Chapter 2 - Context and Conditions, Nature and Desires

Now that the properties that define play have been outlined, we must next be aware of the conditions and context necessary to engage in play. These conditions will aid in discovering how to design for a play-based escape. Investigating the works of Stuart Brown, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Scott Eberle, and Anthony D. Pellegrini, this chapter will bring about an understanding of the atmosphere which must be present in order to play. After which, reviewing the work of numerous others, including Jay Appleton, Grant Hildebrand, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, and Stephen Kellert, it will reveal the properties for designing with the human affinity for nature in mind, and why this may also help in creating the atmosphere for a play-based escape. Numerous similarities and overlaps exist between play and nature which demonstrate a complex interrelationship. Furthermore, this chapter describes three desires which we innately possess as human beings. These desires are linked to the concept of a play-based escape and will aid in understanding how to achieve a related design. These desires are those for: exploration, body-play, and a dynamic environment.

Desires for Exploration

Stuart Brown defines play through six properties: seeming purposelessness, diminished sense of self, inherent attraction, freedom from time, improvisation potential, and continuation desire. Scott Eberle’s work outlines that play is a process involving six steps. Eberle states this process involves: anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise. These steps do not necessarily have to occur in order, yet, we must reach each step in order to experience play. Taking a closer look at each of these qualities gives us clues as to how we may facilitate this form of escape within design.¹

Anticipation is the curiosity and wonder that occur. During this step there can be a little anxiety due to uncertainty and to small amounts of risk involved. The risk cannot, however, be too great, or it overpowers the excitement. Surprise is the next step during the process. Anticipation often leads to surprise: a new discovery, the unexpected, a great idea, or a new perception. The surprise then produces pleasure, the great feeling one is overcome with. Understanding is then gained. New knowledge is incorporated, differing concepts are synthesized, and foreign ideas are acquired. This leads to strength; the empowerment that results from conquering scary situations unharmed, and the new mastery that is gained from constructive experience and understanding. Finally we reach poise. Poise is the sense of balance in life, a feeling of satisfaction, grace, and composure. Once we reach this final stage we then seek new sources of anticipation and begin all over again.²

The benefits and necessity of this process are clear; we gain creativity, confidence, and improve both our physical and cognitive health, among numerous other benefits described in the preceding chapters.

While engaged in play we experience positive affect and a relatively low heart-rate. It is a form of practice, as opposed to an information gathering endeavour. However, before we can play, we must first explore and gather information. When we arrive in a novel context we seek to understand that context until it becomes familiar to us. We first ask ourselves questions such as, “What can it do?” Once we are satisfied, we start to play. We now ask, “What can I do with it?” This exploration is part of Eberle’s six-step process of play.³

Before we can play, our context must also include a limited set of preceding conditions; as discovered by Kenneth H. Rubin and his colleagues, Greta Fein and Brian Vandenberg⁴. Our contexts must include: familiarity, free-choice, minimal supervised intrusion, and be stress-free. A context can be familiar in terms of materials and people present; however, as discussed, even novel environments and objects can become familiar after exploration. Familiarity seems to go hand in hand with a stress-free context. For example, unfamiliar people, or strangers, can often cause anxiety which creates stress. Similarly, free-choice and minimal supervised intrusion go together; these conditions are the prerequisites for an individual to be intrinsically motivated. While these conditions were evaluated with child psychology in mind, they hold true for adults as well.

Through my experience as a child, I saw that a connection to nature effectively produced the context necessary for a play-based escape. Nature was both naturally familiar as well as stress relieving, and provided the freedom I required in order to play. Through the studies of various researchers, the following investigation will reveal the necessary interrelationship between nature and a play-based escape within architecture.

Stephen R. Kellert⁵ is an advocate for the connection between the natural and the human built environment. He believes in the concept of biophilia. Biophilia refers to humans’ inherent affinity for the natural world. Therefore, an initiative that fosters a satisfying connection between people and nature in the built environment is called biophilic design. Biophilic design has two dimensions: organic design and vernacular design. According to Kellert, organic design, “involves the use of shapes and forms in buildings and landscapes that directly, indirectly, or symbolically elicit people’s inherent affinity for the natural environment.” Vernacular design “refers to buildings and landscapes that foster an attachment to place by connecting culture, history, and ecology within a geographic context.” This connection to the places where people live is “also a necessary condition of human well-being.”⁶

Humans have aesthetic appreciations for numerous features within the natural environment. We enjoy bright and colourful blossoming plants, vast vistas, and water features of all kinds. Each of these have, over the course of our evolution, been the means of enhancing human sustenance and survival. The blossoms are the precursors to fruits, berries and vegetables, the vistas allow us to see danger in the distance before it arrives, and the water is our life-blood.⁷

Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have suggested that the physical and mental benefits of parks, gardens, and open spaces stem from four observed characteristics of these settings: “coherence, complexity, mystery, and legibility.” Coherence is the human capacity to recognize and discern order and organization in nature; complexity, the ability to identify and respond to diversity and variability in the natural world. Both tendencies can be related to such functional advantages as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Mystery is the ability to examine and investigate the complexities and uncertainties of nature, while legibility reflects the human capacity to orient and navigate natural settings. Both attributes encourage people’s organizational, analytical, and imaginative capacities.⁸

Geographer Jay Appleton (1975), author of The Experience of Landscape, provided a basis for the work of Kaplan and Kaplan, as well as for the work of Grant Hildebrand. The Kaplans, using their four characteristics, believed that people are attracted to buildings and landscapes that are “rich in environmental complexity and mystery, and that offer frequent opportunities to wonder, imagine, explore, and discover.”⁹ Furthermore, they believed that successful buildings are those that avoid confusion and feelings of chaos by incorporating elements of coherence and legibility, and enhancing a sense of orderliness and meaning. Grant Hildebrand goes further however, and emphasizes the effects of six paired elements that reflect the inherent human affinity for nature which are often encountered in evocative building and landscape designs. The pairings are: prospect and refuge, enticement and peril, and order and complexity.¹⁰

Prospect is a quality that reproduces allowance for the discernment of distant objects. It has been a part of our survival to be able to spot distant movements and activities, or potential threats, and to locate distant landmarks and resources. According to Hildebrand, prospect is achieved in buildings by providing extended views, spaciousness and openness, as well as plenty of light and brightness. Refuge, on the other hand, references the complementary human need for shelter and protection. Designs geared to a sense of warmth, comfort, and safety, with limited views, spatial circumspection, and intimately sized spaces achieve a sense of refuge.¹¹

Enticement reproduces the desire to “explore, discover and expand one’s knowledge, a characteristic that has proven crucial to human adaptation and development.”¹² In order to enhance our exploratory drive, in other words our exploration desire, Hildebrand suggests that designs should provide opportunities for exercising imagination and creativity through natural detail and diversity in order to stimulate inquisitiveness. Hildebrand’s pairings stem from our roots in nature, which also means that a connection to this nature will also stimulate inquisitiveness. Peril, the second property of this pairing, reproduces the desire for “mystery, challenge, and even risk that simultaneously attract and repel.”¹³ According to Hildebrand this can be achieved by the use of overhanging balconies, elevated passageways, obscured pathways, or heights. These features work to challenge, thrill, and excite us as well as providing a small amount of anxiety. Along with encouraging exploration, these features cause us to practice caution. They make us more aware of ourselves.

Complexity reproduces the human desire for “detail, variety, and mystery, which throughout human evolution has enabled us to make difficult choices and to secure resources in response to the natural world.”¹⁴ Order reflects our desire for organization, routine, structure, and pattern. Order without complexity produces monotony and boredom, complexity without order produces chaos and confusion. Hildebrand (1999) states that designs must therefore contain a dynamic relationship between both complexity and order.

The first pairing, prospect and refuge, relates to humankind’s drives for safety and sustenance; the second pairing, enticement and peril, relate to our exploratory drives, and the final pairing, complexity and order, responds to our drives to cure boredom and confusion, those for contentment and understanding. There are many overlapping qualities between these characteristics and those that are required to experience play. The second pairing, enticement and peril, is perhaps the most pertinent. This pairing relates directly to Eberle’s required steps, those of anticipation, surprise, pleasure, and understanding. Complexity and order relate most directly to the final step of poise, the contentment, satisfaction, and sense of balance that is achieved at that step. Prospect and refuge inform us of the spaces where we are most likely to prefer and feel relaxed, or stress-free, within.

Using the analogy of the human body, it is a system which requires not just one vitamin, hormone, or mineral in order to be complete or maintain a healthy life. It requires many, and many are interconnected with others. The body’s systems all work together in numerous complex ways that we still have yet to fully understand. Similar to this, the same human body must relate to its environment in numerous complex ways. We need a connection to play and daydreaming in order to sustain cognitive health; we also need a connection to nature. As hundreds of people migrate from rural areas into urban centers our environment is becoming the designed world; it is the city, and the architecture. It is therefore necessary to provide a connection to play using evocative techniques, as well as nature, within our designs.

Desires for Body-Play

In order to further understand play, and how to deploy techniques which encourage it within architecture, we must also understand the concept of body-play. Also called movement-play, body-play is the first form of play that any human being participates in.¹⁵

Movement is primal. Understanding and appreciating human movement allows us to understand ourselves, as well as play. It helps us structure our knowledge of the world around us, which includes space, time, and our relationships to others. “Movement-play lights up the brain and fosters learning, innovation, flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. These central aspects of human nature require movement to be fully realized.”¹⁶ Body-play is universal. As we participate in it, synapses within our brains start firing and strengthening. If a person is having difficulty engaging in a state of play, the easiest way to get into this mindset is to start moving. How do we get adults to play? We trick them by using body-play.

