Open-Ended Play Helps Adults Learn Without Fixed Hierarchies

Cas Holman describes herself as a toy inventor, playground designer, and advocate for open-ended free play “for humans of all ages.” The phrase matters because her argument is not that adults should borrow a few childish activities for stress relief. It is that the conditions that make play powerful for children — uncertainty, self-direction, embodied experimentation, collaboration, and low fear of failure — remain useful in adulthood, including in professional and learning environments.

Holman’s work begins from a design premise: play is strongest when it does not overdetermine the outcome. In a Queens Museum installation called Traces of Play, she built abstract mark-making tools for children and families. The tools were intentionally difficult to control. A slide showed a toddler holding a long marker attached to a black tube in front of a white wall covered in colorful scribbles; another showed a bright museum space where children and parents worked across curved drawing surfaces, blue mats, and rolling tools, with marks accumulating across walls and floors.

The difficulty was not a flaw in the design. Holman said it removed the pressure to make something beautiful. She connected that to research suggesting that around age eight, drawing often shifts from an activity children love into something judged by its outcome. Her design response was to make control less available, so the child could return to process.

That principle carries through her other examples. At Liberty Science Center, Holman designed Wobbly World, a toddler play space built around balance. Toddlers encountered varied surfaces, inclines, and unstable conditions. Holman framed balance not as stasis but as “a constant shift,” and she said the exhibit was partly about how play can help people become more comfortable with uncertainty.

“In an open-ended play in particular,” Holman said, “because there’s no failure, because there’s no instructions, there is no certainty and therefore there is kind of only figure it out.”

That formulation became the backbone of the workshop: play as a structured encounter with uncertainty, not as unstructured frivolity. Holman’s designs are often made for children, but she repeatedly asked adults to recognize themselves in the same design logic. Adults, too, can become dependent on instructions, outcomes, expertise, and permission. Adults, too, can benefit from situations where the next move is not prescribed.

Rigamajig, the building system at the center of the workshop, was introduced by Cas Holman as a hands-on learning material now used in schools and children’s museums. The room had the Junior version on its tables. The slides showed children working with larger wooden planks, brackets, pulleys, ropes, and bolts: two boys outdoors beside a large structure, two girls assembling a contraption indoors, and a boy in a motorized wheelchair pulling a rope attached to a wooden cart holding another child.

Holman said Rigamajig is commonly used for STEM and STEAM learning, but teachers have increasingly reported using it for something less easily captured by curriculum labels: impulse control, negotiation, and conflict resolution. Her explanation was simple. When conflict arises inside play, children are motivated to resolve it because they want to get back to playing.

That makes play a context in which social and emotional capacities are not taught as abstractions. They become necessary to the work at hand. A child who wants the bridge to stand, the pulley to move, or the shared structure to continue has a reason to negotiate.

Holman also emphasized Rigamajig’s use in special education and inclusive classrooms. She said New York City’s District 75 special education schools had begun using Rigamajig across all their schools a couple of months earlier, in ways that were “really blowing my mind.” Because the material is open-ended, teachers are not locked into one prescribed use. They can decide what a child, classroom, or moment needs, and adapt the material accordingly.

That same open-endedness informs Holman’s phrase “designing for others to design.” She is not designing a finished object that transmits a lesson. She is designing a system through which other people can discover, negotiate, invent, and repurpose.

The adult implications became clearer in Holman’s account of a United Nations ITCILO workshop. Asked what she thought the future of learning was, she answered that it was play — but said she had no interest in discussing the future of learning without children, older adults, and everyone in between. She described setting up a two-day workshop with “80-year-olds and 8-year-olds,” adding that the numbers were somewhat arbitrary but that participants did end up roughly around those ages. They played together and talked about learning.

The challenge, Holman said, was making the conversations non-hierarchical. People naturally slip into habitual roles. But open-ended play helped flatten the structure because participants were figuring out what to do and how to do it together. No one held the single correct answer.

That experience helped Holman see that what she had been designing for children also applied to adults. Not merely because childhood play shapes adult identity, but because adults themselves can benefit from the same forms of exploratory, non-hierarchical, self-directed play.

When people asked Holman, “What about adults?”, her first answer was comic but revealing: adults need therapy. She said she was not sure even a beautifully designed adult playground would work, at least not if the goal was free play without instructions or imposed structure.

