Technocreative citizens
Case Study [Code: TC-B002] by Jorge Sanabria-Z
The current turning point in traditional learning is undoubtedly linked to the emergence of technologies as digital systems and ubiquitous connectivity, but even more to the convergence of these factors with a general awareness of the diversity of learning styles, youth empowerment initiatives, and increasing prosumer roles, in the face of an obsolete educational system. The convergence is, in turn, revealing the potential of alternative approaches and learning centers, provoking a mind-shift in the design of innovative learning environments, as portrayed in the documentary, Most Likely to Succeed (2015).
In the scenarios introduced in that film, special attention is paid to the development of so-called 21st-century skills; in particular to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and the creative usage of technologies that enables hands-on learning experiences. The scenarios demonstrate how the technocreative citizens of the future can be fostered by rethinking learning through innovative pedagogics and infrastructures.
In addition to revolutionizing traditional school paradigms through experimental environments, a whole new configuration of online platforms, with extensive thematic courses and fully accessible self-managing tools, has allowed people to learn almost anywhere in the world, at their own pace, often with a greater focus on their career path choice, deeper engagement, and far better results than any old-fashioned classroom approach. The secret behind many of these initiatives may lie in providing an integrative framework of tailored contents aimed at developing lifelong learning skills, which are highly valued in today’s workplaces and are rapidly becoming critical in the eyes of self-taught learners.
“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence.”
—Sir Ken Robinson (educationalist)
Forging a creative class
Successful economies are increasingly witnessing the rise of a creative class as a driving force in national development. This class is composed of a super-creative core capable of identifying and solving major problems in innovative ways, coming from fields such as research, science, engineering, computer programming, and education, as well as from a subset formed by design, media, and the arts; who are complemented by creative professionals and highly educated knowledge-based workers who focus on tackling down specific problems, often found in the legal, medical, management, and education sectors. (Florida, 2002)
Though the need for such a creative class may be imminent, the engines to prepare individuals to acquire the needed knowledge and to develop appropriate skills seem to be failing, as evidenced by the problems presented in the aforementioned documentary Most Likely to Succeed, where children face frustration when learning in the traditional, industrial-era models of education. In order to thrive in the digital economy—in addition to, ideally, learning theoretical concepts through project-based projects—individuals should develop competencies such as communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. It is becoming clear that striking a balance between high-level cognitive skills and interpersonal skills provides greater opportunities and increases the chances of excelling in the burgeoning careers of the future, as shown in Figure 1, which maps social and math skills with declining vs. growing occupations.
The report New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology (World Economic Forum, 2016), proposes that, through the aforementioned SEL process, students are more likely to develop the 21st-century skills, necessary for those aiming to adapt and respond to today’s rapidly changing society. These skills, which encourage lifelong learning, include foundational literacies, competencies, and character qualities (see Figure 2).
As the occupational transformation continues, in which new and previously unimagined types of jobs are emerging, young people must, more than ever, be intrinsically equipped to interact with and thrive in unknown environments, successfully adapting and responding to complex challenges. Future jobs will require not only tech-savvy individuals, but people able to analyze problems, and skilled in listening to and sharing point-of-views, who can create, collaborate, and solve problems, scaffolded on their computational and critical thinking competencies.
Of special importance is the perception of such competencies as interrelated, since two or more are often utilized in solving a given problem. As shown by Romero (2016), different challenges may call for doublets, triplets, or even quadruplets of convergence, resulting in co-creativity, collaborative problem-solving, technology-enhanced problem-solving, creative computational-thinking, or even a composite scenario requiring a co-creative computational-thinking problem-solving approach (see Figure 3).
Functional and sustainable urban environments
Cities are composed of interrelated systems aimed at enabling, sustaining, and enhancing the general well-being of individuals and societies. Physically, they are defined by hard infrastructure — facilities such as railways, buildings, roads, or bridges, which may be thought of as physical capital. However, urban performance is increasingly relying on the availability and quality of soft infrastructure — non-physical assets such as knowledge communication, education, health care, and law enforcement. (Caragliu et al., 2009)
In their article “Smart cities in Europe”, Caragliu et al. (2009) summarize six characteristics of a smart city:
“1. The utilization of networked infrastructure to improve economic and political efficiency and enable social, cultural and urban development, where the term infrastructure indicates business services, housing, leisure and lifestyle services, and ICTs (mobile and fixed phones, satellite TVs, computer networks, e-commerce, internet services). This point brings to the forefront the idea of a wired city as the main development model and of connectivity as the source of growth.
2. An underlying emphasis on business-led urban development. According to several critiques of the concept of the smart city, this idea of neo-liberal urban spaces, where business-friendly cities would aim to attract new businesses, would be misleading. However, although caveats on the potential risks associated with putting an excessive weight on economic values as the sole driver of urban development may be worth noting the data actually show that business-oriented cities are indeed among those with a satisfactory socio-economic performance.
3. A strong focus on the aim to achieve the social inclusion of various urban residents in public services (e.g. Southampton’s smartcard). This prompts researchers and policy makers to give attention to the crucial issue of equitable urban growth. In other words: To what extent do all social classes benefit from a technological impulse to their urban fabric?
