On Play, Practice, and Boundaries

Back in January I wrote that one of my goals for 2025 was to play more. It’s September. So, what have we learned from eight months of playing more and playing more intentionally?

Well, quite a bit as it turns out. We’ve been playing with new services, new technologies, and new events. And along the way we’ve noted some helpful lessons about play.

Play can be uncomfortable

You might think it’s easy for me to advocate for play because Smudge is a creative studio and play is what creative businesses do. You might think play could never work for your organisation.

But, for those who know me well, purely playing for the sake of it isn’t easy for me. I have the sort of personality where I like to get outcomes. So, it's uncomfortable for me doing experiments where we don't deliver a result. But I also know not everything has to be productive and it’s not a realistic expectation that every new thing we put out there will be useful, so I push through that discomfort and play regardless.

As a small aside, if you’re reading this and you’ve got a strong emotional response about play, I’d encourage you to lean into that further and if you want to discuss this topic some more, I’m all ears, reach out.

Creativity is playing with many ideas

Despite the personal satisfaction I get achieving an outcome, I also know that a large part of creating something new is experimentation, and I wonder whether our definition of productivity might look like someone else’s view of play?

A common misconception about making software is that you have one great idea and build it, but part of creating something for the first time is exploring many more ideas than you end up shipping. You’re working out what shape something will take and how you’ll make different aspects of it work. That might include exploring 10 different ideas and picking a couple to iterate, while the others get left on the shelf.

People think prolifically creative people and organisations have all these brilliant, winning ideas. They do, but they also have many average ideas. It's only because they're playing more, experimenting more, and having more ideas in general, that more good ideas emerge.

Put good guardrails in place

One of the risks of exploring ideas is that if you leave the creative process too open ended, you can be consumed by the open space! It’s a good idea to establish guardrails when experimenting, especially with play projects that run long term, because there's a risk time spent on a project could get out of control.

In September we’re releasing an app called Jasmine. This has been a play project in collaboration with photographer Rebecca Bijl, who’s also my wife.

The seeds of this app were sown at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. During the keynote announcing Liquid Glass I thought it'd be fun to create an app using Apple’s new software design interface and Rebecca’s flower images. Making something is a great way to learn new technologies. So, I set up a project, with the goal of making an open space to be present in, that feels like being in an art gallery, using Liquid Glass.

I put boundaries around our play, giving the team four weeks to explore ideas around this concept. I didn’t suggest features. I simply said, use this photography and make something that feels spacious. I wasn’t committed to shipping a finished app. At the four-week mark, I was happy to finish up, document our learnings and leave it there. While this was a pure experiment, it was also very intentional play where we learned new approaches to app design and explored ways to use Apple’s new Liquid Glass controls. The result ended up being something that we all enjoyed and wanted to finish to a point of shipping.

Play can demand that you grow

We've sponsored events before and given our quiet, understated nature we rarely find the right place for us. However, we do like meeting new people and we enjoy showing people what we do. So, we started playing with the idea of what it could look like to host our own event and invite people we like. We came up with Behind the Code, an afternoon where people can see behind the scenes of some of the projects we’re working on and talk directly to our team involved in the creation process.

Running with our theme of play, we put an event on, took some risks, and tried some new ideas. Some worked well, others not so much. And in allowing ourselves to experiment and try something new, we discovered areas we needed to grow in, including bringing in a coach to support us with presenting. Our second Behind the Code event was much better for this coaching. And it was only through play and experimentation that we were able to work out what good presenting looked like for our team.

Good play partners help you feel safe

I’m always looking for ways to improve Smudge’s website and at the start of the year I was working with Lizzie Davidson, one of our creative partners. Through some discussion we agreed to work on defining our services more clearly on our website. I’d always been hesitant to do this, as often people want to split out the components that make up our services, not fully understanding how interconnected they are.

I didn’t find writing about our services particularly comfortable the first time I did it, because I had so many reasons not to do it. But Lizzie is a great play partner. She helped me work through my discomfort and experimenting with messages together enabled me to look at packaging our services in a different way, and now I’m much more of an advocate for them.

We want to be a good play partner too. Part of that is making sure you know what to expect when you work with us. For example, we’re about to launch a new prototyping service, and as a good play partner, when we quote for a prototype, we quote for custom software development. That way, if you like the prototype, and decide you want to build the next stage with us, you know how much it’s going to cost and you feel safe.

We don’t offer prototypes to get you in store and sell you something big. If you take your prototype and decide not to take that idea any further, we’re happy. If you take your prototype and work with another software design studio to build it, we’re still happy.

We quote to help you make informed decisions. Because if a prototype's going to cost $5,000 but making that prototype into software will cost $100,000, and we know that, but we don’t tell you, we’d be a pretty predatory play partner, and that’s not the way that we want to show up.

A thought to make us all better play partners

I’ve been thinking more about the dynamics in relationships where one person knows far more than the other. Sometimes you’re alongside someone with a similar level of maturity or knowledge. You take on challenges together, discover new things, stumble, and grow side by side. Other times, the gap is wide. And that knowledge can be used to the expert’s advantage, sometimes at the other person’s expense.

When you’re the one with more skill or insight, one of the most beautiful things you can do is use it to help the other person grow. To make the experience more enjoyable and less intimidating. To let them find their own rhythm and learn something yourself in the process.

A friend told me recently they avoid playing board games with certain people because those friends play the particular game all the time (they're experts) and always win. The result? It’s not fun. But what if the ‘expert’ players used their knowledge to make the game so enjoyable that my friend couldn’t wait to play again? What if expertise wasn’t about proving you’re the best, but about making it better for everyone in the room?

How have you been playing with new ideas this year?

I’m keen to hear if you’ve been experimenting with new ideas in 2025. Have you found boundaries helpful? How do you feel about your success rate on experiments? Have there been hits and flops? Does play feel uncomfortable sometimes? And how are you supporting your team (and maybe even your customers) to play more?

Drop me an email. I’d love to know.