Running head: DESIGNING FOR PLAY
Capstone Essay:
Designing for play in an informal arts environment
Katherine Chapman
Vanderbilt University
DESIGNING FOR PLAY
Abstract:
The ArtQuest gallery is a space at the intersection of informal learning and arts
education, built for all ages, but especially for young children. At first glance, it appears
to be highly successful at achieving some of its goals, and less successful at others.
Specifically, it appears to encourage material exploration, but not the “higher-level”
components of high-quality arts curricula such as aesthetic awareness and reflection. In
this essay I explore some of what is known about high-quality arts education, designing
for informal learning environments, and the innate characteristics of play in an effort to
explore whether play as a conceptual framework might be fruitful in approaching the
design of an informal arts space to better promote meaning-making and meta-awareness.
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Introduction: Purpose
In a brief field study at the ArtQuest children’s exhibit (conducted for EDUC 3770), I
noted that some of the curricular materials appeared to be significantly more successful in
engaging young visitors than others. Since many of these visitors appeared to be preschool to early elementary aged, my first instinct about how better to get them involved
in the exhibits was through play, which is both intrinsically motivating—particularly for
students of that age—and often considered fertile ground for learning. For this essay,
then, I explore the conceptual framework of play (particularly in the context of
education), the specific context of an informal learning environment, and current ideas
about what makes a high-quality arts curriculum. These three lenses are brought together
in the learner—and here I focus on roughly ages three to six—and some issues about
assessment of the efficacy of exhibits in informal environments are touched on. Finally, I
suggest that play is a useful way of conceptualizing what educators would like to see
happen with young children in a space like ArtQuest, and some suggestions are made
about how it might be put to use.
Conceptual Framework: Defining play
Before discussing the work of play, it makes sense to establish just exactly what it is.
Play has often been called “the work of children” (Montessori; Paley, 2004). It has been
posited to serve all kinds of functions from preparing young animals for the physical
demands of adolescence and adulthood (Burghardt, 2005), to providing insulated spaces
in which to nurture and repair fragile (or undeveloped) minds (Erikson, 1977). Despite all
the theoretical work that the concept of play has done over the years, however, the thing
itself remains difficult to define, seemingly relegated to the “know it when you see it” bin
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of cultural categories. Play scholars Anthony Pellegrini and Brian Sutton-Smith have
both written extensively about the difficulties of defining play. Pellegrini points out that
there is very little consistency with which the term is applied, noting that “in the child
development literature, the term play is often used to label most forms of children’s
social and nonsocial behavior, regardless of whether it is play or not” (Pellegrini, 2009).
Sutton-Smith also noted that play is notoriously ambiguous. In an effort to make clearer
the defining features, he cataloged eight “rhetorics of play”—from play as (specifically
child) development to play as pure ludic frivolity—the agendas of which he says have
had as much influence on researchers’ definitions of play as any intrinsic property of the
behavior (Sutton-Smith, 1997).
The study of play persists even despite its slippery categorization, or perhaps even
because of it. Scholars have been fascinated by play for its prevalence and spontaneity,
but also for its seeming subversiveness and accompanying imperviousness to facile
labels. Even the “when you see it” designation is misleading, since Pellegrini has shown
that “children, adolescents, and adults have sometimes have [sic] difficulty differentiating
some forms of play from nonplay” (Pelligrini, 2009). Sutton-Smith—who is more
committed to the subjective qualities of the play experience than some researchers—has
said that part of the difficulty for researchers is that “anything can be played with, but no
particular thing is necessarily play” (Dibb, 2011). Thus, he suggests, the tendency to
designate certain structurally consistent interactions (with certain peers or objects, for
example) as “play” often fails to be compelling to those who take a view that the player’s
disposition is paramount (cf. Csikszentmihalyis’s notion of “flow”).
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Unsurprisingly, the rhetoric of play (to use Sutton-Smith’s term) most commonly
associated with education research is the rhetoric of development or “progress.” From
this perspective, play is viewed as promoting individual development. Perhaps the most
famous proponent of this view, Vygotsky considered play to be, among other things, an
intrinsic way for the child to create his own Zone of Proximal Development (1967).
