At the intersection of play and design, a metric shit-ton of thoughts surfaced. The rest of this piece will unpack those.
Quote 1
“In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.”
― Donald A. Norman
Force Coaches make up artificial problems in nice and neat packages.
Played roller until 13, which, even if you’ve played competitive roller, you understand that it’s not very ‘coached’. He was essentially untouched during the acquisition phase of 8-13. He could learn the game correctly for that phase of life.
Unconsciously.
And that’s important, because most of us still are backwards on this. Even learn-to-skate (unless you go rogue) is taught conscious to unconscious… And that’s why kids say this stuff:
Play is great design. But because of its simplicity, it succumbed to ‘skills gurus’ and Instagram and private coaches trying to exploit you for money, and we tried to teach the game backwards… We turned it into the latter part of the Norman quote. Traditional ‘drill’ training is ‘superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things’
And we’re getting exposed on this side of the world because of our error:
Watch the beauty, grace, and deception Cover plays with.
And get your kids playing out in the street again. Because play is Power. And it is only undervalued because we’ve made the choice to be coerced.
Play is quiet, uplifting and effortless. It flies under the radar of ‘important’.
But like most truths, it’s a paradox. Power is non-linear, unseen, and almost undetectable. Yet it is true. Play is important because it can easily be made to feel unimportant.
Through joy and significantly less ‘coaching feedback,’ our kids, like Jaxon Cover, can become ‘players’ again.
“Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.”
― Donald A. Norman
P.S. betz dropped a great article yesterday, consider reading it:
