Exploring Enriching Environments
Nice to see sports teams like to be a little silly and break the “rules.”
While you were out living your normal life, working your normal job, a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex threw out the first pitch in San Diego on Wednesday. I’ll give you time to read that again and adjust to our new reality (per MLB):
via SBNation.com.
A great article about how building playful spaces leads to more, and better, play.
Can playgrounds make kids smarter? Yes, say the experts, and landscape architects everywhere are responding. Welcome to outdoor play’s new reality.
All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. Granted, Jack does not lack for innovative toys and gadgets. But what Jack really needs is better playgrounds. These days, reality is exchanged for a simulation of reality, and the sandbox is abandoned in pursuit of the virtual. Cognitive scientists, however, are finding that the unstructured activity children engage in at the playground fosters the social and intellectual abilities they need to succeed in life. Monkey bars and swing sets present opportunities to develop new skills, encourage autonomous thinking and promote flexible problem solving – but they also shape the brain. This is good news. With technology taking over so much of our lives, increased pressure on children to compete academically at a much younger age, and helicopter parenting restricting play for fear of potential danger, many experts – such as David Elkind, psychologist and author of The Hurried Child – are drawing attention to the “reinvention of childhood.” It is time we also reinvent the playground.
more via The Playful City – Azure Magazine.
Staying playful and creative sometimes requires going back to your roots, or at least your crayons. Drawing, scribbling, doodling, and coloring have all been found to help with destressing, thinking out ideas and problems, and keep brains active into old age.
Drawing is also a great learning activity with lots of fine motor skill and development, problem solving, language development and social learning opportunities… (Editor’s note: all of which tie into the above-mentioned benefits, and these skills are all useful for both grownups and kids to practice and refresh on a regular basis).
Drawing is a way for
childreneveryone to process their world, to represent and share their ideas and to explore new skills and information.
see all 20+ Drawing Ideas and Activities at picklebums.com.
If you think this is just “kid’s stuff” I dare you to try some of these, especially the collaborative drawing exercise. It’ll (potentially) expose some growth areas of yourself and/or others very quickly. 😛
Perhaps not very scholarly, but I love this growing trend of making “Day in the Life” photos of toys and other objects. It’s a great, playful exploration of space and creativity.
In the Star Wars movies, the Imperial Stormtroopers’ activities are pretty limited: Marching. Shooting things. Keeping order. More marching. What do they do the rest of the time? Twerk? Wait for the bus and bully battle droids like the rest of us? (OK, most of us don’t bully battle droids.) Photographer Zahir Batin has a few ideas, and they include feeding baby chickens.
Batin’s still-life photos, created with action figures and largely homemade props, provide a glimpse of Stormtroopers after the big battles—stringing crime scene tape, for example, and doing the splits, Jean-Claude Van Damme-style, on their 74-Z speeder bikes. But the Malaysian photographer’s pictures also reveal a grimmer reality. We see troopers carrying wounded soldiers from the battlefield and mourning fallen comrades. We also see dichotomy of life as a Stormtrooper, roughing up battle droids one moment and feeding chicks the next.
The photo series is “just a hobby to fill free time on the weekends,” Batin says, but it’s blossomed into dozens of pictures. The bulk of the time spent creating each image is spent on preparation. Because “my Photoshop skills have a limit,” Batin tries to make each scene as realistic as possible before snapping the frame. The resulting pictures are as gorgeous as they are humorous (or, of course, tragic).
Check out some of the photographer’s best Stormtrooper still-life photos in the gallery above, then check out even more on deviantArt and 500px.
via Intimate Photos Reveal the Day-to-Day Lives of Stormtroopers | Raw File | WIRED.
An older article, but too charming and innovative not to share on the blog:
A patchwork quilt aims to combat separation issues and distress in hospitalised children by allowing them to helping them to communicate with their families using augmented reality.
Each of the quilt’s 20 squares is decorated with a unique multi-coloured animal or plant design and can be linked to an individual friend or family member. Loved ones can then leave messages for children to access with Aurasma, an app which uses the camera on a phone or tablet to recognise the unique image and overlay content — a picture, photo or video — so that it pops up on the screen.
The quilt is designed to serve as both a comforting, tactile object and a method of communication
more via Anti-loneliness augmented quilt comforts children in hospital (Wired UK).
Having fun, exciting spaces to play is important for both kids and grown-ups, so it’s nice to see what’s out there for kids, and hopefully grown-ups will follow suit.
When you’re a kid, visiting an amazing playground is the greatest experience ever. And these fantasy-themed playgrounds around the world have us wishing that we were kids again so we could run around in them like small, crazy people.
more via These are the most fantastical playgrounds ever built.
All of these are in more urban settings, and it would be cool to see some more natural playscapes, but the ideas behind some of these parks are fantastic!
Sometimes all it takes is one person to start a neighborhood to start talking and engaging with one another. Someone moves in and throws an open house. Or even a garage sale. So how can art, or an artist, inject “love and play” into a community, particularly when the younger generations trust each other less than ever before?
