4iP Blog

Working at 4iP is great. Not only do we get to back great products and visionary entrepreneurs but we occasionally sponsor the odd event. Helping to facilitate people meeting, talking and thinking in the real-world hopefully sees more folks applying and receiving 4iP funding. This Friday London’s Conway Hall plays host to Playful09. Tickets are running out fast so I suggest you grab em while you still can!

ooo I’m not speaking but the awesome Lucy Wurstlin is.

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play - in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. Games mean different things to different people, but a fundamental desire to play is something we all have in common. Playful 2008 focused on the creative and cultural dimensions of game design as both discipline and craft - 2009’s edition will go all out, frolicking across disciplines like nobodies business, and celebrating the presence of play in all its forms and successful/daring/original and brilliant implementations.

As Jonathan Follett wrote in 2007:

“Playfulness, like usability, refers to a quality of user experience that can span many disciplines—information architecture, information design, interaction design, and graphic design. In our minds, however, many of us have relegated play to the realms of gaming or kids’ stuff and don’t consider play daily when designing. Though, in the digital space, satisfying the desire to play can be integral in determining the success or failure of a digital product or service. So it’s time for user experience designers to take play seriously. (And stop being so darn boring.)”

So how are we doing? Are we being playful enough? Let’s see eh?