This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Play: Shift Your Thinking, Inspire Connection & Spark Creativity with Cas Holman | 355

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Most of us were taught to color inside the lines, follow the rules, and get a gold star for staying tidy. Cas Holman has spent her career blowing that up — and thank god. She designs tools, not toys, to spark creativity, collaboration, and imagination. (If you’ve watched Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix, yep, she’s the genius behind the episode that made you want to ditch your to-do list and build something weird and wonderful instead.) In this episode, we dive into what happens when we stop obsessing over “right answers” and start embracing curiosity, creativity, and — yes — play. Cas challenges the way we think about learning, design, and work itself. Because what if the secret to solving our biggest grown-up problems is to think a little more like kids? We explore: Why play isn’t just for children (and why adults need it desperately) The danger of over-engineering creativity out of education and work How designing for possibility creates stronger leaders, teams, and ideas What Cas learned from creating Rigamajig, and why it’s so damn powerful Why fun and freedom are the real productivity hacks Because when we make more space for play, we make more space for brilliance. Thank you to our sponsors! Get 20% off your first order at curehydration.com/WOMANSWORK with code WOMANSWORK — and if you get a post-purchase survey, mention you heard about Cure here to help support the show! Connect with Cas: Website: https://casholman.com/ Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736596/playful-by-cas-holman-with-lydia-denworth/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/casholman/Rigamajig LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cas-holman-7b9baa5/ Abstract: The Art of Design (Season 2, Episode 4, The Art of Play): https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883 Related Podcast Episodes: Crafting A Better World with Diana Weymar | 245 Burnout 2.0: BurnBOLD with Cait Donovan | 331 The Power of Conscious Connection with Talia Fox | 263 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here.

Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training tread plus at OnePeloton.C.A. I am Nicole Kallel, your host of the This Is Woman's Work podcast, and I'm about a half a year away from a big time birthday. I'll be turning 50. And one of the things big birthdays and milestones often do is they have us reflect.

It's an opportunity to look back on our lives, the lives that we've lived so far, and decide what we want to carry forward and what we're finally ready to leave behind. And, friend, I don't have a lot of regrets. That doesn't mean I've done things perfectly or avoided mistakes. I have had far more than my fair share, and some of them have been doozies. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how they shaped the person that I am and the life that I've built. I can really only come up with two big regrets. The first is not living or studying abroad.

And the other, I wish I'd played more, had fun more as an adult. The problem is, after decades of taking both myself and life far too seriously, I'm not even sure I know where to start. Because somewhere between learning to pay bills, building a career, managing relationships, and trying to keep like 1,000 balls in the air, I traded in my playful self for my productive self. I told myself that it was part of growing up. I told myself that I was being responsible, but really?

I just forgot the version of me who knew how to play. And even worse, I forgot that it mattered. And here's the thing. That's not just sad. It's a little dangerous. Because when we disconnect from play, we're not just missing out on fun. We're cutting ourselves off from joy, creativity, connection, and some of the best parts of being human. Play isn't just what kids do when they have free time or when they're bored.

It's how we expand our thinking, reset our nervous systems, and remember that life is about so much more than checking things off of our to-do list. So as today's guest says, play is how we learn to be human, how we learn who we are, how we learn to fail, communicate, love, fight, rebel, desire, build, and survive. At its best, play is life-affirming, soul-sustaining, and mind-expanding. And I don't know about you, but I could use a lot more of all of that. So let me introduce our guest, Cass Holman, founder and chief designer of the toy company, Here is Will Rise and former professor of industrial design at RISD.

Her work, including iconic designs like Rigamajig and Gimo, has inspired playful learning imagination all over the world. She's led workshops and seminars with teams at Google, Nike, Lego Foundation, Disney Imagineering, and in art museums across the globe. Her mission? To show us that play isn't just for kids. And then it might be the thing, our overworked, over-serious, over-scheduled adult selves need the most.

