Some quotes from an interview with Bill Gaver

• We don’t analyse the data, so we don’t do some of the things that I might have done when I was a psychologist, like count up the number of people who give certain types of replies or even the number of responses, nor do we try to use the replies to generate personas, because after all we’ve got real people that we’re dealing with. And we don’t really do scenarios in that context because, again, we’ve got real returns from real people. We don’t need to kind of re-present them. They are what they are, and what I find too is that it’s nice to work with the… raw materials because they force you to re-interpret them pretty much every time you look at them
  
• Ludic Design: I’ve been inspired by the notion of designing for play because I think it offers a nice alternative to assumptions that design should be about problem solving or about functionality or about trying to … pursue tasks in particular ways. From the point of view of play; if you want to think about people as being characterized by play you realize that there is a huge number of activities that we pursue in everyday life that are not about achieving some external goal but are done merely for the sake of enjoyment and pleasure. Here I don’t mean game play. I don’t mean joining in a set of kind of arbitrary rules to see who can win in some situation. On the contrary I mean by play something much more fluid and self-motivated so examples of play are things like, I don’t know, anything from fooling round with friends and taking on imaginary roles when you’re just having a chat with them to maybe starting to take over things where you stack up things to see how many things you can balance on one another before they all tumble down or taking a new walk on the way home from work just to see where you get.
• Also I tend to allow that category to extend to beyond the obviously playful to taking things like enjoyment of the scenery or just sort of staring out the window and wondering about how the wind is moving around the leaves and the trees and so forth.
• So it’s a pretty broad category and I think what really ties it together in my mind is the notion of there’s a bunch of ways of appreciating the world or engaging with the world that aren’t goal oriented and that it’s quite an interesting task to try to design for those things.
• Well that’s an interesting question because you know the kind of tangible interaction is not the focus of our work at all. We don’t really tend to characterize our work in terms of the style of technology we use, but instead the kind of personal and cultural effects we’re trying to achieve.
• to design some sort of devices or systems that would enable people to get new views on their environmental impact but the key would be to avoid being too prescriptive about how they should approach that information, so rather than create systems that constantly tell you that you need to use less energy and recycle more and so forth, we would try to point out some of these issues in a way that’s fairly non-judgmental and in fact open for a kind of aesthetic appreciation.
• The idea there is that we don’t need systems telling us how to live and what to do. We’re adults, we know the issues, we get told what to do all the time by various things but instead it’s more that if we could find new ways, new perspectives on ideas and on the world around us, if we could sort of play around with the issues that surround us, we can find our own ways of leading meaningful lives, so that’s the kind of thing we’d like to support with our designs.

Source of the interview: http://www.infodesign.com.au/uxpod/ludicdesign