For example, take a moment and try taping each of your fingers on a surface. Start by tapping your pinkie-finger, ring-finger, middle-finger, and then index-finger. Do this a few times until you form a rhythm. Now vary this. Start instead with your index-finger. When you have done that a few times, vary it again, perhaps making it more complex. Now, vary it once more. What you may have noticed by now is that you had, for a moment, been completely absorbed by your finger movements. You were absorbed in a form of body-, or movement-play. Your mind changed gear for a moment and any other thoughts you had seemed to melt away.

Vision is also influential in switching this mindset and engaging the brain. John Medina¹⁷ describes that vision trumps all other senses. It is the most dominant sense, taking up approximately half of our brain’s resources. When we remove visual cues, we force our brain to use circuits that are not normally engaged. The brain typically relies on a combination of information from our limbs, joints, and eyes to coordinate movements. If we were to close our eyes we force our brains to adapt. Instead of short circuiting to automatic movements, more senses are engaged in order to facilitate balance and movement¹⁸. It is not to suggest that we walk around blind-folded; however, the regularity and regulations with which buildings are currently built largely maintains that most of our movements are automatic because we are visually cued to typical conditions. Think of a stair for example: we see a stair and we easily walk up it automatically. Raise just one step slightly out of the ordinary and, similar to a robot programmed to make efficient movements in order to climb a stair, we trip due to our automatic responses.

Combining the notions of body-play and the problem with regularity due to visual cues, it is not hard to understand how nature fits in. In nature the ground is uneven. Think of a mountain hike. We become aware of our bodies as we climb the uneven surfaces. We engage in body-play. When climbing a mountain we test footholds, whether using the balls of our feet or planting our heels, we soon learn how we must adapt and tackle the climb. Similarly, during the climb, regularity is eliminated, thereby eliminating the over-preformed automatic responses. We become fully engaged in the moment and the experience. If we designed a space that removed regularity, (for example, imagine someone installed an uneven floor that you must cross in order to get to the lunch-room at an office) the automatic responses to typical visual cues would largely be diminished, as well as forcing visitors to connect with their bodies through their movement within the space. This causes their brains to make connections and improves brain plasticity.

These movements are also minor forms of exercise and even minor bits of exercise are proven to boost brain-power. During our evolution, our brain developed while working out and while walking as much as 12 miles per day. In our sedentary lives, our brain still craves this experience¹⁹. Even those who fidget in their seats while reading this thesis are improving their brain power more than those who are calmly or lazily remaining still.²⁰

Desires for a Dynamic Environment

So far, the discussion has centered on our desires for exploration and body-play. Now, building on Hildebrand’s complexity and order pairing, we must understand our desires for a dynamic environment. This pairing reflects our desire to cure boredom and confusion. With respect to play, we enjoy complexity due to all the details and variety that inspire our wonder. Our drive for order allows us to explore the complex details of our experience and to organize them until we understand them. In this process we experience all the steps described by Eberle, from anticipation through to poise; however, this is a cyclical process. Hildebrand would agree with the work of Joachim F. Wohlwill²¹ when he states that “laboratory research on the relationship between stimulus complexity and preference has quite consistently shown that stimuli falling somewhere in between the two extremes of this continuum are most strongly preferred.”²² The extremes he refers to are: extreme complexity, and a lack of complexity. Wohlwill also goes on to say that “experience changes the degree to which the individual is able to structure the stimulus input, i.e., to extract the information with respect to patterning contained in it.”²³ What this means is that the more familiar an individual becomes with a complex space, the more complex it will need to be in order to continue to be perceived as attractive. For example, Wohwill, and his colleague C. Simon, preformed a study on musical preferences (1968).²⁴ In this study, regular individuals were compared to trained musicians with regards to their preferences of musical complexity. The trained musicians are more familiar with music and its structure, and when presented with music of varying complexity, are shown to prefer music of a higher complexity than the preferences of non-musicians, who are less familiar with musical complexity; the untrained individuals preferred the intermediately complex musical compositions.

We can therefore understand that as we bring order to the complexity around us, or perhaps even start to become experienced, or familiar with the complexity around us, we begin to seek more complexity. The complexity and order pairing is dynamic, and always in flux so that the process of play advances continually. It can be said, therefore, that we have desires for a dynamic stimulating environment.

These three concepts, the desires for: exploration, body-play, and a dynamic environment, can all work together to help us understand how to achieve an architectural atmosphere engendering a play-based escape. The next chapter will investigate a series of case studies which have attempted to encourage a connection to play, nature, or both, in their designs. It also explores what techniques the designers used in order to do so.