I’ve just had a very enjoyable afternoon at Neue-Digitale in Frankfurt interviewing co-founder, Olaf Czeschner, for Desktop but also giving a presentation called Less Work, More Play. My friend Tim Buesing also works there and we did a Podcast, which I hope to link to at some point when it has been edited (yes, I ranted on a bit…)

Here’s the abstract to the presentation and I’ll post the podcast when it arrives. Thanks to everyone at ND who made me welcome and the chats over beers afterwards.

Everyone likes to play. Even adults who pretend to be serious like to play. Play and playfulness are essential attributes of the creative process, yet there is an inherent tension in design process between playful discovery and careful planning and production. How can we balance these two processes and how do they interfere with each other? Similar tensions exist for the users of interactive media.

The more interfaces we encounter day-to-day the more it becomes important that we can work out how to use them by playing and experimenting with them. Who wants (or has the time) to read the manual after all? As mobile media becomes more bite-sized, small, playful interactive ’toys’ may well be the most engaging interactive media. In this talk I try to explore some of the underlying elements of play and how they relate not only to the design process, but also to the end results.

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