Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
TED Taken Over by Play

From KaBOOM! representatives, who are down in Long Beach right now at the TED Conference promoting their latest initiative – the Imagination Playground:

For the past two days, two sets of Imagination Playground blocks have been displayed in the plaza just outside of the main theater. Completely without context, conference attendees – ranging from business leaders to scientists to designers to actors to musicians – stopped to investigate the strange light blue structure that lay before them.

And then they started to play.

I’m happy to see smart adults getting into play, and KaBOOM! has always done great work at advocating for play. Still, I’m trying to bite my tongue about the Imagination Playground concept. It just doesn’t seem to quite get children’s play right: What KaBOOM! and the Rockwell Group have put together is an adult-designed, packaged, and ultimately commodified solution to play provision, when we don’t have to look far to find even better solutions that are inherently more sensitive and honoring of children and their communities.

But that’s a talk for another time.

Feb 12, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #