From Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Four freedoms of play: Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies, Education Arcade Project) has observed this truth: play has no agenda. Freedom is central to the experience of play. To understand the anatomy of play, Scot has identified four components that he calls the “four freedoms of play.” If these freedoms are not respected, the play experience is severely compromised or even ruined. Freedom to Experiment The player’s motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. The process is open-ended. Freedom to Fail Losing is part of the process. Freedom to Try on Different Identities Players aren’t necessarily …
A Harvard business professor asks his students to think about elBulli, a fascinating restaurant near Barcelona To eat at elBulli, customers must navigate a mysterious reservations system. If they are lucky enough to be one of the 8,000 who get a booking that year, they are then given a date and time to show up. Reaching elBulli’s coastal perch involves traveling to Barcelona, then negotiating two hours of narrow, twisting mountain roads. But then they enjoy a five-hour meal of thirty-some completely original, whimsical dishes prepared by Adrià and his team of thirty to forty cooks. The meal costs roughly …
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”: The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by …
Almost 20 years ago I was a part of pioneering something and I had no idea I was doing that. Gathered under the creative eye of Rob Winslow at The Union Theatre in Peterborough Ontario, a small cast of us put on a weekly improvised soap opera called “The Cactus Hotel: A Western Philosophy” (My God! Here is the brochure for it!) Every Sunday night all summer we improvised a one hour show that advanced the story of a number of characters who found themselves in an imaginary world that owed its existence to the marriage of the Hotel California, …
My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human. I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story. For me the social production of music is a deeply …