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Connected Communities

Permission to Play: taking

play seriously in

adulthood

Robert Rogerson, Cathy Treadaway, Hayden

Lorimer, Josie Billington and Hamish Fyfe

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Permission to Play: taking play

seriously in adulthood Robert Rogerson, Cathy Treadaway, Hayden

Lorimer, Josie Billington and Hamish Fyfe

Executive Summary

Playfulness is an innate human trait crucial for making sense of the world, engendering

creativity, and in the development of social skills and positive emotions. It is strongly

encouraged in children and young people in societies; spaces for safe play, time set

aside for play, and playful engagement in sport and art.

In adulthood amidst the pressures and technologies of contemporary patterns of living

and working, such playfulness is increasingly being squeezed out, with play often

viewed as 'juvenile' and an 'unproductive' use of time. Permission for adults to play is

limited to certain circumstances and usually associated with a purpose. Yet playfulness

is celebrated in different forms within some arenas - particularly the creative arts and

sport - where the act of play is viewed as offering positive health and well-being

benefits, actively encouraged as part of community cohesion agendas and providing

spaces for creativity and entrepreneurial thinking.

This project has sought to extend the academic focus on play and playfulness beyond its

current focus on children and young people. By engaging actively with creative arts &

culture and sport in a series of participatory workshops, this Follow on Fund research

has sought to scope out areas for future research around measurement of playfulness,

the nature of playable spaces and the benefits for connecting communities.

Researchers and Project Partners

1 School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Strathclyde; 2 Cardiff School of Art &

Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University; 3 School of Geographical & Earth Sciences,

University of Glasgow; 4 Institute of Psychology, Health & Society, University of

Liverpool; Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan

Project Partners: Culture & Sport Glasgow - Glasgow Life, The Reader Organisation, NVA

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Key words

playfulness, therapy, community connectivity, engagement

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Permission to Play: taking play

seriously in adulthood

Introduction

Playfulness is an innate human trait crucial for making sense of the world, engendering

creativity, and in the development of social skills and positive emotions. It is strongly

encouraged in children and young people in societies; spaces for safe play, time set

aside for play, and playful engagement in sport and art.

In adulthood amidst the pressures and technologies of contemporary patterns of living

and working, such playfulness is increasingly being squeezed out, with play often viewed

as 'juvenile' and an 'unproductive' use of time. Permission for adults to play is limited to

certain circumstances and usually associated with a purpose. Yet playfulness is

celebrated in different forms within some arenas - particularly the creative arts and sport

- where the act of play is viewed as offering positive health and well-being benefits,

actively encouraged as part of community cohesion agendas and providing spaces for

creativity and entrepreneurial thinking.

This project has sought to extend the academic focus on play and playfulness beyond its

current focus on children and young people. By engaging actively with creative arts &

culture and sport in a series of participatory workshops, this Follow on Fund research has

sought to scope out areas for future research around measurement of playfulness, the

nature of playable spaces and the benefits for connecting communities.

It’s child’s play

Research into play and public policy addressing play is dominated by a focus on children

(Woodyer, 2012). For the individual child, play is viewed as being a key element of their

mental and physical well-being and health, and crucial to educational development and

learning benefits. Physical activity in play acts as a natural preventative to childhood

obesity and helps development of spatial abilities and understanding of the world, whilst

play enhances cognitive development and overall emotional health and social functioning

(Rogers et al, 2009). Sociable playing together with others forms a foundation of a

variety of social and societal skills associated with social interaction, communication and

imagination, along with the development of social networks. Many public policy

initiatives have sought to enhance the opportunities for benefits from play through the

provision and design of play spaces, local play strategies and as part of wider cultural

strategies.

