Exploring Enriching Environments
I’ve been reading some very depressing stuff today – about one school that doesn’t allow anyone over the age of 6 to have recess, kids not feeling protected from their tormentors, and so on – so I needed a pep talk.
Adora Svitak’s TED talk did just the trick.
Boing Boing is an awesome filter for culture and science enrichment! Heck the whole site is enriching. Once again they deliver, with this choice nugget from Norway: rural Norwegian homes whose roofs have been given over to the traditional turf — and even small forests.
Turf roofs in Norway are a tradition and you will see them everywhere. Roofs in Scandinavia have probably been covered with birch bark and sod since prehistory. During the Viking and Middle Ages most houses had sod roofs. In rural areas sod roofs were almost universal until the beginning of the 18th century. Tile roofs, which appeared much earlier in towns and on rural manors, gradually superseded sod roofs except in remote inland areas during the 19th century. Corrugated iron and other industrial materials also became a threat to ancient traditions. But just before extinction, the national romantics proclaimed a revival of vernacular traditions, including sod roofs. A new market was opened by the demand for mountain lodges and holiday homes. At the same time, open air museums and the preservation movement created a reservation for ancient building traditions. From these reservations, sod roofs have begun to reappear as an alternative to modern materials.Every year, since 2000, an award is also given to the best green roof project…
The Grass Roofs of Norway (via Geisha Asobi)
They remind me a little bit of the houses built by SunRay Kelley (my father-in-law)…
Great article from Cory Doctorow and BoingBoing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/02/how-i-use-the-intern.html
…my 2.5-year-old daughter and I use my computer as part of our imaginative play and storytelling, using YouTube searches, Flickr image searches, paper story books, toys, and trips around town to play and explore.
Now that she’s more active, she usually requests something – often something from YouTube (we also download her favourite YouTube clips to our laptops, using deturl.com), or she’ll start feeding me keywords to search on, like “doggy and bunny” and we’ll have a look at what comes up. It’s nice sharing a screen with her. She points at things in her video she likes and asks me about them (pausable video is great for this!), or I notice stuff I want to point out to her.
But the fun comes when we incorporate all this into our storytelling play…
This is great that Doctorow is using YouTube as scaffolding to teach his daughter, rather than just plopping her in front of the TV. The interaction is the most important part here, and it’s great that he’s incorporating digital media into the lesson plan, encouraging her to think critically even at a little itty-bitty age. 🙂
An article featured on the O’Reilly Radar last month that interviews Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code, who is currently working with Frank Lantz to integrate gameplay into the fabric of reality, or what he calls “Big Games.”
Big games are “games that take place using some elements from the game system and some elements of the real world. Something Frank Lantz had worked on with Katie Salen and Nick Fortugno was called the Big Urban Game. It involved transforming the city of Minneapolis into a game board. They did that by using huge inflatable game pieces, about 25-feet high. The players, among other things, were moving these huge pieces around the city.”
“There’s a few of us who have been thinking about how “play” and the “city” were going to combine. We’ve been drinking the same Kool-Aid from the same cooler for quite a while.”
The way Slavin’s describing his vision reminds me a lot of parkour. Interesting ideas.
Read the full interview (highly recommended).
Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Zimbardo argues in this lecture that time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
I love the Silician Poet’s comment. I’d also be interested to hear what people’s thoughts are, especially if they speak the Sicilian dialect.
via YouTube – RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time.
What makes cities work? How do humans live in such HUGE tribes. More than half of us live in cities.
I’m a new city transplant. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it, but it’s a fascinating topic to explore.
There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can’t explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who’s walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that’s slipping away.
Thanks Jad and Robert.
I love hearing about citizens taking the initiative to clean up parks, fix up land, and give places names as a sign of ownership for the land, not as in a “I OWN YOU” kind of ownership, but a “I am responsible for you” kind of way.
A group of park-lovers in Seattle took it upon themselves to clean up Seward Park and give the different trails and landmark names.
Knute Berger of blog Crosscut writes that he and a bunch of his friends “floated the idea of naming many of citys unnamed features, including alleys, street ends, trails, and other urban features that are yet unnamed on maps.
“There are many reasons to do this. One is reclaiming urban spaces, like alley ways; another is recognizing more than a centurys worth of life and accomplishment of Seattleites in the years since the streets were named. Yet another is to take the opportunity to include more indigenous names for natural and city features.
