Creative Dissonance: Learning Through Play, Designing within Tension, Rethinking Power
We are taught to value clarity, structure, and control. To smooth over contradictions. To resolve tensions. To seek certainty in a world that is anything but certain. Systems reward predictability over uncertainty, efficiency over exploration, hierarchy over collective wisdom.
But what if breakthroughs do not come from resolution, but from resistance? What if the contradictions we experience — between progress and sustainability, participation and exclusion, innovation and tradition — were not problems to be solved, but materials with which to design?
I move between disciplines — trained as a classical singer, designing and researching in technology, shaping learning experiences, fiddling with artistic pursuits, speculating on AI educational futures. I don’t belong in any one space. That is the point.
Belonging is an open question in a system built on the illusion of certainty, where failure is treated as a fault line rather than a foundation. This intersection is where creative dissonance begins.
Contradiction and Tension as Creative Fuel
In music, dissonance does not break the sound. It propels it forward. The ear leans into the unresolved, waiting for what comes next. The tension is there intentionally — it’s movement, an opening or a closing, a force that pulls us toward resolution or reimagines what resolution could be.
Systems work the same way. In activity theory, contradictions are where change begins (Engeström, 1987). They reveal the fault lines of a system — where it holds, where it bends, and where it finally gives way. They signal where a structure is straining under its own limitations, where something must give way for transformation to occur. Yet, transformation is not automatic — It depends on how we engage with the tensions, how we play inside uncertainty.
Game design understands this intuitively. A game without friction is deeply boring. Every great game — whether digital or physical — thrives on tension, obstacles, and constraints that force creative responses. As Salen and Zimmerman (2003) argue, meaningful play emerges not in ease, but in struggle.
Education, however, still clings to certainty, control, and hierarchy. Collectively, we are not very good at play. I once sat through a presentation of 93 wordy slides on the importance of flipped learning and play for education. This experience was not singular in my experiences in higher education.
We tell students, artists, designers, musicians, educators to take risks, yet penalize failure (Lerman & Borstel, 2022). We celebrate participation, yet keep power within institutions (Costanza-Chock, 2020). We promote interdisciplinary thinking, yet enforce disciplinary silos (Mishra, Koehler, & Henriksen, 2011).
The world trains designers, educators, and students to resolve these tensions. I am far more interested in what happens when we learn to sit inside them.
These are not contradictions to be eliminated. These are the tensions we must design within, around, through, and, most importantly, with others, together. Collective, audacious creativity requires taking the bold, speculative leaps to rethink what is possible.
Control Fears the Unscripted
Control thrives on certainty. It resists ambiguity, unpredictability, and play — because those things make room for questions, for possibilities beyond the expected, for the hard, messy work of complexity. The more a system demands order, the less space it leaves for the creative disruptions that bring new worlds into view.
Rigid systems fear play because play rewrites the rules. It introduces chance, improvisation, intentional absurdity — disrupting the structures that hold power in place. Creativity, speculation, and humor open spaces where none were meant to exist.
Nothing unsettles control like the unexpected. Play shifts rules in real time. Creativity expands beyond the known. Speculation imagines what power refuses to consider. Control depends on a closed system — predictable, structured, contained. But dissonance thrives on movement, stretching the limits of what can be designed, what can be known, what comes next.
Power wants conclusions. Creativity keeps the story unfinished.
Designing What Comes Next
If control thrives on certainty, then uncertainty is an invitation. If power seeks resolution, then contradiction is a door left open. If systems are built to contain, then friction is a way through.
So, where do we go from here?
I do not want seamless systems, not matter how satisfying the illusion. I want the sharp edges where ideas collide and reinvent.
I do not want certainty when it is determined by those who hoard power and influence. I want the creative pressure of what has not yet been imagined.
I do not want to belong to a world that was never built for me, as privileged as I am. I want to build the world with others. I want to play with the future until it cracks open for us, for them, for my child, for yours.
Moving Toward Hope
Contradictions demand movement. The question is how we decide to move.
Not alone. Not in isolation. Not through competition for power, but through collective, audacious creativity.
We do not live in a world of fixed outcomes. Futures are not dictated, they are designed — and design is a shared act. A colleague recently wrote…
“Division may be loud, but collaboration will always be stronger." — Earl E. Lee
The systems around us may be rigid, but we are not. The structures we work within may resist change, but they do not define what is possible. No institution, no hierarchy, no framework can erase the fundamental truth that we exist in an interconnected world — where education, knowledge, and creative expression are not privileges to be hoarded but shared materials for building something greater.
What Emerges When We Stop Designing for Resolution?
If this friction exists in your work, your practice, your field — what happens when you stop smoothing it over? What happens when you design with the tension instead of against it?
What futures take shape when we begin from here?
