Packing Peanut Animals - Unite!

Curiously Cute Creations.

I found myself staring at a box of packing pellets or 'peanuts' as you folks in the US say. They have a weird texture, and the engineer in my surmised that they are likely forced out of a die at high heat and pressure, whereupon they expand into the fluffy, protective chunks used in packaging.

I've been writing about design, sustainability, and suchlike for some years now, and although I have done some fairly advanced stuff (project with RS and NVIDIA recently - link), I've also been making stuff for/with my young son, and this was something that just charmed me.

I think I had just unboxed a 3D printed microscope (OpenFlexure), and had partially wet hands from doing the dished, but was so excited that this amazing thing had arrived, I noticed the peanuts became sticky... I can't say I did anything with this knowledge for some months, but it occurred to me to lick one, and stick it to my forehead to make my son laugh one day. That's perhaps a bit juvenile here, so I didn't publish that as an Instructable of 2 steps, lick, and stick. But #yourewelcome

Anyway, I've spent some years talking about how much of what I do as a designer is about *being curious* and trying to see things differently. To see 'waste' as 'craft materials'. The flipside is it likely makes me a little weird to live with (my wife clearly an exceptional person), and this sort of intrigue is perpetual, being honest.

As Hunter S. Thompson said, 'the right kind of eyes' - is what we're needing here... to see opportunity where other's overlook it.

Open-Ended Play Potential.

So this Instructable is my attempt to show where my son and I ended up after 30mins of noodling around with packing peanuts, and we made some weird and wonderful 'animals'. As much as I think school does many great things, my personal beef with a lot of modern curricula in schools is that they are very prescriptive and not 'open-ended'. Playing with packaging peanuts is not as systemic as say LEGO, but I'd say kids really benefit from not just 'building what's on the box' all the time. It helps to learn techniques, but it also helps to just *play* for the sake of playing.

So you can either see this as a fun thing to do next time you have a box of precious goods, or you can see it as something to ruminate on - just how many other things do we consider 'trash' when it perhaps could have some utility, not just as a 'did you know?' fun fact, but as time to spend with your kids, showing them anything can be transformed into something else if you choose it.

Trash to Treasure.

Indeed, I collaborated with illustrator and creative, Mark Greenbaum on a recent comic, which just won an Instructables Prize here, but I hope this little 'twist' is just as well received by parents as a philosophical point that we don't need more 'toys', we need more 'play'. The hard part, in all these modern distractions, is time, headspace, and dare I say, a bit of boredom. I created a IG feed called 'Bored-Smart' as a riff on 'bored-stupid'.

Thanks for any shared ideas likewise. Have fun.