A reconstruction of a printed sheet of Ken Garland andFigure 1. Photo by Harriet Crowder, circa  1969.

cRobert Chapman’s game Conne t, d1Figure 2. From Connect Rules sheet [v.L0543G],  © Ken Garland and Associates, 210 x 297 mm, offset printed. Reproduced at original size.

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Connect logotype designed by Ken Garland.

11.9.2006, London, UK.
David Bennewith: I was wondering what you thought
about schools? What a school is, or, what a school
should be?
Ken Garland: My wife was a school-teacher for 25 years
as well, so we both have ideas. We share ideas about
this. It’s impossible to imagine any civilisation withoutschools, although there have been societies whereschooling was an integral part of daily behaviour andnot conducted in a separate institution. So, there havebeen times, and some people have said very recently,“I wonder if school is the right place to learn? ” Sort ofa comic idea surely. Where else? Well, you could saythat people learn in life. You could say this, could you
not, about many sorts of skills you acquire: cabinet
making, plumbing – graphic design, maybe – that you
learn them on the job. You could say that the best way
to learn is not in a school, as such, but as an apprentice
under an older person – a person who just passes on
his or her wisdom to you during the course of the job.
There is quite a lot in this. Some things you must surely
learn in school: literacy, numeracy … and even earlier,social awareness – how to get on. Because if you lookat a reception class of children of around five years old,they all turn up from different homes with completely ...
well not completely ... very different ways of behaving,which they’ve acquired in their home. And they have tolearn to get on together. Not to bite, not to scratch; tohelp one another, not to always want to be the best –sometimes to be second best – and to help people ina way that maybe they hadn’t done so at home. So,
schools to start with are always places where you learn
to be a social being and maybe that goes on, not justthrough primary school but into secondary school andonwards. I suppose things like playing games – which
my children and grandchildren do avidly – is a part ofsocial behaviour and it’s important to learn. I wish in
retrospect I’d paid more attention to learning what it isto play games, to work as a team, to collaborate. I see
my grandsons playing football and I’m envious. I lookat them and I think ‘This is what a school has done foryou’, because they learn this at school – where else?
Now, schools that happen later on in life – where weare taught to become designers, for example – could
you do without them? Well, I guess you could. I guess
you could become apprentice to an artist, to a designer,
to a plumber … I see somehow the idea of apprenticeship has died out in this country. I always thought thatwas sad. Because I appreciated the acquisition of skills
from some of my peers who were being apprentices. Ithought, ‘You lucky person’, you know, you really, Really,
REALLY learn how to do something in this way. Of2

course it’s luck too. If you are apprentice to a poor
practitioner you become a poor practitioner yourself –or you quit. But most people can pass on something to
the younger generation quite well, and I think we’ve got
to leave that one in the air. We could say, “Yes, schools;
even advanced schools: colleges, university – yes.” But
why have we abandoned the notion of apprenticeship?
It’s a very old custom, which was learned by Greeks andRomans before us and it was also a medieval principle.
There is no way that the medieval society could haveexisted without its apprentices. Very important people.
So, it’s a bit in the air. I realise what I’ve done is raise
another question – you asked me what do I think aboutschools …

tables and through chair legs, and it did. That is what
we had in mind.

DB: You spoke about games as well and that brings me
to the Connect game. I know you were talking about
physical games, but you also work as a team when you
are playing something like a board game. And especially Connect, which incorporates teamwork in a way,because it is dependent on continuing the play.

DB: Variants of form?

KG:  That’s true, I watched it being played so many times.
A game needs collaboration. You don’t necessarily haveto help the other player to win, of course you are trying
to win, but you are also looking to make something andenjoy the making of it. I think to some extent I’ve seenthat in dominoes as well – which, of course, Connect isrelated too. You notice a bunch of people in a pub playing dominoes, you can see the sensual pleasure withwhich they create the game.  The noises of the clickingof the dominoes, the way they turn it round a corner. Itis a pleasure, the playing of the game.
DB: I really like one of the photographs on your websitethat shows Connect being played. It seems to suggestthat one of the intentions was to create an awarenessof your surrounding spaces as well. Fig.1
KG: Not consciously, but it was an off-shoot. Any game
that’s worth its salt has got byproducts – it does otherthings. If you take a game like Monopoly, which is amarvelous, wonderful game – that game teaches all
kinds of social lessons. I watched my children and mygrandchildren playing Monopoly, being an observer,
and watched them fight their way through greed andalso generosity – where they learn all these social skillsof acquisition, but also the skills of compromise andskills of persuasion, etc. Yes, a good game has many
byproducts. Certainly, when we designed the game we
did have in mind that people would enjoy laying it out.
In the original Connect, the pieces were bigger thanthey became eventually. We thought it would be playedon the floor – just spread around – it would pass under

DB: You mentioned to me in an email that the firstversion of Connect was unplayable?
KG: Not the game itself, but some prototype stuff wedid was unplayable: because the children – or theplayers – couldn’t resolve it properly. In earlier prototype versions we found that the game could not beended. You’d get to the point where all the pieces wereplayed out but everyone still had a lot of pieces intheir hand. So, who’s the winner? Therefore we hadto produce a new set of variants.