Cass, welcome to the show. And because I really mean it when I say that I don't know where to start, can you start us off by explaining what play even means for us as adults. Yeah, I mean, thank you, Nicole. First of all, happy upcoming birthday. Thank you. I also just, I turned 50 last year. So I identify with how you were describing kind of. It's a, it's a big one. It is a big one. And I'm super excited about it. I feel like it's a point of pride almost. I don't know. Yeah. My party was called 50 and Farrell. I really I was like, this is how I'm going to roll, you know. A friend, I might borrow that.

Yeah. I encourage it. Do your best. I'm just giving you more homework now. Not only do you need to play. But, yeah, so, I mean, that was a beautiful introduction. And I'm actually quite moved by your words. Because I think that your experience is a very common one.

And like you said, that we trade in productivity. for play, right? Or we prioritize our lives and the things in our lives in a way that don't leave room for play. We don't prioritize it. If we can start to understand the value of it, then we will, the way that we do with kind of a healthy diet and getting enough sleep, right? Like maybe at some point in life we weren't as in touch with how much we need to sleep or what a big difference it makes when we eat well, right? And then as soon as we experience eating well or getting consistent amounts of good sleep, we're like, oh, right, okay, I'm going to, this matters and I'm going to make this a priority. So, and for me, to your question, like kind of what does play mean to our

lives? There's a lot of different kinds of play, right? There's kind of sports and video games and crossword puzzles and going dancing, right? Going out to dinner with friends. So there are ways that we kind of, that adults are quite good at playing and we can do. And what I focus on in the book is is free play, which is a little bit different than some of the more structured play in that it puts us in touch with kind of what we intuitively might do. So it's kind of open-ended play. So unstructured, right? In my experience, being a professor of what I would consider young adults in undergraduate and graduate art education, and also just in life as a professional person, in my experience, our lives are very structured and increasingly so, especially like you said

with product that need to be kind of productive or the feeling that we can't waste time, like this idea that time as a commodity is even kind of telling and how we think about how we structure our lives. So in FreePlay, it gives us a chance to connect with something that is not about an outcome, right? So we can kind of dive into an activity, not know where it's going, not need to be good at it, and really just play for the sake of playing, which is not to say that it doesn't have value, right? So on the one hand, like in the book, I'm trying to balance that, like, this has value and we should prioritize it and it's good for you. And at the other hand, I'm saying, like, we need to be able to play not because it's

just because it's good for you, right? Like, don't play because, like, now you have to be good at play in the same way that you have the pressure of like, oh, great, now I have to be good at yoga are now I have to be good at, right? So these things that actually, it's not about being good at it. It's just about letting yourself do it. Okay, a few different things popped into my head. One of them, and you kind of alluded to this,

is something that I experienced, I can't imagine I'm the only one, is when I do things or want to do things that fall under this category. For me, it's a lot like puzzles, games, things like that. There is this nagging voice. I almost feel guilty about it. like I should be doing something else or that this is not that, and I put in air quote,

it's best use of my time. And so can you give us, because I want to talk about free play and playing without there needing to be a reason. But before we do that, can you talk to us about the outcomes, the benefits, the reasons why not just allowing ourselves, but encouraging ourselves to do these things, why it matters? Yeah. My background is a designer. I designed, as you mentioned, toys and playgrounds. And when I set out to write the book, I really wanted to appeal to people who might be kind of skeptical, as many of us are. And I also know, even if we aren't skeptical, it really does help us prioritize things if we kind of believe it, right? If there's, we like evidence. We like proof. I love science. So I partnered with a science writer named Lydia Dinworth, who did quite a bit of research. And it's interesting, there's a lot of research about kind of play in general, both

animals, of course, children, and kind of humans in general, but very little specifically about adults. There's so much research that shows the benefits of play. And one scientist in particular named Stuart Brown, who studied play deprivation and the cost to kind of our identity and our development of not playing, right? Right. So there's research that shows, of course, the benefits both emotionally and physically, socially, of the benefits of playing, and then also research that is shown the huge detriment of play deprivation. And so we know that it's great for our psyche, it's great for our bodies, it's great for our relationships. And I think one of the things that specifically free play does is connects us to kind of our intuition. And our kind of intrinsic motivation, I think, like I said, with our lives being highly structured, I think we've become a little bit out of touch with kind of what we need at any point in time in a way that play can be something that can help us get what we need in the way that, you know, sometimes when you're like, oh, I feel weird today. Do I need to eat? Do I need to nap? Do I need to, like, go meditate? Right. And I think play can be one of those things that we can start to get in touch with. with like, oh, maybe I need to just go and putter, right?

