Sketching the Future: The Classroom and Play
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Author: csessums | Filed under: design, strategy | Tags: design | 1 Comment »Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!
Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.
Stay tuned!
It really is crazy how much other areas of life change and the schools stay the same. I bet even Back to the Future would have had students sitting in neat rows as their parents flew to work in a hover-car.