or seem to willfully flout a certain disciplined use of space, time and resources.

It's my contention that play's role in human development is a new foundation for much creative policy. In our justifications of creative sector policies to the wider world of financiers and politicians, we need at some point to stake a claim about human nature. That we at least might be able to start thinking of ourselves as not just homo et femina economicus, but also (and perhaps increasingly) homo et femina ludens.

The Play Ethic, my book, consultancy and blog is all about this. For the last few years now I have found play theory and studies to be a very exciting area.

The most productive concept I've found is a redefinition of play as 'adaptIve potentiation' (from the reserch of Brian Sutton-Smith, in particular his 1997 book The Ambiguity of Play). Play helps us to adapt, survive and thrive in human society, by providing us with a zone of experimenation (games, simulations, rituals, recombinations) whereby we can test out the risks of living, without dire or fatal consequences (a process that S-S calls 'potentiation').  Play is something that necessarily begins in infancy and childhood, but should be acessible to us throughout our adult lives - a "taking reality lightly" that keeps us alive, creative and responsive to new and changing conditions.

Sutton-Smith makes a comparison, in terms of their evolutionary function, between sex and play:

- Sex is fun that serves evolution by making it enjoyable to make babies

- Play is fun that serves evolution by making it enjoyable to stay flexible, responsive and optimistic (rather than make it seem like a wasteful expenditure of energy or possible injury)

Let me briefly share with you my thoughts on how the early moments of play might give an insight into how to build a good 'creative place'

What constitutes 'a ground of play'? What are the universal conditions of a place of play?

From the consilience of these sciences, let me suggest three rules for a healthy ground of play:

1 It must have loose but robust governance

2 It must ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff

3 It must treat failure, risk and mess as necessary for development

Simplest way to think of this might be to compare three grounds of play - two of them, indeed, not even entirely human: 

- Lion cubs on the savannah

- A children's playpark

- The Internet

 Cubs on the savannah

1 Loose but robust governance? The mother and father of the cubs are at a proper distance - far enough away for the cubs to undergoe the scrapes and falls necessary for learning, but close enough to defend them against predators.

2 Surplus of time, space and stuff? Play happens when cubs are fed, when the pride in general has a distance from scarcity. Play presumes either a surfeit or excess of objects. Or alternatively, an attitude that an object can be made gratuitous, is up for play (Adult: stop playing with your food! Child [silently]: I can't help it - it's my nature!)

3 Failure and risk as developmental? The cubs represent the primal scene of play. As Gregory Bateson once said, these animals are indulging in play as a 'meta' position, taking reality lightly: the bite on the ear says, "I'm now biting you on the ear - let me see your response". We must remember that, from one angle, play is strangely maladaptive: it opens you up to injury and predation. But we complex mammals have to do it, we have to rehearse the social complexity we are walking into. 

A playpark (in Huddersfield or Wakefield) - a good one

1 Loose but robust governance? Let us lament the demise of the parkie... but in any case, a good playground will tend to be well managed externally by local council. It also takes strength from the investment of the community in its preservation and development - social capital guarantees that vandalism or destruction is keep to a minimum. And of course, there is 'auto-governance' generated by the sense of 'fair play' inherent to each game that children agree to play - otherwise, it's not much of a game...

2. Ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff? The well-built playground sits in a generous space, and is on an open space full of constructions that are strong enough to withstand endless repetitive use, or creative misuse. the playground thrives when it's an uncommodified, open space - no hourly rates or tickets for entry. It's open from hour of waking, to hour of sleeping.

3. Failure and risk as developmental? There have been much needed recent debates on the need for children to experience physical risk and challenge, as a developmental input into health and even citizenship. But we need things to dangle from, we need sand to get messy with or blocks to recompose... That's what we know and love about playparks.

The Internet

1 Have loose but robust governance? Surely that's the very definition of the Internet. It has a variety of non-governmental institutions which manage domain names, and the improvement of codes and protocols that enable the web. And these codes themselves have come from a variety of actors that are neither public authorities or private enterprises, but exist somewhere in the 'commons' of open source software production. Yes, we have state interference in the net in China, North korea, Iran - but these only make it clearer what we have to defend about the Net. 

2 Ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff? Again, that's the very definition of the Net. It ensures the infinite copyability of digital information, it exists in a state of total plenitude of content. Time mulitplies on the net: the way that social networking eats into organizational time is evidence of the way the Net busts the boundaries of our schedules, enables us to break time into bundles that suit us.

3 Treats failure, risk and mess as necessary for development? The mantra for web development is not 'ready, aim, fire' - get it right, hope you hit the mark - but 'ready, fire, aim' - keep shooting, try many trajectories and options, and out of the many iterations a few things will hit beautifully. In Here Comes Everyboyd, Clay Shirky writes about Sourceforge, the repository for free software. 85% of free software on this has never even accessed, never mind used. But that doesn't matter, the sheer excess of options means that the ones that are used are robust, well-tested and genuinely popular. 

* * *

So how could these enabling conditions for a ground of play illuminate what you do when you try to make policy for a creative-industry place, space or cluster?

Govern the place/space loosely but robustly?

My daughter is a student at MIT, and she often tells me with great enthusiam about the famous MIT 'hacks' - most of which involve placing some object on the domed roof of the main library on campus. This event happens nearly every year. Now, the MIT campus police have to be either the most incomptent police ever... Or.. Perhaps they know they are policing a community that is endemically creative and experimental, and that this requires vigilance over certain things, and selective blindness over others. 

Ensure some degree of surplus of time, space and resources for the players in the place/space?

That's to me an argument for world-class public cultural infrastructure - but also a long argument to be had with our current structures of welfare and social support. When does the deeply innovative nature of our everyday lives get "reproduced", through our welfare institutions, in the same way our industrial lives were? When will we look at sabbaticals, reduction of working hours, 'creative support' as something which citizen-producers might have access to, in order to support a general society of creativity? 

Google/Pixar shows the way, with their 20% rule - the idea that any creative or engineer has the opportunity to devote 20% of their worktime to a project which interests them alone, as creatives or engineers. And both organisations can claim that the vitality of their enterprise is boosted by the establishment of a 'ground of play' within their occupational landscape - many new features and innovations to Google's services have come from 20% Rule projects. 

Those in the public sector should begin to be a bit more confident about what they can do with creative policies "on the rates" - rather than constantly looking over their shoulder to justify every penny to the "ratepayer", In fact, faced with the digital meltdown of the commodity form in cultural commerce, most cultural industries are now attempting to make us all "rate payers" - that is, they're trying to monetise their products and services by putting them "on the rates" of consumer spending. 

For example, the favoured model in the music business at the moment is a passive subscription fee built into the rental of devices and services, by which you access a flow of content "as if it were free". If cultural capitalism aims at the experience of public services as its future business model... well, public services should be a bit more confident about what they provide. 

Accept mess, risk and failure within spaces/places as developmental necessities?

I never underestimate how difficult it is for senior managers to change their dominant mental metaphors of what organisations are, how they hang together, what their underlying presumptions about human nature are. It's difficult enough to get them away from Bismarck's idea of the organisation as a hierarchy of roles, never mind shift their managerial metaphors towards a more networked or ecological picture, in which 'play' and 'players' become one of the vital forces in a fertile environment of change and mutation...

But I think a case can be made (which I hope I've begun to make tonight) that cultural managers could base their policies on the legitimacy of a play ethic, as the main characterisation of a productive, value-creatng life in the 21st century, than a work ethic. And I think there is much research to back up this grand reorientation of societal and economic values. 

ends