Though not wholly committed to the “progress” rhetoric, I recognize its influence on my
reasons for using play as a lens in this context. Thus, taking seriously Sutton-Smith’s
caution about promoting a view of play that merely serves an agenda, for the purposes of
this essay I will “continue to study the behavior in its observable forms with the hope of
inferring a clearer conceptual picture later” (Weisler & McCall, 1976). I take as a starting
point the aforementioned work of Brian Sutton-Smith, but also the emphasis on the
metacommunicative aspects of children’s fantasy play explored by Gregory Bateson, and
a literature review from 1976 by Weisler and McCall with its observations about
exploration as an aspect of play. With these models in mind, I explore an analogy
between aspects of children’s play and current ideas about high-quality arts education as
they might apply to the design of an informal arts learning space. Before trying to clarify
the conceptual framework further, however, I outline both the specific context of this
informal environment, and the learning goals.
Context: ArtQuest at the Frist
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is a museum in Nashville, TN whose vision is “to
inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways.” Consistent with this
vision, the Center maintains no permanent collection, choosing instead to put its
resources into bringing consistently new material to its patrons. All presentations of the
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museum are meant to be accessible to a broad range of visitors, and the museum staff put
a particular emphasis on “meeting people where they are” instead of attempting to force a
particular viewpoint or orientation. The Center also maintains a consistent educational
focus. Its mission statement includes this emphasis, which is to “present and originate
high quality exhibitions with related educational programs and community outreach
activities” (The Frist Center, n.d.; personal communication).
One of the clearest expressions of this educational emphasis is the ArtQuest
gallery—a dedicated space on the Center’s upper floor that resembles a traditional
children’s museum, with activity stations that invite young visitors to view and create art.
The activities range from figure drawing (from a mannequin), to printmaking, to stopmotion animation. There is also a rotating station that has some tie-in to the current
exhibit in the lower gallery. Many of the stations are “explained” by signs that hang over
the workspace, and several are staffed by volunteers who help explain the proper
techniques, and who hand out materials.
On a typical day, the space is littered with children, some in pairs or groups, but
many accompanied only by a single adult. Visitors move from one station to another,
sometimes with purpose, sometimes wandering until something catches their attention. At
stations manned by volunteers—including the watercolor painting station, but especially
the printmaking station—there is a clear order to things. Supplies are doled out one at a
time, and technical help is offered by the volunteers. At other stations there is a process,
but nothing more than a sign to explain it. At still others, the materials themselves do the
bulk of the signaling—a set of easels, set up near stools, in front of a mannequin, for
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example. Some of the materials presented at the stations seem to have a strong pull (for
children especially), and others are less clear in focus or otherwise less appealing.
Included in the less appealing camp are a video in which child actors encourage
viewers to observe line and shape in ordinary objects, and two stations that involve later
stages of art-making—one for mounting finished artworks, and another that asks visitors
to put their finished piece on display, and “Stand back to think about and reflect upon
your artwork” (Frist Center plaque, emphasis in original). There were many stations that
were less popular than others, but these three especially stood out. In several days of
observations, I saw many children, and quite a few parents, engaged if not engrossed in
many of the art-making stations, but not once did I see anyone using the mounting station
or the “reflection” station. (Once I saw someone trigger the “line and shape” video, but
that appeared to have been an accident, the play button inadvertently pressed by a parent
who had stepped inside the viewing area to take a seat.) This raised several questions for
me: What about these forgotten stations? What was their purpose? And once that aim is
clear, what does the literature suggest about why they failed? Should they be abandoned,
or are there suggestions as to how they might be redesigned to accomplish their original
aims?
Aim: High-quality arts curriculum
According to the Frist Center website, the ArtQuest stations are meant to “introduce three
areas of art learning:
1. Art Essentials: These activities examine specific elements of art, such as line,
color, and texture.
2. Art Materials and Techniques: These activities encourage visitors to create
artworks using a variety of artistic media and methods.
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3. Art and Meaning: These activities provide visitors with opportunities to think
about and discuss art with others” (The Frist Center, n.d.).