Or like you said, maybe I need to do a puzzle, which for many I would consider meditative play. Right. So doing something like that is meditative play and the way that like bird watching is what I call attention play, right? Or kind of when I'm on the, I live in Brooklyn. I take the subway everywhere. When I'm on the subway, I love people watching. And it's kind of attention play because I'm just noticing all of the things. but I'm also kind of, it's imaginary play because I'm also inventing stories about everyone and wondering where they came from.

So glad it's not just me that does that. Oh, no. It's so fun. I love that play. So I think that there are also ways that we do play that we maybe don't think of as play. You know, so I think we do take care of ourselves with play, whether or not we know it. I think we could just do a lot more of it. Yeah, that's something that keeps popping in my head, as I might be doing this more than I'm conscious of. and the opportunity to choose to do more of it and allow for myself to do more of it, I think is something I'm excited about.

You talked about not needing to be good at it for us high achievers, right? That can be really, or I think of things like sports, pickleball. I know four people who've had serious injuries in the last couple months playing pickleball. And I'm like, might have been a little too competitive about it, right? So any tips about how to pull ourselves out of that? Because I think it's unconscious, right? We unconsciously get competitive. We unconsciously want to be good at something or achieve or accomplish at this point.

Any tips about how to catch that? Yeah. Well, first of all, you know, this is what our schooling does. So we spend our primary years. We have, you know, first through 12th grade learning to, want to succeed, right? All of our learning is wrapped up in grading, right? So the kind of extrinsic motivators of grades and competitive. And so we're all set up to kind of ruin everything by needing to like succeed at it, right? So one of this, so there's kind of three tenants in my,

in what I'm proposing will help adults play more. And one of them is reframing success, right? So what does it mean to succeed, right? Like, is the goal to win at pickleball or is the goal to laugh with your friends, get some exercise, and maybe be outside, you know, although I will say there's a lot of now indoor highly competitive pickle. Like, that's when that I saw it coming. I was like, I wonder if we're going to ruin pickleball too. Because it just seemed like such a wonderfully silly sport at first. Right. Yeah, no good point.

And it's still, I think for many it still is. But one example of that is the other night some friends and I kind of in it, there was an imprompt to a lot of us trying to go out to dinner. And in New York, you can't really just kind of roll up to a restaurant. And so we were kind of like, ah, we've got an hour wait over there or we could, you know, try to take the subway and go to this other neighborhood and maybe get in there. We were trying to eat somewhere good. But at some point I said, you know what, like success isn't a delicious meal. Success is that we all get to sit together and eat because we're hungry. So let's just go to that place that's not that great, but we know we can get in, you know?

So it was like such a, we like released ourselves from it having to be an epically delicious dinner. Because the point wasn't necessarily the meal. The point was all of us being together, right? So I do, I think like it's important. I hope that we're starting to develop an awareness of do something because you love it, whether it's you or your children, like be there for the joy of it and the play of it rather than the needing to be good at it or needing to succeed or become competitive or professional. Like, you can be a bad dancer and keep dancing, you know?

We can – yeah. There are so many ways to play basketball if you're not on the winning team. Like, it's not – it's about the play, right? So releasing judgment is a big one. Reframing success is another, you know. Releasing judgment is also trusting yourself and the people that you – play with, that they like you, like they want to play with you. No one is going to make fun of you for being bad. And then also like don't make fun of yourself for being bad or, you know,

or if you really want to dance while you're in line at the grocery store, let yourself do that. Try it and everything will be okay afterward, right? Singing while you're walking down the sidewalk. And I think we often, we just don't let ourselves do things because we're afraid of looking silly. There may be studies on this, but I'm just pulling numbers out of my butt. I feel like there's probably 80% of the releasing judgment is the judgment we have of and for ourselves. Absolutely. More often than not, other people don't care. And the people who love us, you know, are happy to see us having fun or a smile on our face.

