Design as a 21st Century Skill

On Friday August 3rd Daniel Pink was the keynote at the Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE) Conference in Breckenridge, Colorado. If you are not familiar with Daniel Pink, he is a former Gore speech writer that has taken up writing business books. His most recent book, A Whole New Mind, argues that left-brained skills such as analysis that were favored in the 20th Century are no longer sufficient to be successful in the expanding global economy. Jobs that include automation (or routine) can easily be outsourced for cost savings. The jobs of the future will require a worked that has left-brained analytic skills and right-brained skills like: design, symphony, empathy, play, story, and meaning.

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During the keynote address CASE had several live "bloggers" posted at the front of the room and members of the audience were also invited to join the discussion. If you read the discussion you will see that folks are responding to Daniel Pink, interacting with each other, and asking questions...all live. CASE actually convinced Mr. Pink to stop halfway through the talk and respond to the discussion on the "blog". This was an exciting moment of interactivity. I applaud Dan Maas (CASE President and Littleton PS IT Director) for setting this up, Daniel Pink for taking the risk, and everyone who participated live. I look forward to the day when people from outside the room are joining the people in the discussion. Truly, the power of this new social web resides in global connectivity and communication.

If you review the transcript you will find reference to Adams County School District 14 building a new high school. The comment asks whether our high school will be better designed than a Starbucks. I assume the comment was not intended to be insulting or even tongue in cheek. In fact, in Pink's talk he emphasized the importance of design and implored us to ensure that our schools of the future are better designed than a Starbucks. In the context of school design does form follow function? If so, what is the function of a 21st Century American high school?

How should schools and curriculum change to accommodate these new right-brain skills?

Visualize Data (Hey Left Brain, Meet Your Right Brain)

As I recall the left brain is considered to be the half that drives logic, analysis, and linear thinking. On the other hand, the right brain drives creativity. People who think in pictures are right-brained. Daniel Pink has argued in his book A Whole New Mind that the future belongs to folks who can master the skills (attributes) typically associated with the right brain.

The folks over at the Visual Communication Lab have created an application that brings the right brain to bear on a traditionally left brain activity, data analysis. The application, Many Eyes, has the "goal to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis." That's right, "new social kind of data analysis." Many Eyes has a number of features that encourage collaborative data analysis including, comments, HTML for blogging about your visualization, and requirements that all data are public. For example, I found a visualization that was created by comparing temperature deviations to CO2 levels for the past 420,000 years. This visualization (below) includes 17 comments where other analysts have reworked the data and noticed a variety of patterns. Some of the results are staggering.


Imagine a scenario where students uploaded data that they found on the Internet, created a visualization, and then the class was invited to comment. The student could also blog about their interpretation (or reading) of the data. They could also invite experts or students from other parts of the world to participate in the discussion on Many Eyes. Take this a step further. What if groups of students were collecting their own data and loaded these to Many Eyes. For example, water quality at the South Platte River, air quality in Commerce City by day of year and temperature, or soil pH and/or temperature along a gradient at the new high school site.

Is this Real World?