For older children and adults however, in Western society, time for unstructured play is

widely considered a low priority in everyday life. In childhood, specified allowances are

made for play spaces ('playgrounds') and time ('playtime') but in teenage years, playful

and irreverent behaviour is often seen as an incongruous and undesirable incursion into

adult space (Valentine, 1996). In adulthood, expectations in work and economic activity

have created a stressful world in which time is always in short supply and quick decisions

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and speedy thinking processes are constantly required. Technology demands our urgent

attention, is influential in organising our thinking and necessitates rapid responses

(Hannaford 2010). Thrift (2000, 250) even suggests that play “is often regarded as

peripheral to the real business of life, because it is gratuitous, free (if one is forced into

such a practice, it is no longer play), and non-cumulative.” At a societal level too,

reflecting a perspective of playfulness as being time wasting and unproductive, any

emphasis on ‘fun’ and ‘playfulness’ appears incongruous in the current climate of fiscal

austerity and economic anxiety.

Pressures do exist, however, to challenge this perception of playful activities as being the

preserve and right of the young. On the one hand, the nature and location of play by

children is changing. Growing concerns about the safety of the physical environment and

associated health & safety regulation and risk management are limiting places where

adults, especially parents, feel children’s play can occur. Increasingly, play is expected to

take place in designated (and safer) environments and is discouraged in other (less safe)

places. New technologies are reshaping the nature of play, providing children (and

adults) with a different play experience in portable, safely controlled fun-sized servings.

These devices can provide pleasurable and playful fantasy and leisure experiences and

social connection but lack the rich multiple sensory experiences of the physical world

that stimulate the imagination and broaden thinking (Griffith, 2013).

On the other hand, there is a growing recognition of the economic value in play by

adults. Research in education and psychology shows that open ended, unstructured

imaginative play is a vital constituent of creative thinking and thus for invention,

innovation and entrepreneurship (Resnick 2007; Hannaford 2010). At a time when

demand for creativity is unprecedented and new ways of supporting and expanding

creativity need to be found by not giving permission for spontaneous play prominence

within our daily lives, we may lose out on new ideas, inventions and creative potential

which could lead to development of businesses and economic growth. And with greater

access to leisure and sporting activities, there are pressures to increase both numbers

involved,and the level of participation in play within sport activities.

Permitting play

In exploring ‘playfulness’ and wellbeing our starting point has been to bring together

strands where permission to play exists and research has been conducted previously – in

the arts, in sport, and in the measurement of play in adulthood. Each member of the

project team has been working with external partners and organisations delivering

practical solutions involving play– in creative arts and design (Treadaway and the Cardiff

School of Art & Design), literary reading and health (Billington and the Reader

Organisation), public art and communities (Lorimer and NVA Arts Charity), communities

and sport (Rogerson and Glasgow Life),creative and cultural industries (Fyfe).

Play, the Arts and wellbeing

Play within art has been used ‘seriously’ in various therapeutic contexts, including play

therapy, in hospitals as art therapy, and in learning. Research into art and rehabilitation

in prisons, and on the impact of reading groups to enhance social networking and mental

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health, for example, underlines the positive impacts on individual wellbeing and how art

assists to connect with places, people and values (Billington, 2012). Playfulness has also

been used in communities to enable diverse groups of people to reveal and explore

identities through creative construction of objects (eg Lego Serious Play projects) or

through creative writing to connect professionals’ and communities’ visions of

sustainability (Selman et al, 2011). ‘Less serious’ notions of play improve and strengthen

communities through enhancing the creation of social capital (Putnam, 2000) and

revitalising and regenerating neighbourhoods (Walesh and Heaton, 2001).

Playing sport and wellbeing

In the arena of sport, permission to play by all ages is not only granted but actively

encouraged. The recognized and measurable benefits in terms of health, both physical

and mental, and quality of life are driving policy agendas (Galloway et al,2006), but

wider community benefits are also recognised (Schulenkorf et al, 2011). PolicyI

nterventions by sports agencies, by local authorities and by voluntary organizations are

targeted to ensure that sport is taken seriously, addressing inequalities in access and

participation in sport, bringing sport into communities, (eg StreetGames network of

‘doorstep sport’) and enhancing cross-community development in Northern Ireland.