And I also think of like the six-year-old self where it's like, if somebody is being judgmental about our play, then it's like, I just don't want to play with you anymore. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And if they even notice, I think that's also one of the wonderful things. And it's kind of in our early teen years that we start to be aware of people noticing or judging us. And before that, like, there's a beautiful oblivion to it, you know. Totally. And I'm finding that in my later years, I'm almost going back to where I was before puberty, where I just like didn't care. I was oblivious, didn't notice. What I worried, I just didn't notice. And I feel like I'm like there's something that's like bringing me back. And in a way that. It is really glorious and I'm loving about being over 50. You know how we're supposed to drink a bazillion ounces of water every day? Cute idea, but between work, life, and trying to remember what day it is,

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And when I need more than hydration, like pre-workout, where I need all the help I can get, I grab cure energy. It's got natural caffeine and electrolytes that get me moving and help me survive the part where I question all my life choices mid-workout. Staying hydrated isn't just about drinking water. You need electrolytes too. That's why I love cure. It's clean. It tastes great and it actually works. And for this is women's work listeners, you can get 20% off your first order at curehydration.com forward slash woman's work with code woman's work. And if you get a post-purchase survey, make sure to let them know that you heard about cure right here. It really helps support the show. Don't just drink more water. Upgrade it with cure. Yeah, I'm finding that too. The older I get, the less I care. And it is freedom. I don't know how to explain it in any other way than that. Okay. So reframe success, release, judgment. You said there's a third, right? Yeah. The third is embrace possibility. So when we embrace possibility, it's a little bit about curiosity. So it's kind of staying curious. And it's also just kind of being open and, and aware of what comes out of it. So another example, a friend of mine was going hiking with her son, and he was dilly-dallying as seven-year-olds do, and she was getting really frustrated.

She was like, we're going on a hike. You know, we have to reach the top. This is what this hike is, is that we go to the top of the mountain and then we can see the view. But he wanted to, you know, pick up sticks and poke a rock and turn over logs and play with moss and smell the ground. And at some point, she just kind of said, wait a minute, we'd been talking about this. And she said, maybe this is what we're doing, you know.

So she was kind of reframing success. But in the process of reframing success, they found this whole, like, orchard of different mosses. And he's been obsessed with moss ever since. And she was really interested in moss. So they kind of like, what was a hike became this like moss exploration. And by embracing possibilities, she was like, okay, I guess we're not going to, hike necessarily, but we're in the woods. Our goal was to be together and to be outside, so here we are. And now they have this family-wide passion for moss, right? So that's a little bit

like an example of kind of embracing possibilities. Like when you kind of are present for what might arise that you don't expect and you stay curious, then these whole other things can emerge that you might not have even noticed or you may have shut down if you were really single-mindedly kind of moving toward a goal or working toward an outcome. And is that also kind of a good example of free play, not having a destination or end goal or like just sort of like, oh, this took me in this direction. I think kids do that really well.

It's like they start something and then all of a sudden they're like over here and you're like, where did that come from? But it's because they don't have restrictions. And similarly, I think when adults can kind of kind of release the judge, that makes us feel like, no, you've got to be productive or, like, that's a waste of time or like, what are you doing? That usually when I say to myself, wait, what are you doing? How did I get here? That's when I'm really, like, following my intrinsic motivation so that I, like, maybe needed to rearrange my knick-knacks or, like, play with my plants. And I'll be like, wait, I was doing, like,

