The Creative Commons

What’s the connection between play and art? We've always thought this quote from Brian Eno summed it up nicely:

‘Children learn through play… and adults play through art’

Together with The LEGO Foundation, we're helping some of the most innovative museums in the world connect with new audiences, using the power of play.

Recently, we've had the pleasure of working with Buffalo AKG Art Museum on their new Creative Commons space and we're looking forward to hearing Charlie Garling - AKG's Director of Learning and Creativity - talk at the MuseumNext ‘Museums, Games & Play’ Summit on the 23rd – 24th October, about how playful experiences can drive engagement (and fun!) for museums.

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When The LEGO Foundation suggested that AKG approach us to help them design the new Creative Commons space in their museum, they challenged us to create a space to empower people to explore and express their identity, a space where visitors could be creative and learn about the potential creativity in all of us, a space to meaningfully connect with others and – of course - with AKG’s world-famous collection of art.

We knew we had to imagine a place that let visitors get hands-on and minds-on.

Hands On, Minds On

We’ve worked lots with The LEGO Foundation create activities to promote Learning Through Play. So, we knew that this needed just the right balance of guidance and free play. One of the experts in this field that we looked to was Mitch Resnick at 美国麻省理工学院 . He has created an excellent framework for playful exploration – or Tinkering – which helped us develop the engagements, following his principles of open-ended discovery and experimentation.

Kicking the work off with an extensive ideation workshop with AKG’s team – and our digital partners, Kiss the Frog – we very quickly identified concepts for a wide variety of experiences, from low to high tech, physical to digital. Our aim was to create a multi-sensory space, using lots of different play materials. Naturally, LEGO bricks were part of the mix but this diverse range of ingredients also included everything from simple magnets to a ‘magical’ scanning station that could transport visitors’ creations onto a digital gallery, alongside famous works of art from AKG’s collection.

Room to play, Spaces to create

The results of the workshopping were seven categories of activity that we gradually developed into distinct spaces, each one focussed on one of the key skills that can be encouraged through play – Physical, social, emotional, cognitive and creative. This is ground that we’ve trodden before, when we’ve worked with The LEGO Foundation to design playful activities aimed at encouraging specific skills. That experience informed our planning. We made certain we invested plenty of time as a team in discussing concepts, challenging each other’s ideas? - in a friendly and positive way – and examining every different aspect of them until we were confident we’d got them just right and that the space as a whole was coherent and consistent.

Of course, no designer is an island, so early on in the journey,?we went out looking for the best examples of play-based exhibits we could find to ensure the standards we were setting for ourselves were the highest possible. ?We also looked back at past projects with partners like the V&A and The Family Court here in the UK, creating spaces that spoke clearly and with warmth, not just guiding, but giving confidence to visitors. The things we saw encouraged us along a collaborative, iterative process, storyboarding, prototyping and testing ideas until we were satisfied we had just the right mix of digital and physical ingredients, that together, our ideas met the challenging scope of the brief and that the activities we were creating were accessible to all.

Play making

Accessibility was critical to the success of the Creative Commons. We spent a lot of time on the formats of spaces and experiences making sure they could be enjoyed at different heights and allowed room for people to move between and gather around them. Displays had lower spaces for people in wheelchairs and smaller children to build at and bright colours were used to demarcate areas.

All of this work was done as we translated our concepts from 2D sketches into 3D digital models. A crucial stage where emotive expressions that are possible in 2D have to be anchored in the real world. Working with the architectural plans of the room and our fabrication partners, Hadley Exhibits Inc. , we refined the designs for production, taking into account their production processes and factors such as maintenance and upkeep that will be critical to keeping Creative Commons in tiptop condition in the future.

A trigger for experiences

We're immensely proud of what we have created with AKG, The LEGO Foundation, Kiss the frog and the fabricators, Hadley. To play a part in the refurbishment of the AKG Art Museum, alongside Olafur Eliasson’s breathtaking ‘Common Sky’ is incredibly rewarding. Especially as the Creative Commons is a community-focussed space that allows visitors to be active participants in the museum’s cultural life. It’s a space that celebrates the power of play as a way of learning and understanding our world and the power of art as a way of playing. It’s a place that recognises – as Brian Eno put it (far better than we ever could) – ‘Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience’. ?And that experience, is play.

Quarterre designs products, places and playful experiences. We help brands and organisations create spaces where they can connect with people and meaningful, well thought-out products to put in them. Want to know more? Why not drop us a line?

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