May, 2026.- What if play is not a method, not a strategy, not a means to an end? What if its greatest power lies precisely in achieving nothing at all?
Vitor Freire, Creative Director at Imagination of Things, invites us to reconsider everything we think we know about play. Through Unruly Play—a platform he describes as “less a database than a working argument”—Freire curates a constellation of works that refuse to behave. A seesaw threaded through a border wall. A phone booth connected to the dead. Jokes broadcast in a Turkish neighborhood in Oslo. These are not gamification tactics or engagement hacks. They are invitations: to sit with discomfort, to open invisible spaces for conversations that rarely happen out loud, and to close the distance between strangers.
In this interview, Freire challenges the narrow, flattened definitions of play that dominate design and advertising. Play, he argues, is not just for children. It is not a tool to make something else more palatable. Instead, it is a way of organizing attention, encounter, risk, refusal, and change. It thrives in the fluid space between the serious and the silly—where absurdity can hold profound truth, and where a wobbly video game about penises can become a thoughtful meditation on consent and queerness.
Freire also reveals why Unruly Play resists traditional categories like discipline or theme. “Disciplines that don’t talk to each other” are forced into unusual dialogues because that is precisely how creativity works: through unexpected connections, not safe sorting. The platform includes generative tools—Shuffle, Collect, Canvas—not as gimmicks, but as an extension of a core belief: that archives should be touched, remixed, and argued with. The visitor is not a passive browser but an active participant, invited to doodle, to create arguments, and to stand under the collection as if under a constellation.
What emerges is a portrait of play as permission: permission to challenge what is fixed, to rehearse what does not yet exist, and to open other ways of being—even if only temporarily. This is a conversation about creativity, responsibility, and the radical act of taking play seriously.
1. “Play as Permission”: You said, “Play is how we give permission—permission to challenge what’s fixed, rehearse what doesn’t exist yet, and close the distance between people.” What’s a specific example from the Unruly Play collection where play achieved something that serious discourse could not?
I think it can be interesting for us to leave the idea of achievement aside for a moment, or at least in the conventional sense that we’re used to thinking about it. What we’ve been doing at Imagination of Things is thinking of play beyond it being a problem-solving method. Play is about process, about diving into the unknown. Sometimes it achieves, literally, concretely, nothing — while at the same time creating many new possibilities.
In Unruly Play we featured the work of Candy Chang, who installed official-looking street signs in Hong Kong saying “It’s ok to freak out here”. With it, she’s not actually solving a tangible problem, right? The power of her work lies in how she’s opening a small, invisible space for a conversation that doesn’t usually happen out loud. The themes of this work are profoundly serious, but the approach is not. There’s also a piece in the archive called “Turkish Jokes” where the artist Jens Haaning sets up a speaker in a Turkish neighborhood in Oslo, playing jokes only in Turkish — from a distance you would see only people from Turkish backgrounds laughing while white Norwegians look confused (but amused). He’s tackling discrimination, prejudice, urban politics, in all their seriousness through the most unserious of all formats — jokes.
Both these examples also show us how there’s no clear-cut distinction between what is playful and what is serious. That contrast is always fluid, and that’s what makes these types of works so exciting. They don’t achieve anything in the way we’re used to considering what achievement is. What these examples of Unruly Play do, at their core, is that they open other ways of existing, even if temporarily. They are most powerful when they aren’t trying to achieve anything at all.
2. An Archive, Not a Database: Unruly Play is described as “less a database than a working argument.” What argument about play are you trying to make through the selection and juxtaposition of works?
The argument is that play is much wider than the field admits, and that we should be taking it more seriously, especially as creatives. Most of what gets called play in design and culture is narrow: gamification, engagement, a tool to make something else more palatable. Often, when we talk about play, people assume we refer only to children — as if play didn’t belong to anyone else. Unruly Play argues against this flattening of play, and wants to show how complex it can be.
It argues for play as a way of organizing attention, encounter, risk, refusal and change. A seesaw threaded through a border wall, like “Teeter-totter wall”, and a phone booth for the dead, such as “The Wind Telephone”, may not share a discipline, a medium, or even a method, but they share something about what play can hold. Both implement tools that spark profound connections. Unruly Play is the argument that if you put these works next to one another, like strangers sitting next to each other on the bus, these narrow, limiting definitions stop being tenable. We’re trying to mirror what the works themselves do: to create more unusual, powerful connections by bringing together works that challenge us and how we think about the world.
3. Disciplines That Don’t Talk to Each Other: You noted that your references “rarely talk to each other”—a seesaw through a border wall alongside a phone booth connected to the dead. Why is it productive to force these “unusual dialogues” rather than organizing work by discipline or theme?
The collection is organized — it’s just not disciplined. It’s defiant of conventionality. To us, that’s what an archive of unruly play has to be, or the form contradicts the content.
This curatorial decision not to sort by medium or theme came after a long process of discussions and research. What we concluded was that these categories can be limiting and exclusionary. They can reinforce the narrow-minded view that we think is incompatible with the nature of play.
