Cas Holman, PLAYFUL: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
World-famous designer, educator, and play advocate Cas Holman joins Zibby to discuss her radiant, provocative, and essential new book, PLAYFUL: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity. Cas—best known for her Netflix Abstract episode and her imaginative creations like Rigamajig—shares how decades of designing for children led her to explore why adults need play just as much. She and Zibby discuss the “three conditions” for rediscovering play, how play fosters creativity and connection, and why letting go of rules and expectations can help us live more authentically.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to zibbmedia.com and follow me on Instagram |
| 0:40.2 | at Zibby Owens. Cass Holman is the author of Playful, how play shifts our thinking, inspires |
| 0:49.1 | connection, and sparks creativity. Cass is the founder and chief designer of the toy company |
| 0:54.0 | Heroes Will Rise and a |
| 0:56.0 | former professor of industrial design at RISD. Cass travels the globe speaking about |
| 1:00.8 | playful learning, the design process, and the value of play in all aspects of life. She has |
| 1:05.8 | shared her perspective in workshops and seminars with teams at Google, Nike, Lego Foundation, Disney Imagineering, |
| 1:12.8 | and art museums around the world. Some of her designs include toys like Rigamajig and Gimmo, |
| 1:18.7 | as well as play experiences at the High Line and the Liberty Science Center. |
| 1:22.7 | Cass lives in Brooklyn and designs from her studio in the Catskills, New York. |
| 1:26.5 | Welcome, Cass. Thank you so much for coming on |
| 1:28.5 | Totally Booked to talk about playful, how play shifts our thinking, inspires connection, and sparks |
| 1:34.4 | creativity. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really, really excited to have some of the |
| 1:39.7 | ideas festering out in the world. Awesome. I have to admit, and this is quite lowbrow of me, |
| 1:47.2 | but I did watch grown-ups last night with my kids. I don't know. You've seen the Adam Sandler |
| 1:51.8 | movie, which is all about getting back to play and skipping rocks on the surface and putting |
| 1:56.8 | down devices and using nature to make forts and all of that stuff. So I had just read |
| 2:01.9 | this book and then I watched that and I was like, all right, the universe is pointing me towards |
... |
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