Playfulness is a vital part of our lives
Playfulness is under pressure. Everything must have a purpose. The focus is on learning, producing, being effective, reaching goals. Adults are too busy to play and so are the children – children’s free time to play is decreasing.
This development is problematic for all of us. It is a problem on a personal level and on a societal level.
On an individual level it is healthy to play. Playing makes us laugh, makes us concentrate. Playing makes us resilient, dynamic and flexible. It teaches us to interact with others and to cope in the world.
On a societal level we see a need for innovative thinking, for people getting new ideas and for people having the courage to realize these ideas.
Playfulness plays a major part in my life – when I work and develop the public sector, when I am at home, when I am a Coding Pirate and when I am a CounterPlayer.
I have joined CounterPlay because I find playfulness extremely important and because playfulness and players around the world need places to meet, to exchange and to develop. Now when playfulness is under pressure it is even more important to create these places for playfulness.
CounterPlay hosts a yearly festival about playfulness and as far as I see it, the festival is relevant for everybody who needs playfulness in the working lives: teachers, pedagogues, leaders, HR-consultants, developers, librarians, scientists – you name it.
The next festival takes place 14th to 16th of April 2016 at Dokk1.
Follow the festival on http://www.counterplay.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/counterplay
If you want to present, play, create, debate something, you can also find our call for contributions there.
We are celebrating New Years Eve tomorrow and hence a status is appropriate. My playful work related highlights from 2015 were:
CounterPlay 2015: Meeting and being inspired by a lot of playful people, who played, laughed and were very serious. The element that inspired me the most was seeing Cirkus Tværs (Circus Across) and their ringmaster Trille who lead young acrobats through the show with an enormous love, empathy and patience. Trille died just two months later in a tragic car accident – an incredible loss for children in the western part of Aarhus and for playfulness in Aarhus in generel.
Aarhus Mini Makerfaire 2015: Inventions, funny ideas and new possibilities in every corner of Dokk1 for a weekend. Nerds, techies, students, artists, craftsmen met and showed Aarhus a conglomerate of possible and almost impossible things. Giving visitors the possibility to create, play and interact with new stuff, hacked installations etc. I have written a small post about the Makerfaire on my blog, but I have also written a small article about the relation between a Smart City strategy and a Aarhus Mini Makerfaire: http://organicity.eu/blog/when-the-smart-city-meets-the-maker-movement/
Internet Librarian International 2015 in London: Together with my fantastic colleagues Rasmus Fangel Vestergaard from Copenhagen, Jeroen De Boer from the Netherlands and Åke Nygren from Sweden we put making and playfulness on the agenda at the conference. We facilitated a prototyping workshop, we held presentations and we did a play track. Our overall message was to focus on playful library services. I held a presentation that can be seen here: http://www.slideshare.net/frkovergaard/playful-library-services-talk-at-ili2015-london
And of course Coding Pirates: Seeing children and volunteers meeting week after week to play, develop and create with technology. Hearing the children getting ideas for decapitation machines for LEGO men, arcades, computer games, game controllers, future islands, future playgrounds etc. has been fantastic every single week in 2015.