In June 2011, Insight Labs convened a group of thinkers from various fields to meet with the leadership of the Union League Boys and Girls Club, which operates three sites in the Chicago area as well as a Wisconsin summer camp. The key question was how the Boys and Girls Clubs could revive their original mission of providing children with a safe place for free play in a world where funders were focused on structured activities and measurable outcomes.

The team came up with a variety of ideas, but the three-hour session was just half of the Lab. The next day, several members of the group visited a Boys and Girls Club to meet with kids from across the city. One Labster pretended to be a Martian who had never heard of play or fun. The team then asked the children what attributes they associated with play. They were then asked to design original games that taught the Martian how to experience it. By working with the kids, the Labsters were reminded that play is not always as simple as it seems.

After the Lab, Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson spoke with two participants about their experience. Maggie Hendrie is a user-experience designer who previously held leadership positions with Manifest Digital and Sony Pictures Entertainment. She also served as a lecturer in Product Design at the Otis College of Art and Design. Andie Thomalla is a Choosing to Participate Coordinator with Facing History and Ourselves. She has also held education-related positions with SCE, DePaul University, and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Here’s what they had to say about the Lab:

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: This Lab included two parts: our normal format of a three-hour strategic session with the leadership of the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs, then a visit with kids from some of the clubs to field-test our ideas. First, what do you think were the main takeaways from the Lab with the grown-ups?

Andie Thomalla: It was interesting to see how a group of people who do not spend all of their time thinking about how play affects cognitive development talk about those things. It’s interesting to see how people with expertise in different areas play with the real experts. If I were them, I would be walking away thinking, “Gosh, it’s good to know that people who are not in my line of work can think about the things that matter to me.”

Maggie Hendrie: I was struck by how open and willing and vulnerable the people from the Boys and Girls Clubs were, as well as how much the people who were not from the Boys and Girls Clubs actually cared.

The other main thing that I took away was that the thing the Boys and Girls Clubs thought was their problem turned out to not actually be their problem. They asked how they could attract more children, and the room asked why they had left their mission of being fun. Fun, in itself, is innately attractive. I was surprised that the structure of the Lab uncovered this deeper issue with their mission. That led to questions of how to articulate, develop, and seek funding for a mission that is not so tangible or may not have traditional outcomes like improved test scores or lower teen pregnancy rates.

So the two things that were most impressive to me were the dynamics between individuals and the fact that the core issues that emerged were not what they thought they would be. In fact, it was a dramatic realigning of who they are.

ABN: How did you think differently about fun or play after the Lab with the adults?

MH: My professional experiences have shown me that kids are actually very self-organizing. They don’t all need to be the hero. They can actually co-create a game. That was somewhat validated.

I think what I learned spending time with the kids was that they really grasped the difference between structured and unstructured play. They grasped that sometimes there needed to be some rules, there needed to be some homework. We can actually trust children much more than we usually think we can.

AT: This may sound kind of negative – I don’t really mean it to – but there is something kind of ominous to me about trying to reshape free play as a means to an end.

In the Lab we talked a lot about developing free play as a way to develop executive function which allows you to be better at business  which allows the U.S. to be more competitive globally. I feel like that narrative has taken over so many parts of life that there is something kind of troubling about applying it to free play, mostly because of the idea of what free play is.

I feel like there is a real vulnerability about the notion of play. I think for it to be real, true, free play, there shouldn’t be any expectations connected to it. But I think it’s really hard to think about what play does without setting up those anticipations or expectations.

MH: That was another takeaway I took away from the Lab. There is not going to be a PowerPoint presentation to sell free play. It raises big questions about the link between nonprofits’ activities, measurement, and funding. It is sort of ominous to have to measure kids’ fun quotient as a way of investing our charity dollars. There is something kind of horrible about that.

ABN: I was intellectually troubled by this too. I was thinking you might be able to get around it by talking about free play as a natural state. You could posit that for a particular phase in their development, a child should have a certain amount of free play and a certain set of abilities related to that, particularly executive function. Then you could measure the extent to which all of these programs and structures are preserving the natural, rather than positioning free play as a programatic intervention to achieve some external end.