KG: Well, look here, I’ll show you one – this is what wecall a split-route piece. Fig.2 [showing cards] You see you
have got … you are going along like this here … there
are two ‘knobs’ stopping here … I’ve got to illustrate
this with pieces I suppose … Once you come to it, it’s
not so easy! [Laughs] OK. You’ve got this piece here,
you are playing with that one, let’s say, and you’ve comefrom there and you’ve done that – but you’ve got tohave that [split-route] piece to go on – and the gamegot stonkered [reached a stalemate] because nobody
had that split-route piece. So, with a split-route piece,
you’re coming out here and you can either go off fromthere, or if you don’t have that piece, then you also havea single red available – so you can go off on that. The
split-route pieces made it work.
DB: So, the split-route pieces are really important forthe continuation of the game.
KG: Absolutely. Without them the game just grinds to ahalt. Now, we did find that – even with the split-routepieces – that you could come to the end of a game andstill no one had run out of cards, but there would be at
the most two players with the least number of cards. So,
you have two players and they have two cards each –and they can’t put them down anywhere. So then, who’s
to be the winner? Well … we didn’t know … so we
asked the children about this and the children said, “Ohyeah, if there are two players who have got the same
number of cards, the younger one’s the winner!”. We
said, “Why? ”, and they said, “Well, that’s the way it is!”.
That was a little rule the children seemed to have – thatyou would give way to the younger person. So, here’sthe Rule [showing instructions sheet], it states: ‘If two
players are left with the same number of cards, theyounger one is deemed the winner’. There you go. Thechildren gave us that one and we thought that was sowonderful, because it had them contributing. Fig.3

hundred, they knew they could go ahead and produce
ten thousand – and then more every year. I did a little
bit of an account and discovered that, including thegame in its present form, which is this form here
[shows ‘Rivers, Roads and Rails’], it has sold 600,000
copies – probably more.

DB: Testing the game – working through the game –must have been fascinating …
KG: We thought, because we hadn’t designed any
games before, that they had to be tested. So Galt Toys,
who were waiting for us to do this game, said, “Wellcome on, when are you coming up with the game? ”,
and we replied, “Oh, no, no – testing”, “TESTING!?,TESTING!? ”. We said, “Yeah? Don’t you always test? ”,
they replied, “We ain’t got time for that. Come on!”Then, in a moment of rare frankness, one of the directors said to me, “Well, y’know Ken, I suppose we should
do a test, but we produce about 10 new games every
year at Christmas time and if they don’t work we dump
them. If they work – if the children like them – then wego on and produce them.” There was a lot to learn onboth sides. We made a lot of trial sets – prototypes –we made them very well. I’ve got one to show you,because they look impeccable; you wouldn’t know
they weren’t the printed ones.
[Ken balances precariously on a bookshelf, reaching forthe prototype]
DB: It’s interesting to see all of the different languages
that Connect has appeared in.
KG: [Distracted, balancing] Oh, yeah …
DB: ‘Nex’ – where is that version from?
KG: That was what we were originally going to call it
but we found out somebody had already registered thename. The prototypes of the games were immaculate
and children would not realise that they were handdrawn – they would think they were an actual product –which was very important to us because, otherwise, thechildren would say, “Oh, it’s not a real game – you justsketched it”. We couldn’t do that – they wanted to know
it was a real game – and we actually made up boxes
called ‘Nex’. We made six prototypes in total, to passout to families in the street basically. That’s where therules became refined and we observed them playing.
We noticed that quite often the children would have toplay the game on a table. OK, so be it, the game had
to be played on tables and a table produces its own
constraints – you very quickly get to the edge of thetable – and the table becomes a board in its own way.
In the end Galt were very delighted that we produced
a game that had already been tested, they knew it
would be a success. Where as with most games you
would produce a couple of thousand sets, or five-

DB: This might seem like a little bit of a silly question,
but – just out of curiosity – would you ever think of adigital possibility of the game?

