Exploring Futures of Learning through Speculative Design
I have been drawn to the area of education and learning, out of both frustration with the current formal structures and curiosity in exploring the question of future of learning and work. A few days ago I was at the Brave New Learning Conference in Amsterdam, where I gave a workshop on ‘Speculative Design: Imagining Futures of Learning’. In this article I share the content of the workshop, the approach, as well as the interesting questions and thoughts that came out during the group discussions.
Status Quo within Education Innovation
When change is the only constant, how should education and learning look like in the 21st century, considering the development of different technologies and the paradigm shift in the meaning of work? What shall we teach kids today that will be relevant in 2050 or in the 22nd century?
If we look at the status quo, what is being argued among educators and learning designers, is the fact that the current school infrastructure focuses too much on a push approach. The child goes to school and has to conform to the availability of subjects, timetables, exams, homework, and the shared knowledge. And it is a great system, it did bring us to where we are today.
BUT, our present reality is different than the past reality, when this system was put in place, over 100 years ago. In the past it made sense, because knowledge and information was scarce, but today it is not the case. We have a different problem in the 21st century: information overload.
The last thing a teacher needs to give a child is information, they have a lot of it already. Instead they need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is not, and above all how to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world. Children in the 21st century and beyond need the flexibility and resilience to deal with a constantly changing reality.
For this reason, many educators argue that we should teach the so-called 4 Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. Not technical skills, but general-purpose life skills, on how to deal with change.
This is where it becomes interesting for me, because it’s not a question of improving, optimising and scaling current structures.
So far, most of our efforts within education innovation have been focusing on the top left quadrant, on optimisation and band aid solutions.
We need to think more within the bottom right quadrant, where transformational change happens. It’s not about making the current system better, it’s about rethinking learning from scratch and outside the boundaries of the formal learning structures.
Because learning happens everywhere, especially in this digital age. You watch youtube videos, you learned something. You read a few articles, you learned something; even though we don’t consciously think of this kind of activities as education.
In thinking of the future of learning, we must think of the future of work.
Technically, the formal education system that we currently have is set in place as a stepping stone in preparing people for the real world out there: to be good human beings, but also to become good, obedient citizens and employees. But with a paradigm shift in the way we work and in the way we think about work, should come a paradigm shift in the way we learn as well.
Systems Thinking to understand the complexity of the ecosystem
We are very lucky to be able to even talk about an educational transformation. I am very privileged to discuss problems within current infrastructure and how everything needs to change to meet change.
But while, I am discussing here the future of education, there are 264 million children worldwide who don’t have access to education in the first place.
In India, poor families would need to spend almost half of their income in order to send all of the children to low fee schools. In Kenya, families living on $1.25 a day would need to spend almost a third of their monthly income in order to send three of their children to school. How we think of these problems, however is in terms of band aid solutions: we need to send financial aid or put in place support programmes that would help Kenya and India in this case to build more schools, and have more qualified teachers.
How many schools and teachers should be there to teach 264 million children?
Maybe we should rethink learning from scratch. Maybe the formal structures that work in countries like Sweden, the US, Finland are not appropriate for the reality of other parts of the world.
What is surprising at the same time is that, while some children don’t have access to education, others have to live in debt to be able to pay for their training. In the US for instance, the college tuition for a resident, hits at least 10,000 dollars per school year, leaving 7/10 students who graduate with huge debts that they have to worry about for years to come.
These are all things to consider when we think about education.
And unfortunately, there are no easy or direct solutions to these. And this is where, we can use design thinking and systems thinking to understand the complexity of the problem, the different stakeholders involved and most importantly to stop treating education as a silo.
Our world is interconnected: one event or technological breakthrough impacts and even disrupts a whole industry. So education, is a very complex system, that needs structural re-thinking and improvement, not band aid solutions. And more often than not, the best ideas and solutions come from outside the system.
Best ideas come from outside the system: thinking like a designer
What is Design? And how can thinking like a designer help tackle the topic of Futures of Learning?
When we think of design, we often think of commercial and marketing activities. With the development of design thinking, design has become a discipline of exploring and understanding user needs to build solutions that bring value. And many times, designers have a proof of record in crafting experiences and products that are appealing, efficient and matching individual and collective needs.
