Intro Episode - Hello from Jane and Ronan

Hello there!

We’re Dr. Jane Hession and Ronan Healy. We’re a husband and wife team and co-founders of the service design studio How Might We - www.howmightwe.design

We're passionate about Play and provide online and in-house training in the LEGO Serious Play method to:

1) Third-level Educators - https://bit.ly/LSP_Ed_Innovators

2) Organisational Innovators - https://bit.ly/LSP_Org_Innovators

We're delighted to have you as a listener. Please get in touch with us if you would like to be a guest or have a guest suggestion.

Episode One

In 2015, we hoped to become parents and did what every expecting parent does. Buy ten books on parenting…read one, skim one....and leave the others to gather dust!

Coincidentally, at the same time, we were trying to figure out if the LEGO® Serious Play® method had any merit as a service design and systems thinking tool.

Trying to understand the LEGO® method led us back to the parenting books we had abandoned, which then took us down a rabbit hole of trying to understand two questions,

What is Play? and Why do we Play?

Since starting our "Play Odessey", we’ve come to understand that to answer these questions, we’re actually trying to understand:

1) What is cognition?

2) What is perception?

3) What is human physiology?

4) What is it to be a human being?

5) What is the centre of Human-centred design? (if that’s not too grandiose a question)

Before starting this podcast, we wanted to ensure that “cute” or “fluffy” conversations about play and playfulness didn’t happen. We know the workplace is serious. We’re not naive to that fact.

Since 2015, we’ve taken a serious look at play, and it’s taken us to rich and varied disciplines such as:

1) Pragmatism

2) Ecological Psychology

3) Affective Neuroscience

4) Material Engagement Theory

5) The Enactivist Approach and 4E cognition

6) Play Therapy, Psychology and Psychotherapy

The people we’ve interviewed have written books and research papers and dedicated much of their working lives to these topics. Because of that, our podcast is unapologetically long form. We want to know the person behind the research.

The name SEEKING PLAY is a homage to the work of Jaak Panksepp, which we cover in our video. We're delighted to have you as a listener and hope you enjoy this episode.