San Francisco-based artist Hunter Franks is on a three-week mission across several different cities to explore just that, and hopefully get some “creative intervention” going in these urban areas.
One Franks’s planned activities is something called “Vacant Love,” which aims to transform abandoned or neglected buildings with messages of affection. Another, called the “Free Portrait Project” asks residents to sit for a Polaroid photo taken by Franks, and during the 120 seconds it takes for the picture to develop, entertain a brief interview about their lives. Other interventions include two-way advice booths, for citizens to both give and take advice from one another, as well as an activity that asks people to write sticky notes about their loves and fears on a public wall. Franks will also be expanding his SF Postcard Project, in which he gathered postcards written from low-income San Francisco neighborhoods and mailed them to homes in ritzier ZIP codes.
more via An Artist’s Quest: To Force Strangers In Cities To Talk To One Another | Co.Exist | ideas + impact.
What activities have you seen, or even been engaged in, that got a neighborhood members involved and communicating? For some, even a Little Free Library can get the ball rolling. Tell us your experiences in the comments below.
Do you think better in a small, cozy place, or something a little more rustic than modern offices? Twitter now has got its employees covered in that department.
Employees at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters will soon have a chance to tap their creativity inside repurposed 19th century log cabins. The tech company has made a plan to install two homesteader cabins salvaged from historic ranches in Montana. The cabins will be installed within an open area in the headquarters, and serve as a creativity-inducing dining area.
The cabins, which are nicknamed Stanford and Belt to honor the Montana towns they were sourced from, will join other salvaged materials in the Twitter offices. Twitter’s logos throughout the office are made from reused California license plates, and the reception desk is made from salvaged bowling alley planks.
Like other tech companies in Silicon Valley, Twitter’s office is chock full of gimmicky but enjoyable features to inspire its employees. The refurbished office includes a yoga studio, rooftop garden, arcade and culinary treats like a cupcake shop, all clad in salvaged wood. The cabins are expected to be installed in the coming weeks.
more via Twitter to Install 19th Century Log Cabins in its SF Headquarters | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building, or from its source CBS.
Going into a novel space, or even a space that feels special, can really boost creativity and/or help people focus on a project. It can also help to have some place quiet and private to concentrate and really dive in to something, whether it’s a log cabin at work or just a small “phone booth” style room.
What small, perhaps quirky, space do you use for yourself to get work done? Let us know about it in the comments below.
Taking time to destress and be creative has great benefits, both physically and mentally. Take knitting, for example:
It turns out that knitting has incredible health benefits. It makes people feel good in just about every way. A bit of research has revealed a wide range of ways in which knitting helps humans cope, physically and mentally.
1. Knitting is used for therapy. It’s a powerful distractant, helping people manage long-term physical pain. For those who are depressed, knitting can motivate them to connect with the world. It is a conversation starter, allowing people to interact politely without making eye contact. It builds confidence and self-esteem.
2. Knitting is supremely relaxing, which is extremely important for reducing stress and anxiety. Dr. Herbert Benson, founder of Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute, wrote The Relaxation Response, in which he recommends the repetition of a word, sound, phrase, prayer, or muscular activity to elicit “the relaxation response” – decreased heart rate, muscle tension, and blood pressure. Knitting is likened to meditation, sometimes described by knitters as “spiritual” and “Zen-like.”
read more reasons, like social connection and confidence boosting, via Don’t stop knitting! It keeps you healthy. : TreeHugger.
I have always felt like I SHOULD learn how to knit, but I actually find the idea of having to keep count and keep track of where I’m at stressful, but maybe I should just give it a try. Thoughts? Leave them in the comments below.
I am a huge fan of Legos, and so the little kid in me was super excited to see this movie trailer. But the more I read about it, the more the grown-up in me gets excited to. The whole premise of the movie is about fighting a bad guy who wants to keep people from getting creative with Legos and playing with them just the way they want. The goal of the heroes is to keep free play, well, free.
“The Lego Movie” explores what may be the essential question of Lego building as it applies to life: Must you dutifully follow the instructions, or can you combine pieces creatively to make anything you dream up? In the animated children’s comedy, a repressive overlord voiced by Will Ferrell is so maniacal about controlling the residents of Bricksburg that he has a weapon designed to glue all the pieces of their world together, putting an end to freestyle play. Only a band of wisecracking rebels including Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett and Morgan Freeman can stop him. The film is computer-animated but made to look as if all the scenery is built out of real Lego pieces. Everything moves in a way that simulates the stop-motion films that thousands of Lego customers have created with their pieces and posted online.
more via ‘The Lego Movie’: How it Came to Be Built – WSJ.com.
I am so excited to see a big budget movie with a lot of big budget actors devoted to promoting free-thinking free play, and some of the clips do in fact look really creative and are all about messing with your perceptions of the Lego reality!
Mental Flowers 