Peter, I love this post. You have my head spinning with speculation about other areas where play was the possible starting block. I wonder how if our early ancestors’ play with different combinations of foods and flavors led to engineering advances in measurement, chemistry, or even heat transfer. (I have always marveled at the flavor transformation that occurs to cheese when it is melted on a piece of toast)
I experience it in my engineering work, more intensely as I approach the sixth decade of life. "The young will invent this, because they do not know that it is impossible", we sometimes joke at work, but there is a deep truth in it: you may be a better engineer, an applier of cumulated knowledge, at the older age, but younger people are more versatile inventors.
"At first only juveniles played this way. Adults neither invented such behaviors nor imitated the young."
The more time I've spent with young people, the more I believe that adults should imitate the young. I think it is good for the body, mind, and soul.
"However, younger juveniles imitated older ones in stone play, and stone players continued to play with stones when they themselves became adults."
This sounds like a good utilitarian argument for folks who question the value of unlimited free play for children: "your kid may be more innovative as an adult."
Having worked in Silicon Valley during the 1990s and early 2000s, I noted that it became gospel that every company had to have a play area for adult workers. Foosball, ping pong, video games, climbing walls, bowling alleys, etc. The mentality was that play led to creative innovation.
But I have never seen a study that examined whether corporate playrooms had a positive, direct impact on anything, not even worker stress or creativity. In fact, it seems that not only did a few companies shut down these areas, but employees started avoiding them, returning to the stigma that the folks in the play room were just wasting time and you didn't want to be associated with time-wasters if you wanted to keep your job.
So, what are the real facts here? And why did the once-vaunted corporate playroom go from hero to zero?
It occurs to me to wonder then if the addition of an iron band around the wooden cart wheel served not only to tighten the wheel’s wooden parts and hold them together, increase the wheel’s useful life by protecting the wood of the wheel from wear as it rolled along the roadway, but did physics make the iron bound wheel “rounder” than the simple wooden wheel?
Peter, I love this post. You have my head spinning with speculation about other areas where play was the possible starting block. I wonder how if our early ancestors’ play with different combinations of foods and flavors led to engineering advances in measurement, chemistry, or even heat transfer. (I have always marveled at the flavor transformation that occurs to cheese when it is melted on a piece of toast)
I experience it in my engineering work, more intensely as I approach the sixth decade of life. "The young will invent this, because they do not know that it is impossible", we sometimes joke at work, but there is a deep truth in it: you may be a better engineer, an applier of cumulated knowledge, at the older age, but younger people are more versatile inventors.
"At first only juveniles played this way. Adults neither invented such behaviors nor imitated the young."
The more time I've spent with young people, the more I believe that adults should imitate the young. I think it is good for the body, mind, and soul.
"However, younger juveniles imitated older ones in stone play, and stone players continued to play with stones when they themselves became adults."
This sounds like a good utilitarian argument for folks who question the value of unlimited free play for children: "your kid may be more innovative as an adult."
Having worked in Silicon Valley during the 1990s and early 2000s, I noted that it became gospel that every company had to have a play area for adult workers. Foosball, ping pong, video games, climbing walls, bowling alleys, etc. The mentality was that play led to creative innovation.
But I have never seen a study that examined whether corporate playrooms had a positive, direct impact on anything, not even worker stress or creativity. In fact, it seems that not only did a few companies shut down these areas, but employees started avoiding them, returning to the stigma that the folks in the play room were just wasting time and you didn't want to be associated with time-wasters if you wanted to keep your job.
So, what are the real facts here? And why did the once-vaunted corporate playroom go from hero to zero?
It occurs to me to wonder then if the addition of an iron band around the wooden cart wheel served not only to tighten the wheel’s wooden parts and hold them together, increase the wheel’s useful life by protecting the wood of the wheel from wear as it rolled along the roadway, but did physics make the iron bound wheel “rounder” than the simple wooden wheel?