It’s a brilliant pairing, because Holman, like Honnold, is uncomfortable with the world as it is, charismatic without seeming at all interested in fame. The director of Holman’s episode, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, was the co-director of “ Free Solo,” about the climber Alex Honnold. You can catch a glimpse of several little girls trying to record their elders. Holman was delighted when, during filming of the “Abstract” episode, several schoolkids decided that the most interesting thing to build with Rigamajig would be a boom mike. Plastic nuts, bolts, and pulleys are made in basic black so that they look more real and less like the typical toy. The wooden parts are punched with holes so that kids don’t need additional tools. One of her most successful creations is the Rigamajig, a wooden building toy that she has called “a glorified pile of construction debris.” The basic Rigamajig set consists of two hundred and sixty-five parts, including long wooden planks, “S”-shaped hooks, wheels, and various lengths of rope. When her friends bring their children around, she insists that they learn to whittle or follows them as they search for frogs.Īll of Holman’s designs build-literally-on earlier work by designers and educators, such as Caroline Pratt’s Unit Blocks and Maria Montessori’s pink wooden cubes. The property includes a house, a studio with a wood shop, a pool, a basketball court, a trampoline, part of an old metal slide, beehives, and a neglected vegetable garden. She was raised in a small town in Northern California, and you can see her love of the outdoors and her appreciation for the time that she spent there, playing alone, in the toys that she designs and the way that she lives. She owns an apartment in Providence, but her main abode is a former day camp in Hope, Rhode Island, which she calls Camp Fun. Holman has plenty of toys of her own-so I invited myself over for a playdate. “These are the people that are going to make the world suck or not suck. “The reason I design for children is I’m designing for people,” Holman said. The blocks, which are bulky but lightweight, make it possible to set up play practically anywhere the minute they hit the floor, the kids take over, creating their own world, with their own hands-not without some bickering. Since 2010, when the blocks were launched, in a park in lower Manhattan, they have spread to libraries, children’s museums, more parks, and schools in more than seventy countries. Holman, who is forty-five, is best known as a member of the design team behind the Imagination Playground blocks: blue foam logs, bricks, arches, and chutes, some as big as a preschooler they allow children to build their own playground and, in the process, practice teamwork. In the episode that features Holman, we get a glimpse of the educational future, as Chinese kindergartners, dressed for the rain in full-body yellow slickers, create a life-size version of a Hot Wheels track out of ladders and barrels, learning about coöperation, gravity, and momentum along the way. Holman is the founder of the toy company Heroes Will Rise, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and one of six designers profiled in the second season of “ Abstract: The Art of Design,” on Netflix. What if the future of early-childhood education didn’t involve an iPad? What if, on the playground, movable blocks and ladders replaced fixed plastic slides and tubes? What if teachers acted more like guides and were less beholden to worksheets? School would be more like the creative process (rather than the counting-the-minutes crucible that many students experience) and the tools would look quite different: wooden play pieces, ropes and pulleys, nuts and bolts.
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