future of education

Future of Education Charrette

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July 20, 2017 5:44 PM

Futures of Education Charrette

Peter Scupelli is joining two dozen leading thinkers, tech visionaries, librarians and change-agents to help imagine a new universe of collaborative systems that could transform the academy.  The group convenes at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, founded by commons scholar and Nobel laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom, from July 22 to 24, 2017, to explore new patterns of scholarly commons that could help invigorate open science, the humanities and academic institutions more generally.  The charrette is being hosted by Earth Science Information Partners and the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has provided funding for this endeavor.

It is an open secret that many structures and protocols of academic research, communication, and collaboration are relics of another era, unable to take full advantage of the rich affordances of digital networks. In addition, many academic systems are overly formal, hierarchical, and credential-driven. While open platforms have significantly advanced scientific and academic missions, many fields of inquiry are discovering that open access and sharing are not enough.

What’s needed is active stewardship, curation, peer commitment and “commoning” – the social practices, ethical norms and processes by which a community can govern itself and manage its research objects. To explore the possibilities, we are convening a “pattern lexicon” charrette to identify possible “design patterns” based on the efforts of several open-science organizations committed to open access to scholarly resources.

There are already encouraging developments in this direction. Just last year, the European Commission announced support for a European scholarly commons as the future of EU science (Open Innovation). At the same time,Force11 is exploring how a scholarly commons can serve as the organizational schema for better governance and management of scientific data sets, software, work-flows, and publications.

Last updated: 2:51 pm

Paper presentation @ IDSA International Conference 2015

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August 23, 2015 9:00 AM

Peter Scupelli presented a paper he co-authored with Judy Brooks and Arnold Wasserman on “Learn!2050 and Dexign Futures: Lessons Learned Teaching Design Futures” at the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) International Conference 2015 in Seattle.

Introduction:

This paper explores how we might redesign education to face the challenges and opportunities of sustainable futures. Increasingly, designers operate within ever-broader contexts (e.g., technological, social, political, environmental, global). Design for sustainable futures requires the ability to envision longtime horizon strategic scenarios driven by forces likely to shape change in broader contexts. Traditional pedagogy poorly equips designers to integrate long-range strategic thinking with current human-centered design methods.

We present two interlocking projects: LEARN! 2050 and Dexign the Future. Please note the term dexign was introduced to indicate an experimental type of design. The LEARN! 2050 scenario describes design pathways from today to a new learning landscape in the year 2050. Dexign the Future, a course integrating Futures Thinking with Design Thinking, was introduced in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University in fall 2013 to a mix of third year undergraduate and graduate design students.

Students learned to engage strategic longtime horizon scenarios from a generative design perspective.

Lessons learned led to a three-semester sequence teaching design methods for longtime horizons aimed at transitioning towards sustainable societies. The sequence includes: Dexign Futures Seminar, Introduction to Dexign the Future, and Dexign the Future. The Dexign Futures Seminar is an online module that teaches students to critique and deconstruct existing futures scenarios. In the Introduction to Dexign the Future course students explore futures based themes, design methods, and research techniques. The Dexign the Future course deep-dives into a semester long project set in 2050. In summary, we provide here three contributions: first, an example of a future learning scenario set in 2050; second, a design course sequence that combines Futures Thinking with Design Thinking to create desirable design futures (what futurists refer to as Normative Scenarios); and third, lessons learned that lead to a pedagogy for designing for longtime horizon futures.

Last updated: 9:00 am