Doodles are magical — they can help you create fresh possibilities for your life and career

The Visual Turn

Nowadays, we witness ‘the visual turn’: Pictures, images, videos, films, infographics, and artwork are more popular than ever. Similarly, companies producing user-friendly visuals from Pixar to Apple, Netflix to Instagram are more profitable than ever. We live in a golden age of visualization, design, and creativity.

As an instructor, I am constantly in search of visual methods and innovative approaches to make my teaching more relevant and interesting for my students. I believe that we need to create more room for play, magic, enchantment, and dreams in our educational systems. You can see a sample lecture that reflects this aspiration here.

I have developed a new habit to create more room for open-ended discovery, surprises, and emergence in my lectures: I challenge myself to share with my students about 20–30 minutes of exciting and new things that I have learned during the past week. This is what I call a ‘refresher hackathon’ for my teaching…