While these three categories are not explained in much detail, they align nicely with
several of the “seven broad purposes of arts education” identified in a survey of
contemporary arts education programs and recent academic literature conducted by
Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (funded by the Wallace
Foundation) (Seidel et al., 2009). While I did not conduct an exhaustive search of the
current landscape, the Seidel et al. findings are both less than a decade old, and consistent
with the most recent National Core Arts Standards, as well as with several other
publications (some of which shared authors with the Project Zero study) (e.g. Gardener,
1989; Hetland et al., 2013). I will therefore use the purposes identified by Seidel et al. to
give a fuller picture of what each of the ArtQuest station areas are presumably meant to
evoke in visiting students. These include the following (rearranged for parallelism with
the ArtQuest categories): “3. Arts education should develop aesthetic awareness”; (2009,
p. 21) “2. Arts education should teach artistic skills and techniques without making these
primary” (2009, p. 20); and “1. Arts education should foster broad dispositions and skills,
especially the capacity to think creatively and the capacity to make connections” (2009,
p. 18).
The first of these foci—what the Frist Center calls “Art Essentials,” and Seidel et
al. call “aesthetic awareness”—includes the specifics of “line, color, and texture,” (The
Frist Center, n.d.), but also the broader notion of “students’ capacity to see things from an
aesthetic perspective” (Seidel et al., 2009, p. 21). Several proponents of this perspective
argue that arts education should not be limited to canonical works of art, but instead
broadly applicable as a lens through which to view all kinds of visuals. Specifically, in
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this case, students should learn to be discerning viewers not just of works in a gallery, but
of the everyday world around them. Attention to the details of composition is encouraged
in several of the ArtQuest stations, including those asking visitors to compose using
supplied blocks, as well as to draw from pre-arranged still lifes. The broader version of
this view of “aesthetic awareness” is also reflected in the ArtQuest “line and shape”
video, in which the narrators encourage viewers to see these aspects of design and
composition not just in sculpture and painting, but in sidewalks and buildings (though as
noted, the line and shape video was one of the disused stations).
The second focus reflected in both the Seidel et al. review and the ArtQuest
gallery is that of “Materials and Techniques.” This is the most dominant of the
observable interactions in the gallery, since many different types of materials are
available to visitors, and most of them seem to be taken up, at least briefly, by most
children. All over the ArtQuest gallery there are stations and objects that encourage
different kinds of work—drawing, painting, and printmaking chief among them, but also
stop-motion animation, block stacking, and pipecleaner sculpture. Seidel et al. refer to
these as “artistic skills and techniques.” Importantly, however, they also stress that skills
and techniques should not be primary. In this and other of their seven identified purposes
they point out that many educators voice “serious concerns about privileging technical
training over meaning-making” (Seidel et al., 2009, p. 20). The teaching of technique,
they insist, is meant to enable students to better express themselves in a given medium.
They warn, however, that “the teaching of technique can limit as well as enable” most
explicitly because it “limits how students explore” (Seidel et al., 2009, p. 20). A truly
skilled arts teacher, they maintain, can make little suggestions about technique without
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hemming students into specific modes of expression, or taking the focus away from the
goal of meaning-making and communication.
The third category of stations at ArtQuest is “Art and Meaning,” which, while
broad, is at least partly analogous to the Seidel et al. purpose of fostering “broad
dispositions and skills, especially the capacity to think creatively and the capacity to
make connections” (2009, p. 18). As mentioned above, the educators interviewed by
Seidel et al. warn against separating meaning from the production of art. Thus, they
might balk at this explicit separation of technique and meaning. Nevertheless, The Frist
Center mentions “discussing art with others,” and their on-site literature explicitly invites
visitors to “reflect,” which parallels the Seidel et al. notions of “reflection, and
metaphorical thinking” (Seidel et al., 2009, pg. 18). This last purpose or category appears
to be the most difficult to promote in the context of ArtQuest, as evidenced by the lack of
engagement with the stations that fit under this heading.
