What a beautiful collection of photos capturing people playing around the world. Happy Friday, go play! 🙂
Author: Beth Kelley
Beth Kelley is an applied & digital anthropologist with an overall interest in how people engage with and are impacted by their environments and vice versa. This has manifested itself in many ways, by looking at creativity, playful spaces, built environments, and environmental enrichment, sustainability, design research, and integrative and collaborative models of learning such as through play and hands-on learning.
A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing
Happy Friday! After a looooong work week, here’s a little more incentive to make sure you get some time to play this weekend.
[Okay, fine, for all of you who are too “busy” to read the article, here’s a basic breakdown: you need free play in order to recover from stress, and that if we don’t we’re basically setting ourselves up for early brain deterioration and death.
Now will you take a second to read the article?] 🙂
“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.
In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?
In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.
more via A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing.
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- A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing (seculardiscourse.wordpress.com)
Landscapes Can Be Open-ended « The Dirt
An academic take on creating inviting, communal public spaces:
In Operative Landscapes: Building Communities Through Public Space, Alissa North, Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto, argues that the best contemporary landscape designs are concerned with more than just aesthetics. Instead of striving for fixed, static designs, the goals of these landscapes are “operational”: they aim to guide “the transformation of urban environments over time.” By moving away from fixed form, landscapes can be open-ended and non-prescriptive, changing in response to — but also influencing — the development of their communities.
continue reading Landscapes Can Be Open-ended « The Dirt.
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- Consumerism and Landscape Architecture (dirt.asla.org)
Playgrounds made from junk | KaBOOM!
Recycle, reuse, replay!
Plastic bottles, car parts, shipping containers, steel drums, and tires.
No, we’re not describing a junkyard — we’re describing a potential playground. Recycled playground structures combine ingenuity, whimsy, and thrift to create spaces that are friendly to our kids and our planet alike.From Brazil to Norway to Uganda, these playgrounds are true gems, even if they’re made from junk; more via Playgrounds made from junk | KaBOOM!.
At IIDEX: Will the Office Go the Way of the Phonebooth and Mailbox? : TreeHugger
Happy Monday. Most of us are probably back at work now after the holidays. But for many of us, our work space has changed fairly dramatically in the past few years, in large part due to advances in technology. What used to be office-bound work can now be done at home in one’s slippers while simultaneously playing with your child (not that I’ve ever done that!). What does the future of work spaces look like? This article tackles that very question. The subject isn’t specifically related to playful environments, but creating spaces that are more conducive to creativity and productivity are incredibly intertwined with playful environment:
The company Teknion has been doing a serious amount of research into where the office is going, and what they should be designing and building to furnish it, and have published Phonebooths and Mailboxes to look at the future of the office.
© TEKNION
Phonebooths and Mailboxes is a discussion about new technologies. Consider how quickly the cell phone replaced the pager, how quickly the fax machine was replaced by email. Mobile technology now signals one of the biggest transformations within the modern office.
more via At IIDEX: Will the Office Go the Way of the Phonebooth and Mailbox? : TreeHugger.
As awesome as flexibility with one’s work space is, there is also value with face-to-face, tangible collaboration. Plus spaces for creative work and data analysis work, or whatever kind of work, may need very different spaces.
What are your thoughts about how technology is changing what our offices look like?
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Inhabitat is on a role with their environmental enrichment stories!
OakOak’s street art is created to amuse and inspire – this self-described “fun-loving” artist plays with urban elements to make people laugh. He finds broken infrastructure, crumbling buildings and cracks and gives them a facelift with the simple addition of a character in play. Everything from simple stick figures to smiley faces, animals, objects and superheroes can be seen gracing OakOak’s hometown of St. Etienne, France, where they turn the less than perfect facades into something playful and fun.
Xylophone Coffee Table
I looooved my xylophone as a kid. It was just fun to bang on every once in awhile. And I love the idea of being musical before I’ve finished my first cup of coffee:
The designers behind Manhattan based Jellio have dreamed up yet another uber-cool, kid-friendly home decor piece: a coffee table that doubles as a rainbow colored, working xylophone that is just begging to played by tots and adults alike! Jellio’s Music Table is a much larger version of the tiny xylophones we all tinkered away on as tots — and we think the designers have lived up to their mission to ‘combine childhood fun with interior design… and make you smile.’ Made of solid pine with a natural finish base, Jellio’s Music Table would not only be a lively focal point in a nursery or child’s bedroom, it would also be a unique and entertaining coffee table for the family room. We’d sure love to tap away to a spirited rendition of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on this beauty.
more via: Inhabitots
Happy New Year
Live Science Animal Gallery: Fun in the Snow
Snow-bunnies aren’t the only animals excited about snow; check out this great collection of photos of animals playing in the snow:
See the whole collection, including some adorable snow pouncing.
Even the president of the U.S. makes time for play
Reposted from Hypable:
Though U.S. President Barack Obama is probably one of the busiest and most stressed people in the world, he still has time to show his fun side as seen in the latest photo released by the White House today in which he’s gets caught in a young Spider-Man’s web.
Check out the adorable photo of President Obama fighting Spider-Man below, which was released across the President’s Facebook and Twitter pages earlier today. If you look closely you can even see that the President seems to be making a battle-style sound effect of being caught in Spidey’s web – something all of us have to admit to doing when playing with kids in superhero uniforms!
We wonder which villain the President was taking on. With his hands in the air could he have been impersonating Doctor Octopus? We’re sure the youngster’s imagination was running wild as the President indulged the Spider-Man battle!
Nice to be reminded that there are always opportunities for play, and no matter how responsible or important or busy you are, play is important.
Mental Flowers 