What's become apparent to me is how playful Made by Many is as a company. Play seems to be a large contributing factor in the day to day, it's clearly evident in the working process.

Firstly, and most notably to me is that many aspects of the design process have a playful nature to them.

In my short time here we have devised games as useful exercises to gain a better understanding our clients needs and objectives.

Sketch sessions have involved working closely with other team members and designers to throw thoughts back and forth, rapidly working through our ideas. This in itself is not an unusual way of working, but the pace at which we progress through the sketch sessions is. It's rapid. It keeps you on your toes. It keeps it fun.

Design spikes into core areas of the product have allowed us to gain a better understanding for how certain aspects of the design could work. This part of the process allows us the room for exploration and experimentation without getting bogged down in too many of the details. Spikes provide a play space to explore our options.

Secondly is the process of prototyping. It is crucial in both understanding what the end user wants and needs - fundamental to the success of the the things we produce - and for getting a better understanding of how a design will work. It is far more effective to be able to test with something that functions, when it's tangible and can be played with.

My background in design, for the past few years at least, has been working in a lean way so the process we practice here is not an alien one. Even so, I have been surprised at how quickly we have been able to get from sketch to prototype in order to test and iterate. I've been working closely with front-end over the last few weeks building basic HTML prototypes to see how some of our designs will respond across a range of devices and screen sizes. The prototypes have been rapidly produced and any unforeseen issues have been solved collaboratively along the way. We've quickly been able to get a sense for which ideas work and which do not. Again, the pace of the work and the collaborative nature keeps the process exciting.

Where play is perhaps more obvious is in our downtime. There's table football on the mezzanine, a bi-weekly Pilates class scheduled, 5-a-side football on Wednesdays and occasionally online multiplayer games. All this leisurely play makes for a healthy sense of competition amongst the team, and it seems clear that these games we play in our downtime and the competition it inspires feed into the products and services we design and the processes we employ to make them.

I've thoroughly enjoyed my first weeks here, both on a social and professional level, and I think play has been a large part of it. Long may we continue to play.