With this more specific insight into the goals of the ArtQuest stations, the twin
problems of assessing and designing for accomplishing those goals become more
complex. Taking use as the measure of success, it is clear that the “mounting” and
“reflecting” stations were failures, at least over the limited observation period. Since
these appear to be the only two stations focused on the third category, it might be fair to
say that the Center’s goal of reflecting on and discussing the artwork has not been
fulfilled. On the other hand, the first goal—that of developing aesthetic awareness—is at
least partially woven into more than one station, making its status as a separate
category—and thus the simple use/disuse assessment dichotomy—dubious. The simple
assessment might be salvaged if the “aesthetic awareness” goal is considered represented
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exclusively by the line and shape video, which was also unused during the observation
period. Even so, the new formulation of the second goal—to develop artistic skills
without eclipsing meaning-making—makes a use/disuse dichotomy clearly insufficient.
How does simple material engagement confirm or deny the presence of meaningmaking?
Beyond assessing accomplishments, designing for these goals is itself complex.
Helpfully, all three categories are supported by an even more recent publication—the
second edition of Studio Thinking, which gives justification for, explanation, and even
examples of, high-quality arts education. Thus, in addition to lending support to the
consensus about the current goals of arts education, Studio Thinking 2 offers suggestions
about how to accomplish these goals. However, their suggestions and observations are
limited to classroom work, in which the teacher has arguably more control over the social
context as well as influence on the students’ goals and behavior. (The signs hung over the
stations at ArtQuest appear to have some influence on how visitors interact with the
material, though not as much as one might expect from an instructor in a regular arts
classroom.) This adds another layer to the problem, which is what influence different
aspects of the informal environment might have on design considerations. The question
remains, then, whether and how these identified purposes might be accomplished through
the stations at ArtQuest.
Learners: Why play?
If the goals of ArtQuest fit into these three categories—none of which mentions play—
why involve play at all? Beyond the general themes of the rhetoric of progress (many of
them unfortunately unsubstantiated) the concept play is relevant for at least two reasons.
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First, it is a “known quantity” for children, which makes it useful from a design
perspective, and second, its intrinsic features are surprisingly well-aligned with the arts
curriculum as outlined above.
I. Design considerations
One of the biggest challenges to designing for an informal learning environment
such as a museum is that there is nothing compelling visitors to follow the curriculum
except the affordances of the space. Except possibly on field trips, museum visitors are
generally “in ‘self-guided’ mode (i.e. without mediation and guidance by staff members)”
(Allen, 2004, p. 1). As such, museum exhibits need to have their own “pull” for visitors,
and ideally tap into their intrinsic motivation. This can be accomplished in part by
carefully aligning exhibits to visitors’ expectations (making sure they get what they came
for), but also by recognizing what activities are both intrinsically rewarding and
immediately apprehensible. Sue Allen (at San Francisco’s Exploratorium) has pointed out
that one important aid to the immediate apprehensibility of an exhibit—the extent to
which it is quickly clear to visitors what they are supposed to either do or attend to—is its
evocation of familiar activities. In this essay I am suggesting that play is, for young
children especially, such a familiar activity. Further, according to some views, the play of
young children is neatly aligned to the stated goals of high-quality arts curricula. As such,
it makes sense to explore how play could potentially be designed for and leveraged
toward learning in a self-guided environment like ArtQuest.
Play is such a familiar activity because for most human beings and many animals,
especially when young, play is an intrinsically rewarding. However you define it, most
researchers agree on this point. As discussed earlier, however, definitional disputes can
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begin at any level of specificity beyond that basic observation, and here I aim to be
explicit about at least two aspects of such disputes relevant to ArtQuest.
II: Exploration
The first such point of contention is whether “exploration” should rightly be
considered a kind of play. Weisler and McCall, in 1976, conducted a review of the
literature concerning both play and exploration and concluded that the two concepts
should be merged. First, they argue, the two concepts “cannot be defined separately
without subjectivity and ambiguity” (Weisler & McCall, 1976, p. 496). While I might be
tempted to overlook this practical difficulty, given my tendency (with Sutton-Smith) to
favor some of the more subjective definitions of play, they continue. Exploration and
play, if indeed they are distinct, are likely to be interspersed in reality, and thus an
insistent decoupling would lead to a counterproductive chopping of the “ecologically
valid, ongoing stream of behavior” (Weisler & McCall, 1976, p. 496). I take this view
that, particularly for the latter reason, the merging of the two concepts under the heading
of “play” makes most sense. Even so, there are several worthwhile distinctions to be
maintained about what I will here call “exploratory play” as opposed to other kinds of
play.