“A naming project is currently underway at Seward …”
more via The Crosscut Blog.
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The title of this blog post sums up the entire concept. There’s no other way to say it: you need to play to be a productive member of society.
However, this idea doesn’t seem to be sticking.
The perception in America is that the harder and longer you work, the more productive you’ll be. Especially now when jobs are scarce and companies are holding on by the skin of their teeth, people sacrifice play, exercise, and good old legitimate downtime, not to mention sleep (September 30th was National Coffee Day!), to get more work done.
But it turns out we weren’t built to work that way. We need breaks, we need downtime, and we most certainly need to cut loose and be a little silly every once in awhile. As biology professor Robert Sapolsky pointed out in his book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” occasional stress is good – it makes sure we get that report in on time and we are aware of our surroundings in a new city. But constant stress just wears us down.
And it’s not just time away from work that’s rejuvenating. Repeated research has found that play increases new ideas and overall productivity at work. Psychology Today reports that telling stories and jokes makes us better writers. It also reports that even a little bit of physical play or just boring old exercise – a brisk walk around the block three times a week – fights depression.
New business, products, and companies stem from play. The t-shirt company Threadless, for example, started off 10 years ago as a hobby. The company has since grown to employ 80 workers, but Jake Nickell, founder and chief strategy officer, “has made sure playtime remains a part of company culture. Shooting a potato gun at plastic parachute guys is a way to relieve stress.”
Pamela Meyer, author of “From Workspace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing through Dynamic Engagement,” agrees that taking time out for fun is a good workplace practice.
“This idea of play space is very much a key part of business success” because it fosters dynamic employee engagement, said Meyer in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “Companies that engage their workers by giving them space to create, try new roles or test new ideas benefit from higher employee retention, greater productivity and better financial returns.”
So, to re-re-emphasize my point: Go play, it’s good for your work.
My grandma and I had a pact that we’d both do our best to live to be 100. She died at 85 after a long, happy life, married to her best friend since 1st grade. Go Mommo! But I’m still in the running, so I’m always interested in how Centenarians live it up. And it seems to boil down to two things: luck, and keeping a good attitude about life.
Israeli physician Nir Barzilai and his staff at the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have asked hundreds of centenarians hundreds of questions, including details of their living circumstances, nutrition, alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, sleep, education, status, and spirituality — all in the hope of finding commonalities.
The results are sobering: “There is no pattern,” says Barzilai, 54. “The usual recommendations for a healthy life — not smoking, not drinking, plenty of exercise, a well-balanced diet, keeping your weight down — they apply to us average people, but not to them. Centenarians are in a class of their own.” He pulls spreadsheets out of a drawer, adjusts his glasses, and reads aloud: “At the age of 70, a total of 37 percent of our subjects were, according to their own statements, overweight; 37 percent were smokers, on average for 31 years; 44 percent said that they exercised only moderately; 20 percent never exercised.”
More at The last word: The secret to living past 100 – The Week.
The women in my family tend to live a long time, although I don’t think anyone has made it to 100 yet. What is your family’s pattern for longevity? Were people healthy right before they died, or did they linger with illness?
Life has been crazy for me lately, with lots of changes. And even though it is good change, it hasn’t been fun. It’s actually been kind of scary and stressful. I discovered this blog post at the beginning of this summer, when the change was just starting to get rolling – yes, change can also take a loooong time. But re-reading it, and re-re-reading it, is a nice reminder that I’m not alone in my feelings.
Sometimes I think about why there aren’t more people running, sprinting towards greatness. Why there aren’t more people continually evolving into something better, stronger, and happier. I wonder this a lot as I read or listen to stories about miserable jobs and unsatisfying home lives and dreams that have been left to decompose. And, I think I’m starting to understand why some people just stay, as they are, and stop aspiring for betterment.
…changing for the better constantly and drastically, well, for lack of a better word, can completely suck sometimes. As much as you want to believe that everyone around you will be supportive and gracious about this new and improved you, it’s sometimes not the case.
more via The Problem With Getting Better, Happier And Stronger — a life in translation.
I’m just thankful that I do have people around me who support my change. Be kind to those around you who are changing, growing, developing further into who they are.
Mental Flowers 