Salon contributes to Design & Game Theory…

As a fundamental type of human activity, games are expressive of our personal and social “ludic” nature, the word coming from the Latin LUDUS, meaning game, play, sport; to play, to train, to mimic, to deceive. For an understanding of what this means we can refer first to the writing of Dutch social historian Johan Huizinga, as laid out in his 1955 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.

HOMO SAPIENS is “rational man”, embodying the capacity for striving to make sense. One can imagine Homo sapiens as being represented by French artist Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker” (1880) which he intended as the keystone figure in the door sculpted in commemoration of Dante’s Gates of Hell for a museum of decoration in Paris that was never built. This reflective, rather tormented Homo sapiens, with his head pressed in thought to his chin might represent, to a designer, “man the rational planner,” the problem definer and solver.

HOMO FABER, rather, is “Man the maker,” the constructor of form who works with materials and techniques to realize a vision in space and time. One can imagine this person represented in the classic photographs of the World War II–era prints of Rosie the Riveter, or any other maker of choice, the can-do solution constructor wrestling with and knowledgeable of materials, tools, and processes.

HOMO LUDENS is “MAN WHO PLAYS”. When we imagine this person, who do we see and what are they doing? The German Enlightenment polymath, Friedrich Schiller, writes in On the Aesthetic Education of Man that “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.” Homo ludens is the person who seeks out problems through the play of social interaction and plays them through to some level of resolution.

…excerpt from “Salon, an Autonomous Ludic Interior, Alan Bruton