Major's Blog

Design Literacy

Wow, where have I been?

It’s been quite a while.

I’d like to talk to you about something not enough people talk about in education.

That something is called “Design Literacy”.

Now I don’t define this term as detecting trends in fashion or what’s hot in tech industry. Design Literacy is very different.

Finding a problem and finding ways to solutions through innovation, designing and building.

This applies to non-profits, all the way to engineering.

The problem is that no one talks about it in schools. We just do what we’re told, have lunch and do the same thing again for the first 13 years of school.

I can assure that if a school decided to have autonomous design challenges for there students. Students will be more successful than not doing so.

Life is such a mystery. There will always be things we will not know for sure but we can try out best to understand them as much as we possibly can.

If life is like this, then schools are misleading students by giving them concrete tasks, saying you can know everything. You must play it safe.

I don’t have a step by step guide but it’s something worth thinking about.

Staying motivated

Sometimes, getting motivated is easy, STAYING motivated is another thing.
If you keep doing the same thing over and over, you get the same results right?
Not, exactly.

Your passions are like growing plants, if you put attention to them daily, just even a little bit. They grow day by day for the world to see.

Learning

There’s always more to learn. When you think you’ve mastered something, you haven’t. Life is the in the journey, not the destination.

Logic can’t always win

Sometimes, logic can’t necessarily win. I’ll tell you why:

Socrates always believed that it is not the majority who is right, but the one who able to articulate logically why he or she is right.  On a business perspective, this doesn’t always work.

A reporter once asked Steve Jobs what was his market research for developing the iPad. His reply?

“None” 

The iPad is estimated to sell 13.5 million units in final quarter of 2011.
(That’s 14.8 iPads per hour in its retail stores)

Now Jobs could have done market research to explain logically why consumers want a tablet. But he didn’t. He went on his own intuition and went for it.

I’m not saying intuition is better than logic.
I’m saying that logic can’t always work.

Logic and intuition are two heads of the same coin. You just have to know when to use what.

Artists and scientists

We’re all artists and scientists of some nature. we create and then we find out how it’s done the best way.

Solving problems

I read an interesting article (I can’t remember where I found it) but it said that engineers can solve problems but they don’t know which problems to solve. I found that quite interesting. However I’m sure that there are some engineers that come across problems that they end up solving.