AT: That makes a lot of sense to me. The challenge, if you were trying to instrumentalize play, would be how you, as the instrumentalizer – or puppet master, or whatever you would call your role in that situation – how would you allow it to be natural? How would you allow risks to take place?

The trouble with “the natural” is that it’s very chaotic. But that’s also what makes free play free play. It may be that really great stuff can come out of it, but you can’t approach it with that expectation. That’s a philosophical 180 if you are the director of a nonprofit that does after-school programming. It goes very much against your job description.

MH: And it goes against what your business or financial model for funding might be, which is very scary stuff. It seems like it was very natural for the Boys and Girls Club to start out as a place that gave kids the opportunity to have fun. Then they drifted into more measurable outcomes in order to be funded. What’s interesting is that the issue is not to persuade people that fun is good or that children thrive on it. The issue is how to get funding if they don’t have the kind of measurable outcomes that contributors have come to expect. That’s a larger systemic issue.

AT: If you have a quantitative study, you’re simply looking at things in a different way than you are with a qualitative study. But if you look at the kind of metrics used by funders, they are very quantitative. And it’s hard to quantify something like fun.

Part of the what the Boys and Girls Clubs – or anyone who is going to advocate for play – needs to do is to re-educated their funding audience. What would metrics even look like? What kind of information is valuable? They’re probably not going to look like test scores or contact hours. There are going to be other categories that come into play.

MH: You know, Disney has metrics for what kind of experiences work and what kinds don’t. They don’t just count heads. They know how to articulate the “fun quotient” in qualitative ways as well as measure it in terms of which rides kids come back to and don’t.

To me, all of this suggests that the Boys and Girls Clubs either need different funders or different ways of engaging funders that shows them play’s meaning and value.

AT: I think it’s probably both.

ABN: So after reaching similar conclusions in the session with the adults, we spent Saturday morning with some of the kids from the Boys and Girls Clubs. What do you think you learned from that experience with the kids?

AT: It’s always a powerful reminder when you let kids do their own thing. We had a fairly structured experience with them, but they were nominally in charge of coming up with their own games. Kids are so good at designing value and so clear in their thinking about what is valuable in ways that adults aren’t. We have learned all sorts of technical language about things and tie ourselves up a bit. Kids are really good at telling you what is great and what is terrible.

MH: It’s “That sucks!” or “That’s cool!”

AT: There is something valuable in those sorts of visceral reactions, especially if you are thinking about “the natural.” Kids are so tactless that their responses are really valuable for that.

MH: Adding on to that, I think we may offer an over-technicalized or over-engineered account of what children’s experiences need to be. I feel that we can leave our children to their own devices much more than we think they can. They will create and they will build relationships and they will co-create their experiences. Creating the safe environment seems to be more important than giving tools or instructions. We just didn’t need to intervene.

AT: I remember really distinctly thinking how much the relationships mattered in the room – for example, the adults the kids were familiar with versus us strangers who were trying to come in and get them to do stuff. Relationships matter so much in terms of interacting with them and guiding them. If I didn’t like something they came up with, why should they care? Who am I? But when Hector from the Boys and Girls Clubs responded to something, they really paid attention.

I think we sometimes take the adult-child relationship for granted. We think, “I’m an adult, of course they’ll care about what I say.” But it depends a lot on the kind of adult.

MH: It was also interesting to think about how the kids related to each other. Not all of them knew each other. None of them knew Jeff’s daughter. But from an outsider’s point of view, they were very inclusive. They played very fairly. And they paid a lot of attention to fairness and inclusion in designing their games. I was really impressed that the children did that. They knew how to self-regulate a new organization.

ABN: Though it makes sense to consider that these were kids the Boys and Girls Club selected for this project, so there were probably no outright bullies in the room.

So let’s pretend that the order had been reversed, and we had done the Lab with the kids before we sat down with the adults. What information from the session with the kids do you think could have informed the adult session?

MH: I don’t know if it would have worked, since we hadn’t clarified the real challenge yet. We didn’t yet understand that the real issue was fun.

I think what might have changed if we had done the work with the children first is that we would have had more examples of how kids play. We could have developed personas and models.

