Author: Robin

“In the absence of information, people make it up.”

-Anonymous

Robert Brunner, director of Apple’s Industrial Design group in the 1990’s, recruited Jony Ive to his team. Some of his thoughts on how he did this are recorded in Jony Ive by Leander Kahney.

Creating a work space:

“[The studio] was essential to recruiting talent. I can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.” -Robert Brunner

Getting the word out:

Talented, ambitious designers were more inclined to go to firms with a strong creative history like the Bay Area’s IDEO.

To help with recruiting, Brunner […] started promoting his work through design magazines. He created mock-ups of fantastical Apple products and ran big glossy photos of them on the back of I.D. magazine, the international design bible. One was a gigantic bicycle navigation computer that showed maps and local landmarks. Another was a chunky wristwatch computer the size of a cantaloupe.

“They were concepts, not real products,” said Brunner. “They started to get attention. It was totally recruiting. No other reason. They were sketchy, information appliance models. A little bit tongue in cheek.”

“A particular subculture, dominated by computer engineers, is influencing the world of education to favor those school students who are most like that subculture.”

-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (1980, p. 35)

“[To be a great manager,] you have to reconcile responsibilities that, at first sight, appear contradictory. You have to be able to set consistent expectations for all your people yet at the same time treat each person differently. You have to be able to make each person feel as though he is in a role that uses his talents, while simultaneously challenging him to grow. You have to care about each person, praise each person, and, if necessary, terminate a person you have cared about and praised.”

-Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
First, Break All The Rules

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has listed nine contradictory traits that are frequently present in the dozens of creative people he has studied. The seeming contradictions make creative people hard to understand. I identify with all of these except number 5.

Some of my favorite seeming contradictions:

• smart and naive
• playful and productive (responsibility and irresponsibility)
• attentive to real detail yet fluent in imagination and fantasy
• genuinely humble yet displaying a strong sense of pride
• rebellious and conservative
• very passionate about their work, but extremely objective about it

Pun intended.

“Simplicity is… trying to define the essence of something and come up with a solution that seems utterly inevitable and obvious. I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that’s not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, ‘Yeah, well, of course.’ Where there’s no rational alternative.”

-Jony Ive [interview]

Genius: teaching kids empathy by letting them interact with a baby and mother, and encouraging them to talk about what they see. This is the most compelling curriculum for social and emotional learning (SEL) that I have seen.

“An amazing opportunity for life lessons that don’t involve getting in trouble.” -Mary Gordon [TEDx video]

This is finally happening: new elementary schools in the Netherlands, set to open in the fall, are rethinking the educational model by giving each child an iPad and letting them learn at their own pace (with teachers acting as coaches and guides).

If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about. […]

“At home, Daphne learns naturally, according to her own pace, interactively and using multimedia tools,” says de Hond. […] The classic chalk-and-blackboard teachers, he adds angrily, “are preparing children for a world that no longer exists.”

Actually, the idea of self-directed education is at least a hundred years old, as one of the core principles of Montessori schools. In fact, I attended a Montessori school, which perhaps helps to explain why a decade ago I was already thinking about using technology to extend self-directed learning. In high school, I designed an educational website about electricity and described it this way:

This site was specifically designed with the idea that there is no one correct path leading through it. Instead, you are encouraged to start at whichever category interests you most and then meander at leisure through whichever pages “spark” your interest.

[…]

Everyone is interested in different things, so it doesn’t make much sense to make every visitor use the same route, as they would in a traditional research paper. The nature of the web allowed me to set up the site so that people can very easily “choose their own adventure” according to what looks interesting. The hope is that people will have a better learning experience and stay at the site longer knowing they have the power to read about the things they want.

I also pointed out that the connections between topics are crucial:

Energy politics depend on the technologies in use, and development of the technologies depends on the politics. Electrical appliances depend on generators and power lines; all of these things are based on physical principles related to electricity. Because of this there is no inherently “correct” way to teach the subject — so why make one up and say it’s correct? Instead, I hope that visitors will be fascinated by the connections that exist between topics, and willingly learn about areas they might not have wanted to learn about if it was presented in an isolated, linear fashion.

The article about the new Dutch schools casually mentions, almost as a side note:

If a math app is neither enjoyable nor successful, the teacher simply orders another one. The supply of educational programs never runs dry in Apple’s online app store.

I wonder to what extent that is true. Are there high quality educational apps for every K-5 topic, available in all major languages? Do all of these apps let teachers and parents monitor the child’s progress? And further, do these apps make the connections between topics apparent, so that students can follow links to other apps to learn about related concepts?

The principal of one of these schools was quoted as saying “what we are doing will seem pretty normal in 2020.” I don’t doubt that; the low-tech version already seemed pretty normal when I was a kid. In the meantime, I wonder what I should do to help make the high-tech version a success.