However, the conceptual links between sport and play have been much debated. Even

where ‘play’ is present, the nature of such play is more purposeful and deliberate and

open playfulness is often constrained. The existence of rules, competition and goal

oriented objectives arguably make sport more self-focussed and suppressing of more

free-flowing and inclusive aspects of play. Within sporting leisure time, activities are

often goal driven, time pressured (such as ‘fitting in time to get to the gym’) and rule

bound; there is often little opportunity for ‘fun’ in which the process of training or getting

fit as an end result is the desired outcome. Indeed, the introduction of scientific

approaches and skills acquisition in sport (eg work-like repetitions) has transformed it

from play into work.

Measuring plan and playfulness

Play has in many respects eluded a single and simple definition, with distinctions often

made between different types of play, and attempts variously emphasising play as

creative process, action rather than activity, and belonging to the culture of childhood

but with some agreement that play involves five essential characteristics – intrinsically

motivated, freely chosen, pleasurable, nonliteral, and actively engaged in (Rubin et al,

1983; Henricks, 1999).

Whilst play is the focus of child-based studies, research into adult ‘play’ has emphasised

playfulness; “a variable which enables people to transform a situation or an environment

in a way to allow for enjoyment or entertainment” (Proyer, 2012,1). This distinction has

relevance as it acknowledges that outward expressions of playfulness as behaviour

(play) is likely with children, but for adults is assumed to be based on individual

characteristics. To date research of assessing and measuring playfulness has

concentrated on self-reporting using designed scales, the most commonly cited being the

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Adult Playfulness Scale (APS, Glynn and Webster (1992) and the Short Measure of Adult

Playfulness (SMAP, Proyer (2012).

Theoretical work and empirical evidence on adult playfulness underlines its contribution

to individual wellbeing and to enhancing social connectedness - enhanced group

cohesion, creativity and spontaneity, intrinsic motivation, quality of life, positive

attitudes towards the workplace, job satisfaction and performance, and innovative

behavior.

Creating play; revealing playfulness

At the heart of this project has been a set of four workshops where playfulness has been

encouraged to be released, either as part of current research projects or as activity

participated in by the project team for this research. The focus is on how approaches and

practices which encourage 'play' in a variety of social and community contexts can reveal

the defining attributes of playfulness.

In Cardiff, technologies used by the CARIAD research team to examine playful sensory

experiences with autistic children were used by the research team to experience playful

activity. The resultant film and findings from Dr Wendy Keay-Bright’s s research were

used to explore issues around the measurement of playfulness, the therapeutic aspects

of the research and the spaces in which play occurred. The social therapeutic aspects of

play were followed up at Liverpool, in a workshop conducted by Professor Philip Davis

from the Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems (CRILS)

at the University of Liverpool. CRILS, in partnership with The Reader Organisation, has

been developing ways to assess the impact of reading within health, community and

securesettings, for people with dementia, depression and other mental health issues.

Through transcript analysis, the workshop examined how people connect through

literature and the act of shared reading, and how such engagement depends on the

distinctive playfulness of literary thinking.

The remaining two workshops were held in and around Glasgow. Participating in a public

arts project led by NVA at Cardross, members of the project team participated in a day’s

activity at the ruins of St Peter’s Seminary where families and local community

representatives undertook a journey to and within the building. This workshop focussed

on spaces for safe play and the role of play in connecting with the community. The final

workshop, led by Glasgow Life the public agency responsible in the city for bringing

together culture, art and sport, examined how spaces and facilities can be shared to

foster stronger community wellbeing.

Through these workshops, the project has explored how playfulness is expressed in

‘play’ and in turn how such playfulness can be measured and assessed; the nature and

impact of ‘spaces’ in which such innate playfulness can be developed and expressed; and

ways in which permission to play (be playful) can assist in the wider connected

communities and health & wellbeing programme.

