What makes work more fun than play?
Flow is "the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The experience of the activity itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost for the sheer sake of doing it".
-M. Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow,The Psychology of Optimal Experience"


What helps produce the deep concentration during work that causes exhilaration and refreshment?
Useful, appropriate technology is part of the answer.

We look back in time and understand who people were and what their lives were like by the tools that they used. Then as now, even as we shape our tools, using them shapes us.


Human Origins springs from a facination with tool-building and tool-using, through time and today. Here we investigate the reasons systems work well or poorly and sometimes propose ways to make them better: tools and systems that people use and that form us.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
-Robert Frost, "Two Tramps in Mud Time"