Card #42 – ”Make It Fun” from the Creative Whack Pack
Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

One of play’s products is fun — one of the most powerful motivators around.
For example, Rosalind Franklin, the British scientist whose crystallography research in the early 1950s was instrumental in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA (by James Watson and Francis Crick), was asked why she pursued her studies with such passion. She replied, “Because our work is so much fun!”
Similarly, Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who coined the subatomic-term “quark” after a line in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, was asked to comment on the names of the various types of quarks — “flavor,” “color,” “charm,” “strange,” etc. He said: “The terms are just for fun. There’s no particular reason to use pompous names. One might as well be playful.”
Physicist Richard Feynman had a similar philosophy: “Doing science is like sex: sometimes something important comes as the result of it, but that’s not the reason we’re doing it.”
I once asked the renowned chair designer Bill Stumpf what criteria he used to select new furniture projects. He responded, “There are three things I look for in my work: 1) I hope to learn something; 2) I want to make some money; and, 3) I’d like to have some fun. If the project doesn’t have the promise of satisfying at least two of these, then I don’t sign on.”
How can you make your idea more fun?