Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too

My wife is in school for design, and she was telling me about one of her professors. Whenever someone says that they have been "playing" with an idea or a design, the professor will interrupt and lecture the student on how "we are professionals, we don't play... we do serious work..." ad nauseam. I think this woman is, like anybody who thinks that everything they do is "serious business", really insecure in her profession. Sure, doctors and bankers can't "play" with their work, but anybody whose work involves the synthesis of something (whether it is creative in the traditional sense or not) can and should play with their tools and materials.

I also like how this post touches on the fact that school is broken. People learn so much more from real experiences (play being one kind of real experience) than from pre-packaged curriculum in age-based compulsory school.

If we are going to move forward as a society, we need universal education. That doesn't mean universal school. It does mean, in part, a new attitude towards industrial design, where building education into an object is just as important as usability and aesthetics. Deliberately building the capacity to play into a gadget is a great way to do that.

This post captures something of what I mean when I use the word "hacking:" joyful playful exploration.

I've based my entire life around playing with stuff, more or less. I barely graduated high school because by junior/senior year it had become more difficult to get away with never opening a book to study for a test while paying little attention in class as well. In college this was largely the same, but I managed to learn a few study habits. I still don't recall an iota of what I learned via mechanical study, though. But I always aced the programming courses and could probably still write a few lines of x86 Assembly if my life depended on it.

I vehemently refused to learn standard study habits necessary to excel in school, but it wasn't because of sheer laziness or something, I just knew that such a habit was by and large useless to actual learning. Now, what was the atomic mass of hydrogen again...