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.
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.
A first-hand account of being involved in a large community-organized play event.
As much as I love Philadelphia, I never considered it a breeding ground for innovation, but over the past few years, the city has built up enough of a tech scene to spawn an entire week dedicated to celebrating it. To kick off its fourth year, Philly Tech Week gave locals the chance to play Tetris on the Cira Centre, a building conspicuous for bearing a grid of color changing LEDs that sometimes display the Phillies logo. It’s the second game Drexel University professor Frank Lee has brought to the Cira Centre, topping his giant Pong game last year. “What was gratifying for me about the Pong project last year was not that it was the world’s biggest videogame display, although that’s kind of cool. Rather, it was the sharing of the moment by the two people playing, the hundreds of people watching, and thousands of people across Philadelphia watching,” says Lee. Similarly, giant Tetris is more of an art project than a feat for the record books. Lee aims to create a social benefit, what he calls an “aesthetic of a shared moment.”
more details via I Played The World’s Largest Tetris Game | The Creators Project.
Just a fun side note: being part of a large collected effort, whether it’s volunteering at a beach cleanup or playing group Tetris, is very beneficial to mental health as well.
This past Saturday was International Pillow Fight Day, for example, and it received a lot of positive feedback from grown-ups who participated, even with the occasional mention of a hard hit. So pull out the cubes and let’s get it on!
We’re too late to join Elisabeth Stone on her group session she had back in February, but I still loved this idea of making a 21 day challenge to get outside!
21 Days in the Woods is a connection project to get you and your family out in the woods once a day for 21 days. It is well-structured and adaptable to any age range. When you purchase your immediate download of the workbook, you can choose to work through it now or later
April has just started, and it’s starting to feel more and more like Spring, so take a look and see about how you can challenge yourself to get out into the woods.
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.
People often interpret animal behaviors as one thing when in fact it’s something different. But in this case, frolicking is indeed frolicking.
It turns out “cows love a change of scenery. And a switch from the concrete floors of the indoors to a soft green pasture would surely help break a bovine’s winter blues.
In fact, cows are suckers for novelty, adds de Passille’s colleague, . They get an extra spring or leap in their step “whenever something new or unexpected happens,” he says – say, changing their bedding or letting them out or back in. “We think it’s a sign that things are well with them.”
more via The Secret Lives Of Cows: Jumping For Joy : The Salt : NPR.
The blogger of Illustrated with Crappy Pictures posted a couple of years ago about the differences between her childhood and her kids’ childhood, and how we are much more focused on safety, for better or for worse.
There are things I did that my kids will never do.
This type of comparison would be way more interesting coming from my grandparents who walked 50 miles barefoot uphill both ways in the snow and all that.
Still. Times have changed.
My aunt (who is only six years older than me) used to pull me in my Radio Flyer® wagon by tying a rope to her bike. On country roads. Down hills. No helmets.
But the wagon would go too fast.
And she’d yell “put the brakes on!” which actually meant “PANIC!” because there weren’t any brakes. We stopped ourselves by turning into the ditch and wiping out. It was fun.
My kids? They wear helmets at the dinner table. You know, just in case they fall off their chairs.
via I did these things as a kid (but my kids won’t) – Illustrated with Crappy Pictures™.
There are definitely some good things to avoid with her own kids, but even the author questions whether she is being too safe.
Are parents as a whole more protective these days? And where is the line drawn between good protection (seat belts and not letting your kids drink bleach) and being over-protective to where it is stifling for them. I think about this sometimes. FreeRangeKids is an excellent read if you are interested in this sort of discussion.
What are your thoughts about letting kids go out and explore on their own? Obviously some of it is determined by your local environment, like if you live in the city or a country road. But letting kids explore on their own is also crucial to good development. Tough topic.
I loved Wallace and Grommet for all the creative inventions Wallace developed. Turns out artist Dominic Wilcox creates similar odd inventions in real life, and businesses are willing to donate space to display them.
This time it’s the turn of celebrated British department store Selfridges to let Wilcox’s creative wings spread and take over their prestigious windows on behalf of the store’s Festival of Imagination. For the project, Wilcox created the “Variations On Normal” where his eccentric yet logical inventions give physical form to figments of his imagination. Some of his specially made pieces include an umbrella with built-in flower pots and a suitcase with robotic legs that follows its owner.
more via Whimsical Inventions Solve Problems People Didn’t Even Know They Had [Pics] – PSFK.
Yes, yes, yes! This is so exciting! I love some of these ideas on how to encourage play in your community as a way of creating joy and growing community bonds:
Here’s our list of
75100 ways that you can start making your city or town a playful place:Join the CommunityMatters conference call on play and placemaking
see the first 74 via 75 Seriously Fun Ways to Make Your Town More Playful | CommunityMatters.
The other 25 were posted here, and included:
Mental Flowers 