It is commonly said that exploratory play is object-oriented—the player appears
to ask “what can it do?”—whereas other types of play, chiefly symbolic object play, are
more player-centered—the implicit question is more like “what can I do with it?” The
former is often considered to be the chief purview of infants and toddlers, as when they
put things in their mouths, or knock them into other things, as a way of exploring the
objects’ materiality. Looked at another way, exploratory play is promoted by “subjective
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uncertainty”—“an organismic variable jointly dependent on the level of certain physical
attributes of a stimulus and the organism's experience (i.e., familiarity) with, and ability
to process, the information they embody” (Weisler & McCall, 1976, p. 497). This
promotion has its limit, however. When the situation as a whole becomes “too much”—
either the object or the surrounding social context “extends beyond the organism’s ability
or desire to process it” (Weisler & McCall, 1976, p. 497)—the organism will retreat or
disengage.
This reality is well-known by both art teachers and museum designers, though
they don’t use the language of play to address it. In discussing her research in the
Exploratorium, Sue Allen uses the concept of cognitive overload to explain issues around
novelty and familiarity in the design of museum exhibits. Most clearly, when an exhibit is
too complex or not immediately apprehensible, most visitors will simply walk away
rather than attempting to “figure it out.” Importantly, this notion of complexity extends
beyond the specific exhibit to the broader context as well. Namely, “research has
suggested that visitors will only engage in a challenge if they are comfortable and
oriented (e.g., Hayward & Brydon-Miller, 1984)” (Allen, 2004, p. S23).
This last notion, in addition to being consistent with studies of exploratory play, is
also acknowledged by art teachers, who consistently speak of a creating a “safe space”
for students to exercise their creativity (Seidel et al., 2009). According to Belke, “Play
begins within a play space—which is not only a physical place like the nursery room, the
playroom or the yard, but also a psychosocial space that gives an atmosphere of freedom
and emotional contact” (Balke, 1997). The same is true in arts education. Hetland et al.
begin their discussion of high-quality arts classrooms with a focus on the elements of the
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physical space that promote the kind of work they hope to see, including carefully
designed light and sound, just as Allen discussed in the museum context. They also aim
to create a social atmosphere where help is available, but students can still maintain a
sense of “unobserved independence” (Hetland et al., 2009, p. 17)—all notions of support
and autonomy that are echoed in literature on play. If we include exploration, as I have
argued we should, there are clear parallels between this exploratory play and
development of tools and techniques that are the stated goal of ArtQuest. Even the
toddler banging blocks around in the building area is participating meaningfully in the
goals of developing artistic skills and dispositions.
III: Fantasy
Perhaps the type of play given most attention by researchers—particularly those in the
“progress rhetoric” tradition—is fantasy play. Also called dramatic play, sociodramatic
play, or symbolic play, this is the type most commonly leveraged to try to engage literacy
development. Because of its semiotic component—a banana standing in for a phone, for
example—it is hypothesized to be the type of play most relevant to developing symbolic
facility. The disputes about fantasy play are subtler than those surrounding exploratory
play. What is clear is that fantasy play, particularly when it involves a group of children,
includes a host of metacommunicative strategies for its maintenance, often well beyond
what the children involved would use in non-play settings.
An influential cataloger of this aspect of play, Gregory Bateson frequently
explored the extent to which, in “social pretend play, children use metacommunication to
clarify, maintain, negotiate, and direct the emerging play frame (Bateson, 1971, 1972;
Goffman 1974)” (Sawyer, 2003, p. 137). As Bateson explains, many of these signals are
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implicit. Yet, young children engaged in a group play scenario will act out their roles, but
also direct other players by explaining the scenario, or the proper functioning of
characters. These behaviors align with some of the ArtQuest, and Seidel et al., goals of
promoting reflection and communication about art—aspects of the process that children
generally ignore without explicit guidance.
