For a year or two I got involved with MIT's Toy Product Design class, a mechanical engineering introduction to product design and development. There were great inspiring lectures, lovingly crafted and obsessively presented, with music, in-class activities, costumes, prizes, comic timing, and a good deal of information about how to brainstorm, alone and in groups, how to communicate ideas, refine them, to design useful not just possible objects, draw them, prototype them, and build them. I was a mentor to the undergraduate students and learning as I went. The students came up with lots and lots of fantastic ideas, some complicatedly impractical, and created great, if not universally playable, prototypes for each of the checkpoints that took the place of tests, midterms, and finals. They, we, were asked to be curious, creative, open to each other's ideas, to place themselves in the the shoes of the potential purchaser, both the kid looking for a fun toy and the parent who controls what toys will be purchased.
But as I move farther from the joyful we-can-invent-anything energy of that university setting and learn a bit more about how children actually play from some extensive firsthand experience, I think the whole exercise, while a great training in industrial design, is besides the point for what kids actually want. My inner child, informed by watching kids on the playground, in the nursery, at the beach, and in the church community, just wants a ball. I want a nice, big, solid, bouncy ball, to roll and sit on and bounce and throw and come up with little games to play with. If I can't have that, a cardboard box would be ok.
Yesterday's run destination: Janna's house
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes
lunch: nosh around the leftovers
dinner: linguine and meatballs
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