playfulness and creativity and serious social progress

In recent discussions at online educational forums, I’ve shared a persistent and clear vision I’ve had of communities of digital-mediated learners as social/scientific laboratories in which participants innovate and design solutions to real-life local and global problems/challenges they encounter in these times of rapid change and dangers of status-quo mindsets. This video portrays for me the kind of interpersonal playfulness of learning and its productive outcomes which suits the centers of learning I have had in mind. The video gives substance to the hopeful vision of engaging new learning which would replace the fruitless (solely academic knowledge seeking), un-dynamic, un-playful, and obsolete system that we’ve allowed ourselves to believe is inevitable.

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).

Tim Brown is the CEO of Ideo, a design firm founded by David E. Kelley in 1991. Brown carries forward Ideo’s mission of fusing design, business, and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas. Ideo is the kind of firm that companies turn to when they want a top-down rethink of a business or product — from fast food conglomerates to high tech startups, hospitals to universities. Ideo has designed and prototyped everything from a life-saving portable defibrillator to the defining details at the groundbreaking Prada shop in Manhattan (IDEO designed those famous see-through dressing rooms).

Ideo’s website sandboxes are a fun browse (recommended: Kid & Play, focused on children and fun). And check out the Global Chain Reaction for a sample of how seriously this firm takes play.

when I woke up this morning

(written on Wednesday, August 23, 2006, early in the morning)

All the delusions slipped out last night
without saying goodbye. Who knows where they’ve gone.
When I woke up this morning
there was one misfit left staying in the apartment
and I had nothing to say to him.

I brewed a morning cup of coffee
and noticed how loud the refrigerator ran
in the empty kitchen. My first sip was loud, too.
You’d think I’d cleaned wax out of my ears
that was packed there since Dad yelled at me
for tripping on an untied shoelace.

The window sill’s yellowed by sunlight though.
That’s a good sign. And voices carry from
a bus stop nearby. The world still seems to be
working. Or is it just the one delusion that
wouldn’t leave during the night?

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