Lextant

Play is easy to dismiss as something you grow out of. Adults keep reaching for it anyway, through cards games, action figures, sports, stuffed animals, and more. In a chaotic and overwhelming world, engaging in a state of play is when adults feel most immersed, connected, and free. Working from Lextant's Ideal Experience framework, our team of six spent a semester on one question: what makes play meaningful in adulthood? The brief was not to design a new board game or competitive sport, but rather to define the experiential qualities a toy or game would need to earn, and to develop a way to measure play against them.

The project ran on qualitative research: contextual observation, in-depth interviews, sensory cue mapping, and survey data each caught a different register of how adults actually experience play, from what they said to what they felt but could not name. Through iterative affinitization, the team distilled more than seven hundred and fifty primary data inputs into a single tiered model that translates emotional signal into structure. The framework lets a brand test whether a play experience meets adult expectations rather than merely guess at it. Our team then translated the model into a client-facing book built to carry the insight clearly, the point where the research became something clients could use.