
Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too - pius
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/09/apple-has-learned-importance-of-play-we.html
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jcromartie
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.

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raganwald
This post captures something of what I mean when I use the word "hacking:"
_joyful playful exploration_.

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tdavis
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...

