Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Carol Strohecker on the future of design and regional development
Carol Strohecker is a former MIT Media Lab Europe professor, and the incoming director of the new North Carolina Center for Design Innovation. The mission of the Center is to foster
cross-disciplinary research and entrepreneurial activity related to design and innovation, provides educational programming focused on design and innovation, and acts as a design-based business cluster accelerator, to make the Piedmont Triad Region of North Carolina a recognized center of design across the country.
Carol's talk, which drew on the presentation she gave to CDI, traces the various strands that contribute to the emergence of design as a source of competitive and regional advantage.
Much of what she talked about dovetailed nicely with the work Anthony Townsend and I have been doing on the new science city, particularly the idea of R&D as an exercise in urban development. This is something that Carol has lived: Media Lab Europe was located in an old Guinness factory, and CDI's main building is a restored tobacco warehouse.
Big background ideas
1980s: Constructivism
1990s: "Flow" (immersion in the creative process)
2000s: Florida, Rise of the Creative Class: invest in the 3Ts (technology, talent, and tolerance); Rockefeller Foundation's Beyond Productivity: IT and Creative Practices; Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind
Research and engineering
1980s: MIT Media Lab; Media Lab Europe;
2003-5: Efforts in Scotland to link design and technology
2004: National Center for Tech Literacy, Boston
2005: $100 laptop
2006: NSF creativity tools, stanford d.school, center for design innovation
2006-2008: UMass Lowell's Media, Information, and Communications Studies program development; UC Boulder ATLAS (Alliance for tech, learning and society)
Regional development
1980s: Austin, TX tranformed by emphasizing music, culture, hi-tech research
1990s: Dublin's Temple Bar renovation as a downtown center for art and culture
2000: Media Lab Europe
2001: Austin 360 Summit, Memphis Manifesto solidified the idea that cities and companies should invest in the local urban ecosystem and quality of place, and develop policies that embrace diversity, value risk-taking, responsibility for change. AEA Consulting began to build synergies among city center's cultural organizations
2006: World Economic Forum session on "The Creative Imperative"
Technological advances
1980s: Silicon chips become smarter and more affordable
2000s: Sensing technologies following the same route as the microprocessor; wearable and mobile computing getting real; needs in udstrial and interface design around converging electronics, multimodal representation