This potential interweaving of arts curriculum and play is in fact suggested by
Eva Balke. As opposed to the way an adult artist will consider the product of her work,
she explains, children tend to move on: “When play is completed, what the children have
made—a drawing, a block structure, the product—loses importance. They turn their back
on it, and have no time to dwell” (Balke, 1997). If the production of art is incorporated
into fantasy play, however, children are motivated to extend the process. “To complete
the play structure and see that the result is in accordance with what the children intended,
however, gives value to the act—it happens here and now” (Balke, 1997). This process of
extending the “here and now” to include the reflective goals of the arts curriculum is
precisely the design challenge for ArtQuest, and may well be accomplished by
encouraging fantasy play.
Even if the invocation of play did encourage students to reflect, discuss, and
analyze art according to more canonical aesthetic considerations (goals one and three of
ArtQuest), what of the primacy of meaning-making over pure technique (goal number
two)? This, too, may be addressed by the introduction of fantasy play for another simple
reason—children engaged in exploratory play are concerned about the possibilities of the
materials, not of the whole process of art-making, which is, according to the arts
educators, supposed to be communicative. Fantasy play, on the other hand, involves
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taking on roles and exploring the culturally accepted standards on a personally
meaningful level. As Bateson again explains, “it is only in the fantasy space that the
notion that a primary school student can be a reporter, a scientist, a historian, or even a
super-hero is quite believable” (Bateson, 1972/2000, quoted in Barab, Gresalfi, &
Ingram-Goble, 2010, p. 527). Students who take on a role that includes communication
with others may spontaneously reinvest in the communicative properties of art.
Unfortunately, it is in designing for fantasy play that more definitional disputes
arise. One option, of course, is to create structured games, but theorists argue over
whether games are rightly (or always, or ever) considered “playful” (let alone whether
they fit into fantasy play). In fact, Sutton-Smith explains the general problem with
designing for play at all:
In all play, something plays off something else. A […]sense of difference plays
off something that's customary. And usually in our culture in these days a sense of
difference is a sense of freedom too. Once you say that we wanna make this playlike, so the medium is the message, the problem with that is that, that's
immediately a serious thought. In other words, you've given us a script for how
we should do this, which is to make it play-like. But you can't make it play-like
by that kind of intention. And the way for us to make it play-like, with that kind
of intention, is to be terribly serious. Do you get it? So that the very intention can
have play only as its reversal. (Dibb, 2011).
With this view of play as a kind of inversion, does designing to promote it ever make
sense? Or does it really look that different from the existing designs? In fact, this might
return us to the problem of assessment discussed earlier—is the use/disuse dichotomy
really enough to determine the success of an exhibit?
Context Revisited: What is really happening at ArtQuest?1
As mentioned early on, some of the ArtQuest stations are more prescriptive, and some
1
note: Observations and some of the analysis from this section are taken from my
“interim field report” for EDUC 3770.
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leave room for improvisation. At the watercolor station, a volunteer controlled access to
the paper and paints; brushes and water lay on the painting table. At the print station, a
complex procedure seemed to translate to more guidance and explanation from both
volunteer and signs. These restrictions were echoed by parents’ words, including
“supposed to do some…” and “honey it’s not really my job to do it for you,” while kids
were heard subverting some of the tasks, making announcements such as “I’m just doing
whatever.” (In one dyad this trend was reversed when the child announced “done,
Mommy! What did you make, Mommy?” and the mom responded “I was just messing
around.”)
This inversion—just doing “whatever” even when there was a clear “supposed
to”—suggests that the playful attitude was already alive and well at ArtQuest, but many
of the side comments also suggest that many visitors noticed what looked like a
prescribed path they were supposed to follow. It would be a stretch to say that children
appeared overly controlled at ArtQuest—certainly they had more freedom than they
would have in a traditional classroom. Still, the implications of too many directions—too
many ways to do something “wrong”—start to echo educators’ concerns that a focus on
technique over meaning-making can “limit as well as enable.” The labeling of an “offtask” work as “whatever” might also suggest this focus on material over meaning. What
would ArtQuest look like if the play attitude were given primacy? If students at the
“reflection” station were encouraged to pretend, would they see more details in their own
art that they hadn’t before? Could they be encouraged to engage in a mock critique with
family members or peers? What if a volunteer dressed as an “art critic” and offered their
own observations rather than handing out materials to kids waiting in line?