4. A stress on the crucial role of high-tech and creative industries in long-run urban growth. This factor, along with ‘soft infrastructure’ (“knowledge networks, voluntary organizations, crime-free environments, after dark entertainment economy”), is the core of Richard Florida’s research. The basic idea in this case is that “creative occupations are growing and firms now orient themselves to attract the creative. Employers now prod their hires onto greater bursts of inspiration. The urban lesson of Florida’s book is that cities that want to succeed must aim at attracting the creative types who are, Florida argues, the wave of the future” (Glaeser 2005). The role of creative cultures in cities is also critically summarized in Nijkamp (2008), where creative capital co-determines, fosters and reinforces trends of skilled migration. While the presence of a creative and skilled workforce does not guarantee urban performance, in a knowledge-intensive, and increasingly, globalized economy, these factors will determine increasingly the success of cities.
5. Profound attention to the role of social and relational capital in urban development. A smart city will be a city whose community has learned to learn, adapt and innovate (Coe et al 2001). People need to be able to use the technology in order to benefit from it: this refers to the absorptive capacity literature. When social and relational issues are not properly taken into account, social polarization may arise as a result. This last issue is also linked to economic, spatial and cultural polarization. It should be noted, however, that some research actually argues the contrary. Poelhekke (2006), for example, shows that the concentration of high skilled workers is conducive to urban growth, irrespective of the polarization effects that this process may generate at a meso- (for example, regional) level. The debate on the possible class inequality effects of policies oriented towards creating smart cities is, however, still not resolved.
6. Finally, social and environmental sustainability as a major strategic component of smart cities. In a world where resources are scarce, and where cities are increasingly basing their development and wealth on tourism and natural resources, their exploitation must guarantee the safe and renewable use of natural heritage. This last point is linked to the third item, because the wise balance of growth-enhancing measures, on the one hand, and the protection of weak links, on the other, is a cornerstone for sustainable urban development.”
Designing the future of learning in a Smart City
If the formula for improving the urban environment of a smart city — and thus the residents' well-being — involves cross-matching the creative class competencies in line with the six characteristics described above, the question arises, What would be the most valuable crosspoints between citizen’s competencies and smart city’s attributes? And this implies the further question: What physical and non-physical urban infrastructure is currently able to support smart systems that will leverage learning processes for the upcoming new generations?
In this vein, a framework proposed by Sanabria-Z & Romero (2019) in the chapter Emerging scenarios to enhance creativity in smart cities through STEAM education and the Gradual Immersion Method, has addressed the convergence between smart city attributes and 21st-century competencies.
This framework aims at understanding how different combinations of competencies potentially influence or are linked to smart city attributes. As shown in Figure 4, combinations such as co-creativity and creative problem-solving may figure prominently in many of the smart city attributes, as cross-matches that may be used as initial guidelines for determining strategies for social and environmental sustainability.
Project brief
Envisioning the challenges that will be faced by today’s children by 2050, when the latter will be facing their peak working and living responsibilities in smart cities, your local government asks what sort of network of hard and soft systems it should prepare in order to promote intuitive urban learning for technocreative citizens. The response should consider approaches disruptive of alternative education through interaction with the city’s infrastructure.
Specifically:
You have been hired by the Ministry of Education of your region’s future Smart City, as a strategic smart-system designer. Your task is to generate a Human-Centered Design (HCD) research plan template, that will be used by an assigned group of multidisciplinary experts to create a smart system for technocreative individuals’ intuitive learning through interaction with the city’s infrastructure.
Your project plan must consider:
- the context presented in the documentary, Most Likely to Succeed
- the social and technical skills demanded by the occupations of the future
- the 21st-century skills framework provided by the World Economic Forum
- Sanabria-Z & Romero’s cross-matching framework of combined competencies
Activity instructions
- Watch the documentary, Most Likely to Succeed (89 min). What are the “right conditions” for real learning and personal development?
- Read the Executive Summary (p. 4-5) of the World Economic Forum (WEF) report “New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology”. What are the key points to be taken into account in order to design ed-tech-driven smart systems that promote learning and foster social and emotional skills?
- Reflect on the influence of combined competencies on smart city attributes, as in Sanabria-Z & Romero’s framework. Which cross-matches do you consider most important for developing smart systems aimed at promoting intuitive learning in a smart city?
- Propose a Human-Centered Design research planning template that will enable the Ministry of Education authorities to generate a smart system project for intuitive learning involving the city’s infrastructure.
- What did you learn (personally and theoretically) through this case study? (450-500 words).
The HCD research planning template document should include:
- Objective(s)
- Reference frameworks
- Recommended tools from IDEO’s Designkit for each of the three HCD stages (Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation), along with their respective purposes.
Note: The template should be clear, instructive, easy on the eyes, and easy to follow for the team that will implement it.
The didactic materials presented here are meant for students of undergraduate or graduate school technocreative programs, as part of basic immersion for the product or service design processes in future scenarios.
References
Caragliu, A., del Bo, C., & Nijkamp, P. (2014). Smart cities in Europe. In M. Deakin (Ed.), Smart cities: Governing, modeling, and analyzing the transition (pp. 173–195). Oxon: Routledge.
Florida, Richard (2012). The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books.
IDEO (n. d.) Design kit. https://www.designkit.org/
Sanabria-Z, J. & Romero, M. (2019). Emerging Scenarios to Enhance Creativity in Smart Cities through STEAM Education and the Gradual Immersion Method. In: Converting STEM into STEAM programs. Methods and Examples from and for Education. Springer.
World Economic Forum (2016). New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology.