why am I in the plants right now? I don't know, because I need to. Okay, let myself do it. And usually, like, I'll do it for another 10 minutes or so, and then I'll be like, oh, I feel, I feel better. okay you know so that's like its own kind of play whatever kind of tinkering i think tinkering is a very very common way that adults play and and there's something there that we need but we often don't let ourselves dive in and just rearrange our knick-knacks as much as we might benefit from yeah i'm a tinker for sure but i think the opportunity is to put it in the play category even just in my own mind because, yeah, I find myself doing that a lot. I do, but then I like, call it organizing or whatever, but I'm like organizing something that really does not need to be organized. It's more just like a feeling of like,

oh, I just want to mess with this a little bit. Yeah, find order. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, you talk about adult play types. And I think you mentioned a couple earlier, but you talk about different ones in your book. Can you give us, I don't know how many there are, but a rundown of a few of the most common. play types or ones that we want to be mindful of. Okay, so I mentioned a meditative play, which is kind of a slow play. And I mentioned attention play, which was kind of the bird watching. And of course, like with adults, like in the adult play types that I've kind of defined, all of them can be done socially and many of them frequently are social.

So social play isn't its own category because I think like we do these socially. And then similarly, free play isn't its own category because each of these types of play can be done as free play or as kind of more of an organized play. One that's kind of, I think, interesting is misbehavior play. You know, so for some people that could be like snooping or getting, you know, like looking in somebody's fridge when you go to their house, which I always want to do whether or not I do it, which feels nicer than looking in medicine cabinets, which we also, I think, probably. most of us want to do. But that's kind of misbehavior play. But for many, like, having a night out where we like, maybe we drink too much or kind of like pushing boundaries, right? And I think that in that also even kind of dressing up, whether it's like just putting on an outfit that feels more extreme or like it brings out some version of your personality as a way that we can also

kind of play with our identities. So drag is kind of behavior play, but also kind of misbehavior play because for some people it's pushing against something they feel like they shouldn't be doing. There's also, there's embodied play. And I think for adults, you know, dancing around and sports, of course, are embodied play. But on the free play end of things, I love a kitchen dance party, just like imprompt, too, while people are doing dishes, you know, move around. All kinds of, like, you know, swimming and playing at the beach and things like that are kind of a, more of the free play version of embodied play. And I think that what you brought up with kind of rearranging things or tinkering

are a little bit about, like, there's something about creating order that can be playful that also reminds me of watching a, I don't know when the last time is you watched a child play with a dollhouse, kind of like making things feel just so as a way of feeling some control, whether it's domestic or not. And I think that that can be, can be playful in a way that if we, if we kind of rearrange things such that we don't know, like, oh, what would happen if we did this, right? So in each of like these adult play types, there's a way we can enter them with what if. And that helps us kind of stay open to whether or not it's successful, right? So if you say, well, what if we put the couch over there? And then you might say like, oh, wow, yeah, that doesn't work. But you've, you've learned something about what? what was good about it before, right? And in the meantime, it probably changed the dynamic of what happened in your living room, you know, or saying like, let's all sit on the floor tonight. You know, I've done this before with dinner parties where we just, we run out of chairs. And rather

than having a couple people sitting on the floor on a weird trash can, we just all sit on the floor. And it really changes the dynamic in a way that's quite lovely. And it takes all of us out of our normal, you know, posture. So there are ways that just shifting something, whether it's domestic or also in your work life can really give you kind of, and thinking of it as play and entering it with a playful mindset can really kind of give you a new perspective and make something feel fresh or, you know, interesting again. Yeah.

Well, I'm not going to lie, the misbehavior play, the minute you said it, it was like, tell me more. I don't know what it is. It reminded me the idea that came into my head was, you know, when I was younger in school, like high school or college, college, getting the giggles with one of your friends during a class where it's like, you know you're not supposed to, but just the like uncontrollable and the fact that you're laughing when you shouldn't be makes it even funnier. And then all of a sudden, you get kicked

