My son is making a kit of a Grumman F-14 Tomcat and when we briefly forget that he is building a scaled-down flying murder weapon at our kitchen table, it is touching to see how concentrated he is.
I see that this kit is a significant improvement over what scale model giant Revell gave me as a child. The instructions are clearer and this package also includes paint and glue. That glue is no longer in such an aluminum squeeze tube from which much too large drops fall out and which dries out quickly, but in a handy plastic squeeze bottle that you can put down and with a needle, with which a small amount can be placed in the right place with great precision. glue can be applied. The paint is water-based, so no messing around with cleaning with white spirit. Also nice, in the instructions it says that if a part breaks, you can order it again.
All a lot more user-friendly. While a building kit is not user-friendly at its core. All separate parts that have to be put together one by one, where many parts also consist of more separate elements than is necessary for injection molding. If you want a scale model of an airplane, it is much more user-friendly to buy a ready-made one. But that is of course not the purpose of a kit. You want to build. Feeling expertise. Be proud.
We don’t want everything to be easy. Running, playing the piano, cooking. I don’t run to get from A to B or just because I want to maintain my fitness level, but also because it challenges me. I always want something faster, harder or easier. If I had wanted to get from A to B in the most user-friendly way possible, I would have taken the bike or car.
Things are often fun not because they are easy, but because they are difficult. We want to develop and challenge ourselves. Because when something is challenging, we can totally immerse ourselves in it. Then we get into a ‘flow’, as the American-Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called it. For flow, there must be a balance between our ability and the difficulty of the task at hand. If it’s too easy, we lose interest. If it is too difficult, we will give up in frustration.
However, a task must of course be challenging in the right aspects. Cooking is fun when the challenge is learning how to prepare a dish just right, not when the challenge consists of a confusing recipe, taming an incomprehensible hob and cutting with a dull knife.
That’s the nice thing about my son’s construction kit, while trying to make the puzzle itself challenging, and to make sure that everything around it doesn’t get in the way.
Jasper van Kuijk on Twitter: @jaspervankuijk