But, it’s crucial to understand the impact of a product beyond the user experience on a wider system. We design for our customer and all of their pain but what about the consequences and effects of our product within societies and ecosystems?
How might a future social, environmental or political climate influence our solutions or how could our products influence those climates in return? There’s a reciprocal relationship between the solutions we design and the world they exist in. So as designers, we have to think beyond the product or solution and even beyond the user.
Take the example of the autonomous car. Before autonomous cars become a mainstream product on the market, we should consider different ethical questions. We could focus on how it looks like, on what it should do, but there is so much more to it. How should the transportation infrastructure look like? How would a city look like in this new infrastructure? What is the role of a driver? Is there a driver? How should the car take decisions in critical situations? and who would take responsibility?
For the first time, designers and developers alike, should step into the shoes of philosophers and debate different ethical implications of their products and services on societies and the environment.
So, design never stands alone, but is a link in the chain that produces change. Speculative Design or Critical Design is a tool to explore society’s tensions and outline the steps needed to be taken for change to happen.
It is a discipline that can prepare us for these kind of complex challenges. By looking at current trends and development and imagining their progression over time, we can imagine different future scenarios, and take steps back to what needs to happen today.
Examples of Speculative Designs
All these examples are trying to tackle big complex questions such as: Shall we rethink our growth economy? Can we rethink the supply chain management to preserve our planet and people?
Automation, Inequality and Futures of Learning
In the context of learning and the future of work, it’s important to speculate about the implications of automation and the rising inequality gap.
Why automation? As mentioned earlier, we cannot think of the future of learning without thinking of the future of work.
There has been a big discussion over the last months and years regarding the development of Artificial Intelligence and its applications in the daily lives of all groups of people on the planet.
Because, as Yuval Noah Harari mentions: most likely, the people who will lose their jobs to automation are the workers in the so-called low skilled jobs; and most of the people will not be the Dutch or the Swedes, but the Bangladeshi and the Ghanians working in garment factories or on the cocoa farms. Education in this sense serves a crucial role in shaping the global future.
How do we make sure that all kids are prepared for the 21st century? How do we make sure that we are not creating another gap, by changing the education system only in high income societies?
We need to think TODAY what to teach ALL young people. Because a tech disruption of the job market is not going to happen in 200 years but in 10, 20, 30 years and if we continue with the same infrastructure and approach to learning, many people will become irrelevant, economically speaking.
Scenarios of the futures of learning
During the workshop, together with the teams we started from the following problem statement:
Starting from this challenge, the three teams had a ‘What if..?’ statement as a kickstarter for their scenario speculation and for imagining a future persona in that scenario.
The team had a lot of discussion around the question of what is basic and what is universal?
Some of the main insights derived from the speculation where:
- there will be incentives to retrain yourself and be reintegrated back into workforce
- education will be less linear and more iterative
- individuals will relate to each other through different learning experiences
- we will have to deal with social boredom
- schools might not exist anymore and learning will be free for all
Within the second scenario we talked a lot about:
- ethics, and the relevance of social skills
- we would have to rethink what a meaningful life is
- we would have less working time, and more free time
- through technological breakthroughs, people might lose the ability to engage in meaningful conversations and we would trust data to make sense of what is going on in our lives
- people with underdeveloped social skills (ability to understand the meaning and feelings of others beyond the words they say) would use computers to make sense of the conversation
In the third scenario, the group discussed about:
- if consciousness is a priority then maybe automation would not be used as an economic, cost saving advantage.
- work and school will become more about personal development and happiness
- we would engage in a lot of sharing
- we will need new beliefs
- there will always be people striving for power, because, so far it has been in the human nature. So a new question arises: what is equality?
- we might have more challenges in life. If work is such a great part of our every day life, it gives us purpose. Will we be happy without it?
Conclusion
Learning is part of the human nature, and education is a complex system put in place to serve that need. In the 21st century, we need to think in a different way when it comes to education: not in band aid solutions that focus on optimisation and scaling up.
We need to think transformationally:
How can we deliver and receive learning in a different way?
How could we empower every individual to engage in learning and development?
How can we meet contextual needs and circumstances when it comes to education?
How should education constantly adapt to the changing paradigm in the way we work and the way we think about work?
Speculative Design is an approach of exploring these questions considering tech and societal developments, and creating future scenarios that would allow us to engage in present debates and discussions.
