5 Bold Predictions For The Future Of Higher Education. The future of higher education is a constantly moving target. Everything from the emergence of MOOCs to new learning styles and mounting financial and sustainability pressures are impacting the education landscape. Every day higher education leaders are developing new strategies to leverage across these developing challenges and opportunities. The common denominator amidst all this change: students. What should they learn? How can institutions best attract them? Here are five bold predictions for how the answers to those questions will define the future of education. 1: Academic Curricula Will Become More Multi-Disciplinary Current models--reliant upon departmental space where curriculum is developed and fostered independent of the university at large--must change.
Examples of this can be found in our project at the University of Utah where they are developing a transformative entrepreneurial building where students can create, live and “launch” companies all in the same space. Skeuomorph. A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original.[1] Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal[2] and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.[3] Definition and purpose[edit] Skeuomorph is compounded from the Greek: skéuos, σκεῦος (container or tool), and morphḗ, μορφή (shape).
The term has been applied to material objects since 1890[4] and is now also used to describe computer and mobile interfaces.[5] Skeuomorphs are deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, or are simply habits too deeply ingrained to wash away.[5] Donald Norman, an academic in the fields of design, usability, and cognitive science, describes cultural constraints, interactions with the system in question that are learned only through culture, that give rise to skeuomorphism.
Gallery[edit] Notes[edit] Why Aren't Our Gadgets Still Covered In Wood? The world of Mad Men is made up of wood of every conceivable grain and color. The show’s sumptuous design palette has been responsible for popularizing midcentury design again, showing everyday objects and funiture that were popular in the 1960s not as the cracked and fading relics of our grandparents’ basements but as objects that define the characters who inhabit Matt Weiner’s vivid, romantic world. But what about the design of 1960s technology?
The Sylvania television set veneered in wenge? The record console cabineted in oiled walnut? The vintage hi-fi, pulsing its needles in a Santos Palisander shell? These everyday gadgets remain dead to most of us, and even in Mad Men, they look creaky and obsolete. There are two reasons. "I know why electronics companies stopped using wood," says Dave Laituri, founder of Vers Audio, a Massachusetts-based company that specializes in audio equipment made out of wood. It’s a simple observation, but an important one. It’s also expensive. So. How Misinformed Ideas About Profit Are Holding Back The World's Poor. I run a for-profit business that delivers products and services to customers earning less than $6 a day in West Africa.
When I tell people this, I frequently encounter disbelief or concern. The three most common responses I hear are: Surely you can’t make money working with people who are so poor? Don’t you feel like you are taking advantage of these people by making money from them? Wouldn’t charity do a better job of meeting their needs? While these questions are well-intentioned, I initially found them upsetting because they go far beyond a healthy skepticism about my business model.
They made me doubt whether I should be working with poor consumers at all. While I stayed the course, I fear that many will simply choose a simpler path of building a startup in developed markets. So next time you overhear one of these questions, do the world’s poor a favor and shoot it down. 1: Surely you can’t make money working with people who are so poor?
Even the poorest people are still consumers. 5 Ways That Today's Culture Will Impact Product Designs Of The Future. I was recently given a behind the scenes visit to the anthropology archives at the American Museum of Natural History in New York by Paul Beelitz, director of collections and archives in the museum’s Anthropology Division. One of the drawers in the Hopi Indian section housed a pair of moccasins in a particular hue of green that couldn’t possibly have come from a plant or insect shell. Beelitz said this unique color was a perfect example of what anthropologists like to call “culture contact.” During the tour, I knew when I saw chemical-based paints, or further back, glass beads, that Europeans had come in contact with the native peoples and influenced their creative process. What will anthropologists of the future think of the swath of time that encompasses the advent of the geodesic dome, the Shinkansen train, and Judith Jones’s soufflé recipe; but also the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs as we near peak oil?
1: Circular Economies 2: A Connection Between Producer and Consumer. Back To The Future: Why Retro-Innovation Is The Next Big Thing. Against an accelerating backdrop of datafication, a “retro-innovation” trend is emerging. New products and services are designed to connect us with the past in ways that are both nostalgic and interactive. Retro-innovations roughly fall into three categories: Innovations that authentically mimic a product or experience of the past to transport the user back into a gone era.
Innovations that use a nostalgic format to meet a new need. The Italian paper notebook maker Moleskine, whose recent IPO was valued at more than $600 million, is a stunning anachronism in a business environment that glorifies tech startups and digital business models. Crowdsourcing performances of songs, then throwing one live concert Beck’s album, Song Reader, is a retro-innovation that used a traditional format (sheets of music) for a contemporary need (co-creation). Searching for old-fashioned experiences that happen only once In search of lost time [IMAGE: Don Draper, Allegra via Flickr] Vacío del producto.
Eerie Photos Show The Strange Emptiness Of Dubai. Recently released timelapses of images from NASA’s Landsat satellite highlight the dramatically rapid urbanization of the desert in places like Dubai over the past couple decades. Cities sprout so quickly from nowhere, you can see the landscape morphing from space. But another photography project is a reminder that these cities are just as shocking to behold up close. Photographer Matthias Heiderich’s series "UAE" reveals a post-modern kingdom in the desert, hauntingly empty and utterly lifeless. Glistening buildings appear unused. Construction projects seem endless. Parking lots are barren. Of course, the shots are just one way of looking at Dubai and Abu Dhabi, home to 2 million and 600,000 people, respectively (so someone’s living there!). From Berg, A Birdhouse Powered By Your Twitter Stream.