Adults can be good at sports, puzzles, and games, Holman said, but those activities usually tell participants what to do and how to do it. They supply rules, goals, success criteria, and often a known path to mastery. Holman is after something different: “generative play,” not consumptive entertainment. She distinguished play that produces something from the participant — an idea, a relation, a form, a discovery — from play that merely occupies the participant as a consumer.

That question became part of her book Playful, which she described as roughly one-third science, drawing from psychology, neuroscience, human development, and research on adult creativity. She did not present a neuroscience lecture in the workshop; she used the book’s research base as part of the explanation for why adult play deserves to be taken seriously. Holman also drew on 13 years as an art professor. Her students, she said, often came from highly structured school systems and were not especially practiced at “embracing possibility” or stepping into the unknown. Teaching art had already made her, in effect, someone who helped adults play.

One adult problem she named is that people ignore what she calls the “play voice.” In the room, adults had materials sitting on their tables before they were instructed to use them. Holman suggested that some part of them probably wanted to touch the rope, inspect the nut and bolt, spin something, or turn pieces over. The “adult voice” likely intervened: it is not time yet; no one has said we can do that; we should be paying attention.

Holman said she included in the book a “Diary of a Dejected Play Voice,” imagining what the ignored play impulse might record at the end of a day. A slide showed two examples: “It was a grassy slope. What more could you want?” and “The dog you didn’t play with.” The humor supported a serious point. Adult play does not always require a special site, object, or scheduled activity. It may begin with noticing an invitation and allowing oneself to respond.

Childhood play has a research vocabulary: types of play that educators, designers, and early-childhood professionals use to observe and discuss what children are doing. Holman said children themselves do not care what category they are in; they are simply playing. But the shared language helps adults talk about what they see.

Holman argued that adult play needs its own taxonomy because the same terms do not translate cleanly from childhood. “Risky play” is one example. For a five-year-old, risky play might mean jumping off a stage or wandering 10 feet from a beach blanket. For an adult, singing in line at the grocery store may be the riskier act. The physical danger is lower, but the social exposure is higher.

A slide from Playful attempted to map categories of adult play. It was dense and imperfectly legible, with some repeated or messy labeling, so it is best read as a working vocabulary rather than a polished classification system. The categories included meditative play, creative play, problem-solving play, attention play, playful or trivial play, competitive play, embodied play, and forms that push the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior.

The distinctions were useful less as rigid boxes than as a way to widen what adults recognize as play. Meditative play might involve repetitive ordering or familiar physical action: knitting, sorting, coloring, assembling a kit, or walking a known route. Creative play involved generating without instructions, where the player self-directs and makes decisions. Problem-solving play included games and puzzles, but also tinkering and figuring out a space. Attention play involved noticing the world and imagining unexpected details or scenarios. Embodied play used the body as a toy or vehicle for exploration, from dancing and swimming to climbing or skipping.

The taxonomy also made room for play that looks trivial, distracting, rebellious, or socially odd — fandom, pranks, gag gifts, talking back to the television, or time spent in modes often dismissed as wasting time. Holman’s point was not that every instance is equally valuable in the same way. It was that adults narrow play too quickly when they imagine it must look like running, leaping, and laughing out loud.

Play can also be quiet, concentrated, and serious-looking. That observation prepared the room for the activity that followed. Holman wanted participants to adopt a playful mindset, not perform a theatrical version of fun.

Holman introduced an exercise called “Name by Function,” which began as a design assignment. Her example was the to-go coffee mug. Instead of asking whether the world needs another attractive travel mug, she asked what function was actually being served. Is the problem that people need a better vessel, or that they are carrying coffee at 4 p.m. because they are still working, tired, or operating inside a system that makes rest difficult?

The exercise asks people to back away from the named object and identify the underlying function. If the function is “move liquids,” then the possible solutions expand far beyond a cup. Holman’s sketch slide included practical and absurd alternatives: a hose, a cloud, hands, a sponge, a wheelbarrow, an aqueduct with a horse, water balloons, and the gravitational pull of the moon. Her point was that the named object often narrows imagination before the problem has been understood.

She applied the same logic to cars. If the function is transportation, must the answer be another car? Could it be horses, moving sidewalks, personal flotation devices, or designing workplaces near flowing water so the river helps people commute? The examples made visible how much of design thinking is constrained by the object category one starts with.

