Give a child an expensive toy and there is always a chance they will become more interested in the box it came in. Here’s why that’s interesting…
To an adult, a cardboard box is a purely functional item, and once it has carried something from one place to another, its job is over. But to a child, it might be a castle, racing car, shop, cave, submarine or spaceship.
This familiar bit of childhood behaviour tells us something important about how play works, and what that means for us throughout life.
Some toys leave very little to chance: you can press a button and the figure walks, talks or performs its special move. The mechanism may be impressive, but it also begins to prescribe the play: this is the character’s voice, this is what it does, and this is how the action is supposed to unfold.
Children may enjoy the effect, but once they have seen it a few times, there may not be much left for them to add.
A cardboard box does nothing at all. But its lack of character and instructions is its greatest strength. Because the box supplies so little and comes with no instructions, the child must supply almost everything, from a setting to characters, dangers, goals and rules.
It’s usually only a matter of minutes before they’re sitting inside using holes for windows and a few felt-tip lines for a control panel. The box is an invitation to invent.
Children are unusually good at separating an object from its official purpose. They love turning cushions into stepping stones across lava, or using a blanket and a couple of chairs to make a den (from which adults are forbidden). Sticks inevitably become magic wands or, perhaps less happily, deadly weapons.
This is ingenuity absolutely stripped back to its simplest form: that is, looking beyond what something is and imagining what it could be.
Adults gradually become less inclined to do this. We learn the proper names, categories and uses of things. Our left hemispheres take over, which makes us efficient, but can also narrow the possibilities we notice.
Children have not yet accepted or integrated all those limitations, and so their world is still fundamentally loose and ‘rearrangeable’.
When used to its full potential, an empty cardboard box also reveals several of the conditions that make play powerful.
The result is Ingenuity, developed naturally through imagining, making, testing and adapting to each other’s ideas.
Children are naturally good at seeing what something could become, whereas adults become more practised at seeing what it already is.
That is useful, of course, but it can also make our thinking less flexible. A box becomes packaging, a problem becomes an obstacle rather than an opportunity, and a colleague might be seen less as a fully rounded human than as the role we are used to seeing them perform.
Play, properly understood, is fantastic at interrupting these adult certainties and unthinking processes.
At Sharky + George, we create experiences that give adults the same freedom children find in a cardboard box: a distinct Space where normal assumptions loosen, Connection with other people in unfamiliar ways, and enough challenge and absorption to create Flow.
This has real, lasting value, and a team returns to work having practised thinking differently, adapted together and seen one another with fresh eyes.
Children rarely need to be taught how to turn a box into another world, but adults sometimes need the space and permission to rediscover that ability.
That is the Transformational Power of Play.
And there may even be direct practical benefits – as our Right Brainy story shows, a cardboard box once helped bring three astronauts safely home from space…
Read more about these ideas in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
See also:
The Play Files #1: Bumble Bees Play Ball Games
The Play Files #2: LEGO is the world’s biggest tyre maker (sort of)
Images licensed under the Unsplash+ License