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Research findings

Expressing playfulness

In focussing on play, past research has emphasised the visible, movement-based

expression of playfulness involved with such activity. Our live experiments, using the

technologies and stimuli developed by the CARIAD research team to reveal playfulness in

children with autism, highlighted that only some playful activity was clearly visible (eg

through rhythmic movement, interaction with others, expressive facial and body

movement). It was also clear that there were times when participants were passive,

unmoving but engaged in mind both with the play activity and with the others in the

spaces around about; and times of disengagement with the active play, equally

associated with immobility. This was also evident in the reading group workshop, when

the transcripts revealed not only those actively speaking but also how in their ‘silences’

some (but not all) other participants in the group were engaged with the reading and the

group as a whole.

In these respects, play is not constant, and relies on a continuous process of separation

and engagement – both emotionally and physically. Play itself can be enriched by such

separation (eg the thoughtful but apparently distant participant making an occasional

but perceptive comment to the reading group). Interpreting playfulness can thus be

challenging when lack of visible, expressive ‘play’ can be subject to multiple

interpretations, raising questions about what methods and methodologies from across

the humanities and social sciences can be used to help capture and interpret non-

expressive playfulness? And, do such non-expressive forms of playfulness have wellbeing

benefits for individuals and how can they assist in social connectivity?

Playable spaces

In focussing on children’s play, there has been an understandable emphasis in public

policy in on the creation of safe, attractive physical spaces where play is designated and

encouraged through design and planning. Indeed, western societies have to a far greater

extent than in the past now regulated the opportunities for play. Significant investment –

has been made to generate formalised and designated or designed spaces for the

purpose of play (eg football pitch, skating park) or spaces where play is allowed along

with other uses and activities (eg urban parks). Beyond these, other play spaces have

been encouraged, with conscious interventions to make children welcome, provide more

informal and adaptable play infrastructure, and provide a safe environment, although

these other spaces within which play can and does take place are often in conflict or

contestation with others (eg the street, the back alley, urban parks).

By creating alternative ‘playable spaces’ where playfulness was temporarily permitted,

the project has sought to explore the impact of creating territories of and for play. These

included encouraging play within the inherently unsafe and disused spaces of St Peter’s

seminary, the transformation of a laboratory into a group play space, and the creation of

a reading group for playful engagement with text. Our experience in these settings was

contrasted with the aim of bringing more playful activity into the formalised spaces of

museums and sports centres in Glasgow.

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Several key insights emerged which raised research questions. First, the creation of

physically designated play spaces does not in itself generate playfulness and play. The

Glasgow city experience of providing community sports and recreation facilities as play

spaces struggled to overcome associations of these spaces with more regulated, physical

activity than with playfulness. Second, playful behaviour can be engendered in routine

and (apparently) unplayable spaces where the very notions of safe and managed

physical characteristics are absent. The insertion of families into the derelict spaces of St

Peter’s seminary offered imaginative opportunities for play where the very absence of

safety and regulation enhanced the playfulness of the situation.

Third, being playful challenges the existence of bounded territories into which activity

can be harnessed and supported. Play itself seeks to extend such boundaries – at times

consciously occurring elsewhere and challenging designations (eg football in the street

adjacent to the designed football pitch). And fourthly, playable spaces extend beyond

physical spaces, occurring in liminal and emotional spaces which people enter into and

retreat from at different times and in different ways.

Moving on: re-connecting communities and play

In this project it has only been possible to touch on possible ways in which enabling and

permitting playfulness in adulthood can assist in addressing disconnections with

communities. It does however offer some insights into how a deeper understanding of

how play is being used to reconnect people with others and the potential for using

playful activity and engagement as a means of overcoming some of the dissonance

issues of contemporary society associated with isolation, stress, and alienation.

Permitting adults to engage playfully in tasks (eg shared reading) and settings (eg

exploring spaces together) can assist in breaking down barriers and fostering new

connections.

Two main research challenges persist however. First research into playfulness has

concentrated in measurement at the individual scale, focussing on the strengths of

characters which are thought to enhance playfulness. Extending scales such as the Adult

Playfulness Scale beyond individuals and into playful interactions would be desirable to

ensure that measurement of playfulness has more relevance to communities and in

shaping public policy interventions.