3

KG: People have suggested it but I said, “Me – no.” I
haven’t got the time, inclination or skill to evolve a digitalvariant. One thing that was often suggested to us wasthat we could make wall tiles with these, you could put
them in a bathroom and it could be great fun for kids.
Now, I want to tell you something that a lot of people
don’t know. The clue to this game is the template fromwhich all these tiles are cut. When the game came out a
lot of companies started to make copies, there was an
Italian company, somebody in the United States, Japan –they never seemed to get it quite right. Because webought the imitations we could tell that they hadn’t got
the idea of the original. If they’d sat down long enoughwith the original and assembled it – worked out how it
would have been layed up to be printed and cut – itwouldn’t have needed too much ingenuity to figure thisout. But they didn’t. I have only one copy of the original
sheet from which these were made. Otherwise I’d haveto sit down again and work it out myself! It’s fairly
obvious, of course, that, that would be a ring [joiningfour single red line curve cards]. The cards are all
cut from a single large piece – and that’s another key
secret to the game. Note 1 & Fig.4
This version [showing ‘Rivers, Roads and Rails’], ofcourse, was different. Fig.5 In fact this was an ingenious
design because none of the pieces are the same. We
got the illustrator to make the image on each card
unique, so when you go round a corner the image isdifferent each time.
DB: Can you tell me your thoughts on London?
KG: Well … I’ll give you a verbal one and I’ll show you
an image which is being shown in London in a private
view this weekend. I came to London in 1950 and likeeveryone I discovered it is a very confusing city
because it has no grid. But more importantly it has no
absolute centre. What is the centre of London? Is it
Picadilly Circus? Is it Marble Arch? Is it Saint Pauls?
It doesn’t have an absolute centre, it’s a series ofconnected components really – and you have yourfavourite centre. My favourite centre is Tottenham Court
Road – the intersection there – which is nothing tolook at but happens to be easy walking distance toother places. I start from there and everything seems
to radiate.
I discovered London via the Underground diagram.Note  2Because that’s what I could relate to as a new-comer;
it was the first thing I saw that made sense. I came off
a boat from Holland – actually I was a little soldier inthe army. Originally I come from North Devon and I
never went to London and when I was in the army I had
never visited London either. I happened to have leavefrom the army; so, from Germany, I decided to go toLondon. I arrived off the boat at Liverpool Street Stationand I wondered, ‘My god, where can I go? ’. Then I saw
this diagram and thought, ‘Right that’s the thing, go down
there, get on this Tube and then get up at Picadilly
Circus, or wherever’. I would go down – back into theTube – and go up in the next place. So, I discovered
London via the Underground Connection. A lot of people
did this and also a lot of people feel it is the greatfriendly thing in London – the Underground diagram.
I got to know London very slowly, it’s much too confusing to take it all in at once. I’m still learning it after 57
years! It’s a fascinating city because it retains it secrets.
I can go to a part of London I’ve never been to before
and I might as well be in a strange city. Quite unlike Parisor Amsterdam, where you can feel that you can get toknow it quite well in a week, oh, there will be little
corners that you find later – but you’ve got this set-up.
You go to Amsterdam and you know it’s centeredaround a semi-circle series of canals. You go to Parisand it radiates out from the centre. New York is noproblem either  –  it’s a grid. London is a series of wandering streets and you start out on a street going Northand you end up finding it’s going East. But being lost inLondon is fun.
Now, I’ll show you an image about London. TheInternational Society for Typographic Designers asked
if I could produce an image to go on a wall in a hotel
which has been host to this exhibition called ‘My City,My London’. So I chose an image that I already had, mypicture of my part of London: Camden Town. To me,even though London is a very old city indeed, what I likeabout it is that it is continually changing and shifting,like a kaleidoscope, and every part of London is in thisstate of flux. You don’t know London if you don’t know
that. It’s not just the tourists, also people that comehere and stay here – and even when they go away partof them is a Londoner, and always will be.
Endnotes.

1. S ee over. A reconstruction of a printed sheet of Connect basedon a 50 x 70 cm offset plate.
2. T he London Underground diagram was designed by Harry Beckin 1931 and introduced in 1933. See ‘Mr. Beck’s Underground
Map’ by Ken Garland, Capital Transport Publishing,  1994.

Including ani

and2
conductedin00Figure 4. Document, ‘A reconstruction of a printed sheet of Ken Garland and Robert Chapman’s game Connect’, 1– 3 June 2009, Amsterdam.

6.

ISBN 978-90-815569-1-0,lophon, 2010.
oCrlerview with Ken G ant

4

Figure 3. ibid, Figure 2.

Figure 5. ‘Rivers, Roads & Rails’, Ravensburger, Germany, 1982.