PLAY

This video on TED is a good illustration of howPlay is important. However, the short lecture made me think further on several things. One, the man giving the speech, while most likely a veteran public speaker, seemed very much at ease. He was not simply sharing and spewing his passion, he was enjoying himself as well. The images he chose to show, too, were designed to be playful... visually playful anyways, and hitting something in a collective consciousness of pop culture. His allusions to animals seemed more astute, but it wasn't until Homer shows up on screen that people actually participated in laughter.
The topic of work and academic-frameworked play was especailly interesting to someone like myself, thinking of the way in which we 'work' or create. I wonder if those students who made that great movie about an alternative form of meeting dressed in a suit and tie and lived ina bad office building while they came up for schemes of the film, or ideas about what a "meeting" was. Putting Csikszentmihalyi in there, too, made me think. The philosophy in "FLOW" is very appropriate to an individual's outlook on whatever task he or she is doing, but my problem with using it in the interpretation of this film is that it is still somewhat protestant in a way. One can experience FLOW in anything, but there is also something to say about finding what gives you FLOW. Did the character in that film enjoy working in a suit and sitting at a computer all day? Well, maybe he did, but the fact that a mundane office beauracracy like a "meeting" had to be turned into a FLOW experience, makes me wonder if the task of sitting at a desk all day could be transformed bodily to give it more of a FLOW experience for this young man. Professional firms like Google, Apple and IDEO seem to respond to this principle.

This could open up so many more conversations, then, about creating for yourself, creating for many, the biological political/systems impact on the workplace and on what we consume.

I just want to play.