out of class that happened to be once. But just, you know, this idea of pushing against expectations or perfection or letting go a little bit about what people think or how it looks. Yeah. Something about that, I think, is appealing to me. Now, and I want to just also add that I think for, for many adults, any play, just playing is misbehaving, right? Like, it's actually, I would like this to not be the case, but it's, I mean, this is why I wrote the book. Like, it's so hard for us to let ourselves play, right? I think that we all know how to play. We became who we are through play. And then we learned to not play, right? To be an adult, like, definitively is to not play. Like, as you were, I mean, I think probably all of us throughout our teen and preteen years, like, don't, you know, don't act like a kid or like grow up. All of these things, like it was bad to be a child or it was bad to play. You know, you won't be taken seriously. You won't, people won't respect you if you're playful. Like, you need to act like an adult, right? So just playing is already misbehaving in a way that, that I think, requires that

we'd be brave and trust ourselves and trust the people around us a lot. Totally. Okay, so that leads me to my last question, which is for those of us who have taken ourselves in life far too seriously and want to explore and misbehave and play a little bit more, any tips around communicating or inviting other people in our lives to play with us? You mentioned it, most of it being social. and I don't want the people in my life to think I've all of a sudden gone off the deep end, right? So like how do, which I guess is probably fine, but how do we communicate, how do we invite other people into this with us?

Yeah. In play, you know, I mentioned trust and risk. And to play is to be vulnerable, right? Which is why it's hard and also why it is so profoundly important to us, right? Like the more vulnerable we are when we find ourselves in a vulnerable. Like, usually that means that there's something, a large benefit or something really beneficial that we're going to gain by opening ourselves up to something, right? So I think that having the conversation with your friends about like, hey, do you want to try to play more? Or like, hey, I want to, you know, I read this book, right? I think I'm going to, will you do this with me? You know, and just kind of even prefacing it in advance. And I think we do this a little bit with friends, like if we're going somewhere and say, oh, you know, I kind of had a rough day. Like, is it okay if I'm a little bit, you know? And just saying that kind of gives ourselves permission to like show up wherever we are. And usually, this is common. I'm not alone in doing this, but I definitely will be like, oh, I haven't seen this person in so long. I really, I need to like show up and be fun and wonderful. And some days I just can't, right? But I feel the pressure to like show up and be an entertainer.

be like, ah, I got to be, we got to have a great time. And the times that I let myself say, like, hey, I want to come and I want to be with you, but I like have had a rough day. Like, can we just laugh tonight? Like, I need to just, whatever it takes, like, we need to, you know, and they're like, yes. So usually your friends will be so excited to know where you are and probably have their own whatever states they're showing up in. And whether it's, I had a rough day or I had an amazing day, Like, play is exactly what we need in all of those. I think it's also the anecdote for so much. There's some uncertainty happening in the world right now.

Yeah, totally. And people often think, like, oh, we play when things are good. And it's like, well, we also need to play when things are bad. Actually, when things are rough is really when we need to be grounded in our humanity and in our sense of self. And that is what play does. So, yeah, so I think being honest with your friends and saying, here's this thing that I want to try. Like, do you want to try it with me? Yeah, I almost think of, like, inviting your friend over to play, right?

Like, a few of my closest friends I know will listen to this episode. So I'm on the hook whether I like it or not. They're going to be like, all right, we're playing, friend. So I hope you listening are going to do the same. So definitely go order Cass's book, playful, wherever it is you buy books. Definitely, let's keep our local bookstores in business. Yeah. You can also find out more about Cass and her work on her website,

Cass Holman.com or on Instagram, we'll put all the links and all the ways to find and follow Cass in show notes. And send this episode to the friends you want to play with and invite them to play. Cass, thank you for your important work and for reminding us to have a little fun. Thank you, Nicole. It was great to talk to you. My pleasure. Okay, friend, maybe the real takeaway here isn't that play is something we grow out of. It's something we grow into if we let ourselves. And it's not childish. It's not a waste of time. It's one of the most life-affirming, creativity-sparking, connection-building things that we can do. So whether it's building something with your hands, getting lost in a hobby, laughing till your cheeks hurt, or doing something

just for the pure joy of it, let's make space for play, especially when life feels heavy, busy, or overwhelming, because that's when we need it most. Because fun isn't frivolous, joy isn't optional in reclaiming our playful selves, that is woman's work.