Prior to this project, I would not have considered play as an important role, if any role at all, in my creative process. I had viewed play as chaotic or childish, which did not seem to relate to how I made pieces or the final products. When creating work, I often found myself being very methodic, meticulously planning the details and heavily critiquing the outcomes to end up with something I was content with. This process has always been intensely careful and structured at its core, so at the time, describing any part of this process as “play” would have felt inaccurate or awkward. However, I now recognize that my understanding of play was very shallow and narrow–minded. In actuality, it has been one of the driving factors in my creative process; I just did not associate it with “play.” Play is the experimentation and discovery when I develop ideas at the beginning of a new piece. It is the seemingly endless trial and error as I create multiple prototypes of the same idea to determine the most successful. Overall, "play" is the practice of allowing myself to try new things and take chances despite how it turns out.

When brainstorming ideas for images to create for this project, my final product was not even an idea I had originally considered. Instead, it was the result of taking a chance and trying something new, not worrying too much about the outcome since it was never my intention to use the photos anyway. Regardless, it ended up being one of my favorite images I captured for the course so far. In the end, the idea of play has always been fundamental to my creative process, even if I had never initially recognized its importance. Now as I am more aware of it, I think it would be beneficial to allow my process/method of creation to become looser and more sporadic, as it can lead to outcomes I would have never thought of in the first place and help bring more joy and carelessness into the act of making.