Hard to ignore ideas

When we create physical artefacts that represent our ideas they become easier to share and harder to ignore.

There was one idea I never got around to doing when I was in school. I would often come across some great web based resources and key tools that I thought every teacher and colleague should be trying. I would share these in so many different ways, email digests, paper briefing, demonstrating for people. All the usual. My role was leading the development of learning technologies from Nursery through to Year 6.

I would often find the the hardest things for people to try were the web based tools because they didn’t have any physical artefact representing them. They were much easier to ignore or forget about than, say a Bee Bot.

So I always wondered what would happen if you could create a massive foam version of the web tool’s URL. And just put it in someone’s classroom one day. It would be fascinating to see what would happen as a sort of social experiment. Would there be greater experimentation? Would they be harder to ignore?

The same seems to apply to books in physical and digital forms. It often feels harder to recall and connect with the small library of books we have explored when they are in a digital form — tucked away on our devices, viewed one by one. It is much easier to surround yourself with books — normal paper books, glue, ink and all.

The ideas they bind are harder to ignore. We have to shuffle them around on our desk — stack them alongside other books. We might ponder on a jarring author combo or a serendipitous book spine duet.

When I am helping companies and schools with the process of innovation, the act of getting stuff out of our heads and onto paper is always an important habit. It helps to share those ideas and means they won’t be forgotten or missed in the discussion that might follow. Inevitably we have to shuffle those ideas too and combine them with others, perhaps sparking something new or provocative — in a similar way to seeing books side by side.

Don’t get me wrong, I make the most of the affordances of reading in a digital form. I enjoy reading across a few different devices and search and bookmark and keep highlighted notes. But a stack of books on my kitchen table or simply on the shelf is still much harder to ignore and I engage with them, and the ideas and people they represent, much more readily.