Why play, not pressure, may be the key to unlocking creativity in design students

By Raksha Padaruth – South African Fine Artist and Senior Lecturer at Vega School at Emeris uMhlanga – an educational brand of The Independent Institute of Education (The IIE). Padaruth presented her research paper Design Play: Enhancing Ideation Skills Through Playful Strategies in Design Education under the Vega School banner at the 2025 Design Education Forum of Southern Africa (DEFSA) Conference.

Every year, I watch it happen. I ask a room full of first year design students to "start ideating," and suddenly the energy shifts. Pens hover above paper. Eyes dart around the room. Most latch onto the first "safe" idea they think will be acceptable.

These are not lazy students. They are anxious ones. Many of my students arrive at Vega School at Emeris uMhlanga carrying a deep fear of being wrong. They worry about judgment, marks and meeting expectations. The result is a kind of creative paralysis, a belief that ideas must be perfect before they are shared.

I've come to realise that this struggle isn't a personal failure on their part. It's systemic.

Most students come from schooling environments that reward correct answers, neat solutions and measurable outcomes. Creativity, experimentation and playful exploration are often secondary, if these appear at all. By the time students reach higher education, many have learned that mistakes are risky and that originality is something you either "have" or don't.

As a design educator, this is concerning. Design thrives on uncertainty. Ideas are not born fully formed but emerge through exploration, trial, failure and play. Yet assessment driven systems often prioritise the final product over the messy process that leads to it.

In my own teaching practice, I began asking myself an uncomfortable question:
"What if the way we teach ideation is actually reinforcing the fear we're trying to overcome?"

I noticed that traditional ideation tools like mind maps and brainstorming often felt mechanical to students, resulting in increased anxiety. Students worried about doing them "right." They censored themselves before ideas even had a chance to surface.

That's when I started experimenting with play. Not play as a gimmick or an icebreaker but play as a mindset. I introduced quick, time-bound drawing exercises where students had no choice but to draw the first thing that came to mind. I facilitated "What if?" idea games where quantity mattered more than quality, and silly ideas were not just allowed but encouraged. I asked students to bring found objects from home, like leaves, string, fabric, bubble wrap and use these to print, paint and make marks before they even thought about a final concept.

Something shifted. When play entered the lecture room, the sense of fear eased. Students laughed. They moved around. They talked to each other. They stopped asking, "Is this good?" and started asking, "What if I tried this?"

I watched previously reserved students begin to share. Not because their ideas were suddenly perfect, but because the stakes felt lower. Play gave them permission to explore without judgment. It reframed ideation as discovery rather than performance.

What struck me most was that many students didn't even realise they were ideating. They thought they were just playing. And yet, by the end of these activities, they had more ideas, more confidence, and a deeper understanding of their own creative process.

For me, this reaffirmed something I've always known as an artist: creativity doesn't begin with certainty. It begins with curiosity. Play creates space for curiosity to breathe. It invites the body, the senses, and intuition into learning, not just the intellect. It reminds students that ideas can come from materials, movement, conversation and experimentation.

This matters far beyond the design lecture room. We are living in a world that demands adaptability, imagination and the ability to navigate complexity. If students leave tertiary institutions believing that creativity is about avoiding mistakes or pleasing authority, we are doing them a disservice. But if they learn that creativity involves risk, resilience and openness, we equip them with skills that extend into every part of life.

I am not suggesting that structure or assessment disappear. I am advocating for balance. For learning environments to value process alongside outcomes. For lecture rooms to allow students to be human - uncertain, playful, experimental.

As educators, we have immense power. The way we frame creativity may have huge repercussions for students. Perhaps the question we should be asking is "How can we teach in ways that make creativity feel safe again?" For me, the answer keeps returning to something simple, and surprisingly radical: Let them play.