Playful

Playful : how play shifts our thinking, inspires connection, and sparks creativity
by Cas Holman
288 pages, Avery (2025)

Find a copy:

• Bookshop.org (affiliate — supports this site)
• WorldCat (library)

If you spend any time with me, you’ll find I urge play. Doodling, swatching just to see how a yarn or stitch works in different combinations, sitting outside (when weather allows) and just enjoying nature. So I was excited to read Playful.

I wanted more research and a more in-depth adult play curriculum. I work with seniors creating blankets, small business clients navigating tech challenges, and knitters and crocheters learning to trust themselves beyond the pattern. I wanted a playbook I could use with all of them. Instead, it’s a breezy survey, which is great! It’s part memoir and part workbook, with a lot of space devoted to Holman’s design work (especially Rigamajig, which I want a time machine for to send a set back to my childhood). It’s a good introduction, but it glosses where I wanted it to linger.

That said, anyone publishing a popular science book that endorses play for adults is doing important work. Holman explores the history of play research, and if you glean through the name-dropping, you’ll find others to follow up with. I had no idea she created Geemo, which I’ve always wanted. There’s something powerful in how that project teaches that art can become practical, that design can be this.

One line stuck with me: during her time helping relatives with research in the Galapagos, she writes, “try as I might, I just could not do something the same way twice” (103). Yes. That’s play. That’s swatching. That’s the work of building a practice through iteration and variation, trusting that each attempt teaches you something new even when — especially when — it doesn’t match the one before. Sure, sometimes you need to follow a recipe or protocol exactly. But play lives in the variation, and that matters too. I love saying “I’m not sure, but let’s try this to figure it out. It might not work, but we won’t know if we don’t try.” That’s the spirit I was hoping this book would dig into more deeply.

It’s worth reading for the introduction and the sparks, but I’m still hunting for the deeper playbook. I guess I’ll have to play more and write one myself.