What Children Do That We Never Plan For
We design a thing to do one job. It comes back doing four, and none of them are the job.
Hand a set of shapes to an adult and they will sort them. Hand the same set to a four-year-old and they will build a wall, knock it down, line the pieces up by colour, and then use two of them as shoes. The sorting, if it happens at all, happens last.
This used to read as a failure of the design. It does not any more. A piece that only supports the one use we imagined is a piece with a short life, because the imagined use gets exhausted in an afternoon and the invented ones do not.
So the question we ask now is not whether a child used it correctly. It is whether the thing held up to being used incorrectly, and whether it was still interesting on the second day. Those two turn out to predict almost everything.
The practical version of this is that we stopped writing instructions for most things. If a piece needs a diagram to be worth playing with, the shape is doing too little of the work.
