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Play to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
Summary
In this talk, Dr. Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa redefines play as a serious strategy for innovation. Through The Innovation Playground, she shows how curiosity, collaboration, and experimentation transform overlooked insights into powerful UX breakthroughs. From intentionally incoporating puzzles that unlock strategic thinking, to LEGO sessions that make data challenges tangible, her case studies reveal how user research becomes more than discovery, it becomes learning enablement and a bridge to unified insights.
Key Insights
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The most expensive part of digital initiatives is the 'messy middle' between insights and action, where alignment stalls.
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Play fosters psychological safety, breaks down hierarchical barriers, and promotes shared alignment in teams.
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C-FRE—curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—captures the key softer qualities of play in workplace settings.
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Traditional workshops and expert sessions may fail to move complex initiatives forward without incorporating new approaches like play.
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Selecting play activities should be tailored to team psychology; what resonates with one group may not work for another.
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Play is especially effective in situations involving complexity and ambiguity, where psychological safety and creativity are needed.
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Play may not be effective with new teams or under tight time constraints where quick, high-stakes decisions are required.
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Using puzzles as icebreakers with engineers leverages their problem-solving nature and helps initiate collaboration quickly.
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Play-based sessions can be seamlessly integrated into workshops to avoid seeming frivolous and to support serious decision-making.
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Researchers should evolve from insight gatherers to catalysts of change by actively influencing organizational alignment, with play as a key tool.
Notable Quotes
"The most expensive part of digital initiative is not delivery, it’s that messy middle—the space between insights and moving things forward."
"In a world of AI where things are speeding up, it's more important than ever to position ourselves as teams that can actually change things."
"Play is known to create psychological safety, break down barriers, and foster shared alignment."
"C-FRE stands for curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—the soft qualities we tend to overlook in play."
"I asked myself, will I take the leap or will I take permission? And this gamble paid off."
"Within five minutes and two seconds, they just dove right in and started collaborating."
"Play disrupts hierarchy, which is why it helps teams stuck in defensiveness to move forward."
"It’s not about play at work being silly; it’s about weaving it in seamlessly so it just feels right."
"If it feels uncomfortable, you’re probably doing something right."
"Our research power is our ability to influence change across organizations, not just gather insights."
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