Gearing up for the next frontier
By: Ankit Shekhawat
Tags: Education, Makers, Innovation

Gearing up for the next frontier

The Dumbing Down Of A Generation

An edit of this post was published on BusinessWorld on Jan 29, 2014

While learning electrolysis at school, I once pitched a proposition to my grandfather, complete with diagrams drawn with colour pencils — an alternative to fossil fuel engines using water as fuel. My hypotheses were naïve, years of scientific research away from the commercial fuel cell car. They were evidence of a great privilege that is now fading away for most of us — the ability to peek into things and wonder.

Technology has come a long way in making our lives simple. The quest for simplicity, which helped technology become pervasive, has also made it invisible. I can no longer open my blue-ray player and hope to clean the head as my dad did with his VCR. Technology creates a paradox where it demolishes the culture that creates it. When the personal computer was yet to find its place in our lives, computer manufacturers were luring hobbyists and enthusiasts into discovering its creative avenues. The original Macintosh was sprinkled with tools such as the Quartz composer to attract the not-so-technologically-inclined into toying with it.

if Apple were to make a car of today, we would expect them to seal off the engine citing its flawlessness — forbidding future generations from understanding what an engine looked like, let alone contemplating how it works. Image courtesy: MotorTrend

Today technology has become a channel for effortless consumption, instead of being a vehicle for creativity. So much so that if Apple were to make a car of today, we would expect them to seal off the engine citing its flawlessness — forbidding future generations from understanding what an engine looked like, let alone contemplating how it works.

Much has been written about how new age technologies are revolutionising education. Some schools have even started using devices such as tablets and smartphones to teach their curriculum. Online course are seeing a surge in adoption. There is no doubt that this has made a great amount of knowledge accessible. However great these devices are for devouring knowledge, they help very little in letting people use that knowledge in a creative process.

Consumers are lulled into the comfort of seemingly perfect environments, where nothing can harm them. Ironically the Unix operating system, on which most of today’s devices are based, had a contrasting design philosophy: “Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.”

“Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.”

One cannot observe tensions in a sterile environment that causes one to sit back and become passive consumers. We are inadvertently discouraging our younger generation from tinkering with things. We are teaching them not to question status quo.

Behold the new normal

All is not lost, however; with democratisation of technology the normal of innovation is shifting from heavy Goliaths to nimble Davids. Never before in the history of man kind, the most crucial skill has also been the most accessible one! Take for accessible open hardware and software tools such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino, among others are making creative use of technology accessible. These tools do not come with neat casings; you can see what they are made of. They are meant to be offensively difficult; meant to challenge you to take on an open world of possibilities. Exposing cogs and gears of a system may hamper one’s experience of a product, but it also empowers you to create something new with the understanding of the system. Children and adults alike are creating amazing things with these tools. Farmers have created auto sprinkler systems that irrigate the crop automatically when the soil gets dry. Fifteen years-old kids have made and launched weather satellites.

It is not just accessible open hardware and software that will enable the next creative wave; an ecosystem that supports this movement needs to evolve. The sprouts of such an environment can be seen in crowd-funding initiatives, which have already enabled many a hobby project to become commercial realities.

The Choice Is Ours

Often, we make the mistake of assuming that the next big thing would come from today’s market leaders. After all, they have the resources and have been innovative in the past. But they are burdened with the dichotomy of keeping their successful portfolios relevant while driving radical innovations which can render the same irrelevant.

Today, one could be living in the remotest possible location on earth and yet have the same creative potential as a designer or engineer in an advanced design studio or lab. Accessible creative technology can enable anyone to observe tension between reality and desire, and bridge the gap. What is needed is a realisation that technology is a vehicle for creativity and innovations start with personal inquisitiveness.

We are about to witness a subtle disruption in who gets to create the future — it could be anyone with a curious mind and an itch to tinker.