The workshop prompt was to think of ways to measure time without defaulting to a clock. The slide showed a hand-drawn clock face crossed out in red under the instruction “Think of/imagine ways to measure time.” Audience members offered hair growth, giggles, fingernail growth, birdsong, hunger, the changing quality of light, shadows, journaling, flow, biological needs, and the need to stand up. Holman used the answers to surface how strange conventional time can be. Time may be accumulated, stretched ahead, lost, or captured through memory. It may be measured by bodies, light, animals, songs, or social rhythms.

She then made a sharper claim: the monetization of time has a “huge impact” on the ability to play. If time is treated as money, then activities not tied to capitalist production are easily devalued. Holman said she had spent part of her book quantifying play’s value and arguing that it is worth people’s time, but she also resisted making value the only defense. People do not eat only for nutritional value; they eat because food is delicious, joyful, and social. Play, by the same logic, should not have to justify itself only through productivity.

After the discussion of time, Holman gave the room 12 minutes in groups of three to “create a way to measure time” using Rigamajig Junior. She promised time warnings and told participants, “You can’t do it wrong.” They could steal, trade, or barter for materials from other tables.

The choice of 12 minutes was not incidental. In the reflection afterward, Holman said constraints are often essential in helping adults play. Even an open-ended prompt becomes more usable when it has boundaries. A longer period — 30 minutes or an hour — might have encouraged participants to talk, assess, design, and plan before touching the materials. Twelve minutes is awkwardly specific and somewhat abstract. It pushed people to begin building before they fully knew what they were making.

That, for Holman, was the point. Participants figured out the system by playing with it. They discovered how parts lined up, how brackets worked, how an axle might turn, how rope and pulley changed motion. They were not assessing the situation and then playing; they were playing in order to understand the situation.

The demonstrations showed what the prompt made possible without needing to prove that any device was a reliable clock. One group built “Thirst for Knowledge, the Aspen Anti-Drought Time Machine,” a lever-and-bucket system that hypothetically measured time through water. Spilled water, they joked, returned to nature, and eventually something would grow. Another group made “Edgar Allan Poe,” a pendulum and pit described as an evolving work of art and an asymptote, “continually resolving but will never resolve,” making its existence a measure of infinity.

Other devices measured time through wind, marks on paper, slope and gravity, knots untied before a dinner invitation, candles burning down during dinner, or the recognition that a structure resembled Snoopy. The machines did not converge on accuracy. They converged on interpretation. Some were mechanical, some narrative, some comic, some philosophical. The exercise had asked for a way to measure time; the answers revealed how many meanings “measure” and “time” could carry once a clock was forbidden.

In the discussion afterward, Holman asked how it felt to play as adults in a professional setting. One participant noted that everyone had chosen to attend because they wanted to play, so the group was predisposed to accept the premise. Another reflected on iteration: with more time and breaks, participants could have returned to their devices repeatedly. The exercise also made that participant think differently about making children clean up toys, because unfinished play may still be in process.

Another participant observed that most lectures arrange people to face the speaker and screen, but this activity turned people toward one another. They began laughing, talking, and integrating one another’s ideas. Holman used that comment to explain how much she thinks about posture as a designer.

In classrooms, she said, chairs facing the teacher create a dynamic in which the teacher is the expert and children receive knowledge. But people are “constructivist learners.” Round tables make it more likely that learners interact with one another, do things, and collaborate. The physical arrangement changes what kinds of learning are available.

A further participant connected the activity to networking. Play took pressure off the task of meeting strangers. Rather than starting with small talk or professional positioning, participants had an object, task, and shared problem through which to engage.

Holman said play can be non-hierarchical in precisely that way, but the material design matters. Rigamajig may look like an engineering kit, yet most adults do not already have expertise in it. That reduces deference. If the tables had been filled with Lego, she suggested, some people would have identified themselves or others as experts and deferred accordingly. With a less familiar material, more people can enter on equal footing.

She also designed the parts to support different kinds of contribution. A curved piece might function as an S-hook, but it might also become a snake, a tail, a river, a wing, a mountain, or a cloud. Someone interested in story can contribute differently from someone focused on stability. Someone may build, someone may narrate, someone may manage time, someone may test whether the thing works.

That is part of the non-hierarchical structure Holman is after. Play can reveal capacities that ordinary professional or classroom structures obscure. Holman said teachers in special education classrooms have told her that when Rigamajig comes out, nonverbal children who can be hard for peers to know sometimes “shine,” and other students suddenly get to see who that person is. For Holman, that is part of what play can make visible: different forms of intelligence, agency, and social presence.