Gamestorming the Academy: On Creative Play and Unconventional Learning for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Studies show that businesses the world over are looking for more creative managers, and creativity requires an innate ability to play with problems, scenarios, methods and possibilities and to make mistakes whilst doing so. Moreover, the new generation of knowledge workers will be required to fathom and negotiate more complex, networked, dynamic and open problems. They will need to navigate unknown spaces and challenges that currently don’t exist. This chapter looks at how tertiary institutions can respond to the needs of the future workforce by creating a more creative curriculum that goes beyond the teaching of expert knowledge and fact: a curriculum that uses play, and frameworks for discovery, to educate students in that ability to navigate the unknown. If students can begin to feel comfortable within the liminal, divergent phase of discovery, and liberate themselves from thinking only in the standard convergent, linear ways privileged in universities, they would be far better prepared for the big challenges ahead.