One of our first questions to them was “How do you know you’re having fun?” And one of the big things all of them said was that you forget about time. Many of their examples were very low-tech and very relationship-driven, like the little girl who said her idea of fun was picking strawberries in her grandmother’s garden. If we had somehow gone in knowing that the challenge was play or fun, we may have discovered something else related to the DNA of the Boys and Girls Clubs.

As adults, we were asking them to describe things that, for them, are very intuitive. It was curious to me that the children do not necessarily make any mental distinction between free play and structured play. They just respond to them differently.

AT: I think that’s totally right. While Maggie was writing the lists of things kids associate with play, I was thinking that kids have a very one-to-one relationship with the world. They’re not necessarily thinking about the other kids or the words they added to the list.

ABN: It’s got to be an interesting challenge when you are thinking about kids as informants for an ethnography. There were tons of things those kids said about play that I still haven’t figured out how to make sense of. Do you feel the same?

AT: I think of some of the the things they said that were really concrete. There was a kid who kept saying, “Swimming pools are fun!”

You know, no one had told these kids that we had spent all day talking with businesses leaders about the concept of fun and how it relates to development. They may have thought we were there to help them re-design their building. There is something hyper-subjective about the way kids respond to questions. They may have just been thinking, “What would it be so fun for me to go do… right now!” Swimming pool!

ABN: I also had that realization about halfway through – when we say “Boys and Girls Club” we think of an abstract entity, a category, an organization. But of course the kids just think of the building. I guess you can read that back onto the swimming pool example.

AT: I hope there’s not some really disappointed 11-year-old out there wondering why his swimming pool hasn’t shown up yet.

ABN: Maggie, is there anything that happened during the session with the kids that you are still trying to figure out?

MH: Well, you have to take into account how kids may say the thing they think adults want to hear. But I noticed that in the session with the adults, we all turned very much against homework. “No homework! Down with homework!” On Saturday, though, the kids actually said they needed a little homework. The kids actually seemed more mature about how to integrate play with work than we were.

AT: There may be a work-and-reward mechanism in place for them that is just part of the expectations of what that place is.

ABN: Sure – as adults, we feel that we think of ourselves as having an ability to choose whether we are going to go work or go play at any point of the day, though we may have external rewards that condition our responses. For kids, when play is experienced as a reward, it’s not a result of weighing the pros and cons of playing at any given moment.

MH: Do you think that adults really have unstructured play? It feels like we are structuring even our free time so much that we rarely just hang out.

AT: Even my unstructured time is usually marked on my calendar in some way, like “Go have dinner at so-and-so’s house” or even “Hang out with this person.” Maybe someone has a backyard party where a croquet game emerges at some point. I know I’ve had lots of situations where there is unstructured social interaction with people that turned out to be really enjoyable. But I don’t know how many of them I would term “play.”

MH: I feel like we expect to experience free time in what are very structured contexts, like some sort of tropical island where you are going to go sing and dance around with people.

AT: It’s like unstructured play for adults has to happen within some sort of bounded, structured environment, like a vacation or a retreat. You have to create the space before it becomes something you would even consider doing.

ABN: I’m struck by the fact that we as adults seem to associate play with relaxation, retreat, recovery – “down time.” But I’m not sure kids do that. Maybe I was an over-serious child, but I remember being very committed to whatever I was doing during free play, whether it was a drawing or inventing a game with friends. You felt as if there was nothing in the world outside your activity. As an adult, I find that I get that feeling of total absorption in very weird places. I get it when I clean my office, for example, especially when there’s no defined time limit.

MH: Do you think it made a difference that we were working with children from an urban area as opposed to a rural area?

AT: I’m sure it did. I grew up in central Wisconsin. The kids really did have to leave school over the summer to go help on the farm. We had the county fair every year. I think kids growing up in that kind of environment have very different opportunities for play.

MH: I grew up in rural England, and we would just run wild. A friend would knock on the door and say, “Can Maggie come out to play?” And if the answer was yes, we were just all over the place. It was like free-range children.

AT: What’s interesting about that, Maggie, is that it’s the same way my mom describes the way kids would interact with each other and play with each other when she was growing up,  but she lived at 79th and Pulaski in Chicago. There is a temporal and an environmental difference there, I think.

MH: I just want to be careful not to extrapolate from a few experiences who kids are and how they work. I think it’s all about context. As kids, we were always told, “Go away and play.” It had a time, a place, and a certain role of adults in that environment. I think that very much affects what children do.