If Unruly Play wants to be as radical as the works it features, it must try to undo these restrictions, to exercise new ways of connecting, creating and reflecting about play. The archive is our way of producing invitations, as if we’re introducing people at a party that we think would have interesting conversations, even if they have opposing opinions. Take the examples we mentioned before, “Teeter-totter wall” and “The Wind Telephone”. By not being divided in categories, they can inhabit the same room, they can co-exist in their differences and similarities. That is something we think applies to real life as well.
Another aspect of Unruly Play that we opted for is that the pairings for these conversations are nudged by design — shuffle mode picks three works and offers a prompt, for example — but the dialogues themselves emerge through whoever encounters them. So it’s not up to us where these discussions will lead, but up to the visitor, or user, of Unruly Play.
4. Generative Tools (Shuffle, Collect, Canvas): The platform includes tools to make the collection “generative rather than passively archival.” Why was it important to users to not just browse but to remix, doodle, and create arguments? What does that reveal about how you think creativity works?
That we wanted an element of agency was one of the first things we realized about Unruly Play, actually. Archives are usually passive instruments where visitors can look at items but not touch them or change them in any way. It’s a one-sided relationship. All the projects we were considering to add, however, worked precisely in opposition to that. They promoted participation, collaboration. And that has in fact been how we’ve operated our studio for the last decade. So it would make no sense for us to not incorporate this into Unruly Play as well. An archive about play has to be playful, otherwise it will betray its own core.
These generative tools came into our development of Unruly Play as seeds for other ways of making sense of the collection. Shuffle is the one that reveals the most about our own creative process. It picks three works at random and pairs them with a poetic provocation, a prompt that won’t ask you to, let’s say, conventionally analyze the works, but to read them sideways, to actually engage with them. It can be something like: “One of these works creates a situation nobody could have predicted. A strange encounter, a spark, an unexpected opening. When did something like that last happen to you?” The prompt is about you, with the works as your starting point. The collection becomes a constellation you’re standing under, not a database you’re searching.
It started as a feature and became inspiration for IRL events. Unruly Sessions, the live workshop format we’re developing, came directly out of it — the archive in the backdrop, a poetic provocation in the room, creatives in conversation.
These features are there to gently offer other ways of sense-making with this collection. We designed them with the intention of showing these projects as inspiration for new things to be created out there.
5. Play for Complex Issues: The platform features works that use “play as a method to address complex issues” like power structures and rebuilding social connections. When does play risk trivializing a serious issue, and how do you distinguish between playful critique and mere frivolity?
Play trivializes when the playfulness is decorative, when it’s a coat of paint on a subject the makers haven’t actually thought critically about. You can usually tell. The form doesn’t match the stakes, or the form is doing all the work and there’s nothing underneath.
We came across many brand projects, for example, that used play simply to stay relevant by following a trend. To try to distinguish those from works we’re actually intrigued by, we tried to define criteria. Even though most times we can tell straight away which projects we think are not unruly enough, it turned out that the criteria were less useful to us than the conversations. The most interesting moments were always when we disagreed about whether something belonged to the collection or not. Having to justify our choices, to argue, and to sometimes change our minds and pull a piece out, that is a tension that is more honest than any rule.
One thing we could agree on is that silliness isn’t trivialization. “Genital Jousting” is a video game about wobbly disembodied penises trying to penetrate each other at a house party. It is extremely silly at the same time it is a thoughtful piece on consent, queerness, and awkward intimacy. “The Museum of Jurassic Technology” is a museum of objects that may or may not exist, and it has more to say about how knowledge is constructed than most museums of actual things. Mella Jaarsma’s “I Eat You Eat Me” sits two strangers across from each other and asks them to feed each other from a shared plate. Absurd setup. Real encounter. Serious discussions.
6. From Studio Inspiration to Public Resource: Your collaborators asked where your ideas came from, so you built a public platform. What responsibility do you feel toward the artists and communities whose work you’ve curated, especially when their work is now being remixed and shuffled by strangers online?
One responsibility is accuracy. That is, making sure the works are represented with care, context, and clarity rather than reduced to aesthetic references. Our goal is to show complexity and for that reason many of the projects in Unruly Play emerge from very specific political, cultural, or personal conditions. Ultimately, the platform is less interested in ownership than stewardship. Unruly Play does not claim to define the field of play. It simply makes visible a constellation of practices that already exist across art, activism, design, and everyday life. These are also practices that we believe in, and we wish to see them grow into more and more spaces across the world.
Another responsibility is resisting the flattening effect that often happens online. Digital platforms tend to turn everything into interchangeable content, and we often lose track of where that has come from. Unruly Play was designed against that instinct. The shuffle and collection tools are meant to create unexpected relationships between works, but not to erase their origins. Ideally, the platform encourages curiosity and deeper reading rather than fast consumption.
At the same time, we also accept, as artists ourselves, that reinterpretation is part of how cultural ideas stay alive. Play itself depends on variation, misuse, adaptation, and re-performance. If people discover connections between works that the curators did not anticipate, that is part of the value of making the archive public. The responsibility is not to control interpretation, but to build a framework where reinterpretation happens thoughtfully rather than carelessly.