Such a focus on reassessing the characteristics of playfulness would also assist in the

second challenge. Although having many similarities to the nature and character of play

observed and researched in children, play in adulthood is potentially more complex.

Perhaps because of society’s association of play with childhood (and the associated

marginalization of play by adults), there has been a tendency in research to focus on

comparable expressions of playfulness in adulthood to those found in childhood. Like

child’s play, visible, vocal and movement-focussed expression - such as is found in

research on the arts and sport for example – are assumed to be indicators of playful

engagement. But playful engagement can exists in other, less visible ways and have

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equally important potential benefits on wellbeing and connectedness. To understand

such playfulness requires the application of different approaches and methods. Textual

and discourse analysis of transcripts from the reading groups revealed some of the

outcomes of playful engagement in the silences. Film and personal accounts of ‘play’

stimulated by visual images revealed insights into forms of engagement (and

disengagement).

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References and external links

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Critical Survey, Special Issue, ‘Reading and Writing in Prisons’, 23:3, 67–85, 2012.

Galloway, Susan Quality of life and well-being: measuring the benefits of culture and

sport – a literature review, Edinburgh: Scottish Executive, 2006

Glynn, Mary Ann, and Webster, Jane Refining the nomological net of the Adult

Playfulness Scale: Personality, motivational, and attitudinal correlates for highly

intelligent adults. Psychological Reports, 72, 1023–1026, 1993

Griffith, Jay. Kith: the riddle of the childscape, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013

Hannaford, Carla. Playing in the unified field : raising and becoming conscious, creative

humanbeings. Salt Lake City, Utah: Great River Books, 2010

Henricks, Thomas Play as ascending meaning: implications for a general model of play,

in Reilfe, S (ed) Play contexts revisited: play & culture studies 2. Stamford CT: Ablex,

1999

Proyer, Rene Development and initial assessment of a short measure for adult

playfulness: the SMAP, Personality and Individual Differences, (online accessed

29/8/12), 2012

Proyer, Rene and Ruch, Willibald The virtuousness of adult playfulness: the relation of

playfulness with strengths of character, Psychology of Well-Being: Theory, Research and

Practice, 1(4), 2011

Putnam, Robert. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Resnick, Mitchell. .All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By

Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten, Washington DC: ACM.Press, 2007

Rogers, Sue, Pelletier, Caroline and Clark, Alison. Play and outcomes for children and

young people, London: Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009

Rubin, Ken, Fein Greta and Vandenberg, Brian Play in Mussen, P (ed) Handbook of Child

Psychology, New York: Wiley, 1983

Schulenkorf, Nico, Thomson, Alana and K. Schlenker, Katie. Intercommunity sport

events: vehicles and catalysts for social capital in divided societies, Event Management,

15 (2), 105-119, 2011

Selman, Paul, Carter, Claudia, Morgan, Clare and Lawrence, Anna. Raising catchment

consciousness: how imaginative engagement can help sustainable use of rivers, in

Rogerson, R et al (eds) Sustainable Communities, Hertford: University of Hertfordshire

Press, 2011

Thrift, Nigel. (2000) 'Afterwords', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18,

213-55

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Valentine, Gill. Angels and Devils: moral landscapes of childhood, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space, 14, 581-99, 1996

Walesh, Kim. and Henton, Doug. The creative community: leveraging creativity and

cultural particiaption for Silicon Valley’s eocnomic and civic future, San Jose CA:

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313-26, 2012

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The Connected Communities

Connected Communities is a cross-Council Programme being led by the AHRC in partnership

with the EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and NERC and a range of external partners. The current vision for

the Programme is:

“to mobilise the potential for increasingly inter-connected, culturally diverse,

communities to enhance participation, prosperity, sustainability, health & well-being by

better connecting research, stakeholders and communities.”

Further details about the Programme can be found on the AHRC’s Connected Communities web

pages at:

www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectedcommunities.aspx