AT: Andrew, you mentioned getting really into specific activities as a kid. An important related idea from the education universe is self-guided inquiry and how kids use it to develop expertise. That’s an important principle when it relates to digital education. There’s a book called Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out that is all about the process of moving from an unstructured space to becoming deeply involved with something. There is play at several points in that process. And there are places where you become more serious in your play as your interests sharpen and narrow.

ABN: I think you can see that even in really young kids. I have a pair of nephews who are twins. They’re a little under two years old. And one of them is a run-and-hide specialist and one of them is a playing-with-puzzles specialist. No one trained them to become specialists, but I’m not sure they were born that way either – it’s a process that happens through play.

AT: That’s one of the interesting things about play and executive function. Interest-driven play often helps promote literacy because you create situated meanings for words. If you’re really into dinosaurs, you know a lot of vocabulary related to dinosaurs. That allows you to learn vocabulary related to lots of other things because you’re used to using words with specialized, technical meanings.

MH: It’s like how when you’ve become literate in one language, you can more easily learn another.

AT: Right. But it’s interesting that both of those come out of play. That’s the basis for both of those different skill areas.

ABN: I think that also speaks to the narrative of play as the natural state. If you can think of there being adult play specialists – which is ideally what the people at the Boys and Girls Clubs are doing – they wouldn’t necessarily be the funnest people around. I mean, they could be that too, but their real job would be to recognize these emergent skills in play and cultivate them. I guess that’s the Montessori idea. But if the Boys and Girls Club could present themselves as the people who can take skills that naturally develop through play and then push those skills five or ten percent further – that could have huge benefits for those children and their organization.

Both of you have been or will be involved in designing activities for children that by necessity have more structure than the kind of free play we’ve been talking about. What lessons from this Lab might you bring to the design of activities involving children in the future?

MH: I have done work with a leading toy manufacturer, working on some of their major branded toys, and we’ve found that the ones that seem to be most successful were tools where kids could create their own music, create their own stories, create their own things in a themed way and then share them. Part of that is the direction technology is going – user-generated content is becoming the primary experience.

AT: Last summer, I was interviewing researchers in the digital education field about the kind of work that would move the field forward. One guy I talked to said he was really skeptical about the idea of apps for children, because they bound every experience. If you have a bunch of blocks, there is an unlimited number of experiences you can have with those blocks. They don’t even have to be blocks – you can pretend they are pieces of food in a kitchen. They become a canvas for all the things a kid may want to do with them. But with something like an app on an iPad, there is not much of an ability to move beyond the limitations of the app. We think about digital technology as opening up this world of possibilities, but it can also limit possibilities in interesting ways.

In terms of my professional work, most of what I’ve done with activities has been related to professional development and designing things for teachers. There’s an extra layer there – I might have to think about how a teacher might show how something relates to Illinois core curriculum standards, for instance. I haven’t had as much time to think about free-form activities for kids in those settings. It’s hard to work with a lesson plan but also include time where you say, “Now we’re going to just sit back and see what happens.” Parents and employers and the state say, “That’s not exactly what we were looking for.”

MH: In the commercial space, we were working to develop experiences that had to be branded. But I think there is an opportunity for some of these development companies to create opportunities that are less structured. KidPix was really important when it first came out, for example. It was like a Photoshop for kids. Kids loved to play with KidPix!

ABN: Some of us still do.

So this whole Lab was about studying fun and play in kids. But what was fun for you?

AT: I have been in a couple of positions where I have been developing this kind of subject matter expertise. But I don’t normally get to be in situations where people find it be interesting, new information. So the whole experience of the Lab made me feel very valued, which is a nice way to spend a couple of days.

MH: For me, it’s just fun to spend time with kids – the spontaneity and humor are just really nice.

AT: I’ve been thinking about where opportunities exist for unstructured play for adults. I think the kind of environment you guys have created, even though it is very business-oriented or goal-driven, feels like an opportunity for play. Essentially you have a bunch of people in a room poking at something or trying to turn it into something else. That’s very much in line with the concept of what free play is.

Image: Illustration for the 1883 edition of Le avventure di Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910).