Читать книгу Voices of Design Leadership - Ken Sanders - Страница 25

As Alan Kay famously said, “technology is anything invented after you were born.” To each new generation, the tools and methods considered by the prior generation to be technology are just a normal, day-to-day part of life. For my grandparents, the telephone was technology. For my parents, television was technology. For my generation, personal computers and the Internet are technologies. For my children, none of them are. Compared to the prior, each new generation is unafraid of technology because to them, it is not. It is just how the world works.

A personal reminder took place during a trip to Brazil six years ago. My wife Regina and I were enjoying lunch in São Paulo with our extended family, including our niece Giulia, who was six years old at the time. Although the Apple Watch had not yet been introduced in Brazil, I had purchased my first one in the US a few months earlier and happened to be wearing it that day.

Giulia noticed my new watch and asked if she could take a look. I handed it to her and she quickly strapped it on her wrist. As the adults around her continued chatting, she began tapping and swiping. When she handed the watch back to me a few minutes later, it featured a new Mickey Mouse watch face.

Through her own intuition and instinct, my six-year-old had niece had quickly mastered the user interface of a product she had never seen before. To Giulia, the watch was not technology at all. It was just a tiny iPad. She swiped to Settings, scrolled through the collection of watch faces until she saw Mickey Mouse, and clicked Save. No training was required.

As the world continues to change rapidly, the very definition of technology is altered with each generation. In Chapter 15, Nader Tehrani points out how such rapid change has reshaped the curricula at The Cooper Union: “So much has transformed in terms of practice, it would be a waste of time to attempt to establish a direct correspondence between what one learns and what one practices. At best, what we can do in school is to develop a curious mind, analytical skills, or a critical mind, such that the graduate can translate those capacities into worldly practices as circumstance warrant.”

This is referred to by some as meta learning: the process of learning how to learn. Meta learning requires an awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of learning itself, far beyond the short-term objective of obtaining specific knowledge. Learning never ends.

But it all starts with individual attitude. Design professionals who are committed to lifelong learning and feeding their own curiosity are usually those who emerge as influential citizens and MVP talent.