About

Early on I was hoodwinked by the notion of play as something extracurricular.

As a girl who grew up playing in a low-tech world most anything could potentially be altered or reimagined;  constructing make-shift houses out of oversized cardboard moving boxes and rolling downhill inside them after they wore out or setting up a maze in the living room from dining table pads and bedsheets to create a place where many adventures unfolded.

Conversely, school was a knuckle-dragging exercise in rote memorization and regurgitation. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized that doing projects were the way I liked to learn best and it felt a LOT like playing.

During a summer at Yale’s Graphic Design program in Brissago, Switzerland I was introduced to highly structured exercises that focused play as a means of exploration and learning. The objective was playing with tools as a way of learning to think through them when solving for visual problems. Exercises/tools were taught in color theory, composition, typography, visual semantics, 3D design, etc.

This core notion stayed with me as my professional life progressed into information architecture and then design research & strategy.  In working through your tools to problem solve you learn where they work and where they fail you. When problems (inevitably) exceed the tools you have it’s time to evolve them or invent new ones. This continues to be particularly relevant as the need to solve for increaslingly complex problems occurs at the intersection of disciplines.

So this site is a space set aside to exercise those play muscles…which I’ve come to value for what they really are.