The last time we checked in on designers at Berg, they were helping Google imagine the future of objects. Before that, they were putting the finishing touches on the Little Printer. Now, with #FLOCK, they may have solidified their place as kings of technological whimsy. Because #FLOCK is a handmade series of birdhouses that follows, @s, and retweets through delightful animatronics--the quirky-yet-understated movements of tiny mechanical birds. Sadly, the project isn’t for sale. Instead, this extremely limited batch was produced as a proof of concept for the studio’s new Berg Cloud Dev Kit, which is basically a hardware bridge to connect the Internet to Arduinos, enabling your bespoke physical projects to speak with the voice of cloud data.
These cloud bridges are certainly on-trend (the most recent of which we’ve seen from Twine), and for good reason: As of today, the only gadgets we can depend on routinely talking to the Internet are our laptops and smartphones. See more here. A Design Revolution That Could Lift Humanity. Editors’ note: The following is an excerpt from The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press).
In iconic nature scenes, one shape is ubiquitous: the tree. Based on evolutionary biology’s findings about innate human preferences for savanna-like environments, Judith Heerwagen and other psychologists have focused on tree images as signals of refuge that offer the potential for shelter, shade, and nourishment. Trees and other vegetation have inspired the art and architecture of every culture throughout history, which suggests their universal appeal. One species in particular, the Acacia tortilis, dominates the African savannah, where its silhouette emblazoned on the human retina for thousands of millennia, and research verifies that people are drawn to its shape--broad, spreading canopies and branches close to the ground.
The appeal of the acacia in truth may have nothing to do with its being recognized as a tree. And not just in nature. Consider the strange attractor. This 'tricorder' helps you monitor your vital signs. Walter de Brouwer is building what he hopes will be the next thermometer. The Scout — unofficially nicknamed "the tricorder" after the medical device from Star Trek — is a small square-shaped tool that reads your vital signs: ECG, temperature, heart rate, blood flow and blood oxygen levels. "These are boring signs when you're healthy but very important signs when you get sick — and the first signs of any infection," said Brouwer, CEO of Mountain View-based Scanadu, which is developing the Scout. The vitals the Scout is checking for also happen to be the first thing measured when you go to a hospital.
Now imagine if you can have this information readily on demand and with context to help you understand your own health. To use Scout, you place the sensor on your temple for about 10 seconds. Brouwer says Scout will arrive before the end of the year. PaperTab: World's first 'paper tablet PC' rethinks multitasking. Looking into our crystal ball, we'd say the future of computing is looking bendy. Billed as the world's first "paper tablet PC," PaperTab looks to combine the tangibility of paper with the speed and convenience of digital.
PaperTab is the brainchild of Queen's University's Human Media Lab, Plastic Logic and Intel Labs. It's a flexible "high-resolution 10.7-inch" touchscreen display (no details on resolution) and is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor (not shown in any photos). As we already alluded to earlier, the PaperTab is a new spin on working with multiple documents. The key difference between the PaperTab and an iPad is that each display is essentially one app. Multiple PaperTabs can also be combined to create expanded displays and drag-and-drop functionality between tablets. PaperTabs are also proximity-smart. The "tablet" isn't quite wireless yet, as it looks to require power from a computer that is presumably under the desk. Via Human Media Lab. The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013. Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the year. Working with dozens of clients who serve customers around the world, we designers spend a lot of time observing people as they interact with technology, services, and experiences, noticing how they seek solutions to everyday problems and make decisions.
In the process, certain patterns emerge so forcefully that they’re practically unavoidable. Meeting over three sessions spread out over a week, 23 Zibites (designers, researchers, and creative directors) discussed the patterns we’d seen, and distilled them down to the 12 insights we thought were most current and useful, to us and to our clients. Each one is presented here, as a brief essay that suggests how it will affect business practices in 2013, and as an illustration created by one of Ziba’s designers. 1.
Our understanding of how we decide has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, and it paints a messy picture. 2. 20 Tech Trends That Will Define 2013, Selected By Frog. Yes, it’s already that transitional time when our current year ends and another begins, and today and tomorrow are quickly changing hands. Rather than look back at significant trends of the past 366 days (2012 was a leap year, remember?) , we asked a wide variety of technologists, designers, and strategists across Frog’s studios around the world to take a look to the future.
The near future, that is. “Near” in that 2013 is not only upon us, but also “near” in that these technologies are highly feasible, commercially viable, and are bubbling up to the surface of the global zeitgeist. We believe you’ll be hearing a lot more about these trends within the next 12 months, and possibly be experiencing them in some form, too. Smartphone accessories become smarter Assistant Vice President of Strategy Timothy Morey, San Francisco I recently interviewed a doctor who had used AliveCor’s iPhone ECG on a flight to diagnose a fellow traveler with a heart attack. We lose control of our cars.