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Limitations and Implications
In addition to its limited scope, the current essay has said virtually nothing about the
learning theories underlying the various definitions of play discussed. I suggested in
passing that much of the present work is loosely informed by Vygotsky without exploring
the implications of such a theoretical background. Scholars in the traditions of Piaget and
Vygotsky in particular have agreed to some extent on the salience of play, but certainly
not on its definition or function. Even Pellegrini and Sutton-Smith, while consistent on
many points, disagree explicitly on whether the notion of purposelessness or “means over
ends” should be included as a defining feature of play (Pellegrini says yes, Sutton-Smith
not necessarily), and some of these differences may be attributed to different theories of
learning. In addition to field-testing the idea of designing for play in ArtQuest, then, next
steps would be to continue to flesh out the definitional implications of these observations
about the overlap between play and arts curricula, as well as their alignment to particular
learning theories. I would also like to further develop the extent to which these ideas can
both use and inform what is known about designing for informal environments, which
would start with a review of the literature covering play in arts education. While such a
review is beyond the scope of this paper, I have begun its outline and tried to incorporate
some of the insights here.
In keeping with a clearer articulation of both learning theories and implications, in
terms of fantasy play and arts curriculum, it is not at all clear that reflection and
metacommunication are the same thing. Scholars such as Vivian Paley have certainly
suggested that the metacommunicaiton inherent in play can be leveraged into reflection
for young children (e.g. 1990). Still, the leap from fantasy play to the kind of reflection
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aimed at by ArtQuest is not as simple as the distinction between the exploratory play
allowed by the some of the more open-ended stations and inhibited by the more scripted
ones. By extension, we might ask if the parallel between play and arts learning is merely
analogous, or actually a fruitful medium for designers to work toward. Two conclusions
seem fair, even if the salience is analogical.
First, when designing for engagement in an informal environment, Allen tells us
that “[f]amiliar activities can also be used on the scale of an entire exhibit” (2004, p.
S23). Again, I argue that play is such a familiar activity, and it seems right to suggest that
an invocation to play that blanketed the whole of ArtQuest might be very fruitful.
Whether that meant adjusting details of the environment that art teachers focus on—such
as light and sound—or distributing some of the early objects that signal play in
classrooms, like child-sized, false versions of everyday objects, or a dress-up box—might
best be explored in a design-based experiment.
Second, if many of the characteristics and kinds of play are already present in
ArtQuest, though they are sometimes stifled by too much prescription, a simple reframing
of the experience might have a significant effect on visitor interactions. This could mean
redesigning the stations to have clearer physical affordances and less text—at the figure
drawing station, for example, those interested in figure drawing knew just what to do, and
those simply interested in drawing didn’t seem at all deterred by the presence of a
wooden figure. It might, on the other hand, be as simple as reframing the experience for
docents and parents. If the stations look to children like they have a prescriptive path,
they certainly look that way to adults. Literature (signs or pamphlets) that made an
invitation to pretend play (with or without an explanation of its pedagogical significance)
DESIGNING FOR PLAY
21
might encourage adults to play along. Similarly, volunteer training that included this
playful view of the embedded curriculum might encourage less prescriptive interactions,
which might in turn encourage playful engagement.
Conclusion
Informal learning environments have a special challenge when it comes to the
presentation of material. Anything that is too complex or unclear is generally passed over
in favor of something more readily apprehensible. This is a real struggle when designers
are aiming for deep learning beyond simple material engagement. For young children
who are prone to move on quickly from one engagement to the next, promoting things
like reflection and meta-awareness is especially difficult. In this essay, however, I have
shown that some of these behaviors they normally will not exhibit in certain
circumstances, they will perform quite readily in play. Furthermore, both exploratory
play and fantasy play have explicit parallels to arts curricula. It is suggested, then, that
promoting a view of engagement in an informal arts learning environment—such as
ArtQuest, studied here—that is playful, and acknowledges the spectrum from exploratory
to fantasy, would better promote some of the goals of such an environment.
DESIGNING FOR PLAY
22
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