No way.

Way!

Serious play is not an oxymoron; it is the  essence of innovation. Although Michelle Khine describes the motivator for her breakthrough as “impatience,” clearly her work had taken on the qualities of play when she dreamed up the idea of using Shrinky-Dinks right off the shelf of the local toy store as a stop-gap solution to a manufacturing problem in her new lab. A little Autocad, a laser printer, a few sheets of shrinky-dink material and yes, a hot toaster oven later, and Khine had created a  microfluidic chip without using the $100,000 equipment everyone else relied on to manufacture them. And guess what? it works! Read about this clever young woman in MIT’s Technology Review.

Next, we want to see what she can do with Silly Putty.

Thanks to Monique Paturel for bringing this story to my attention on Facebook.