Three Design Opportunities for a Brighter Future
Three entrepreneurial ideas have been churning in my head for a while now. Rather than hide them for some competitive advantage, I’d like to share them with you and possibly tackle them together. If sharing these ideas leads to direct competition, so be it. As my ideas are all triple bottom line business models at least the competition will move us forward.
Before reading the rest of this post, you’ll benefit greatly from watching William McDonough speak on the concept of design. As one example, McDonough puts you in the shoes of Thomas Jefferson charged with the task of designing the Bill of Rights. Feel ready to take on that one yourself? For better or for worse, we’re faced with similarly massive design problems today, and the solutions are far from clear. Together, however, I am optimistic we can design a better future.
My entrepreneurial opportunities follow. I estimate the solution to any of these challenges, taken to market properly, would be worth millions (if not billions) today.
Idea 1: Climate Crisis, Sustainability and Green Technology
The fact that we face consumption rates far beyond sustainability is no longer controversial within the scientific community. We need a massive change and we need it now.
Many people take the political route to elicit change. Frankly, I have no faith that government alone can move fast enough to save us. What’s the alternative? Empower individuals.
In the next few years several green technologies will emerge that will save you money to use while saving the environment. One problem will be adopting them fast enough. It takes time for information to spread, and we can’t implement solutions we don’t know exist.
Background out of the way, here’s my idea: Create a website aimed at serving the the simplest, most effective means for maximizing sustainability at any given time. At the top corner of the site, put a panel that tracks how much money all the site’s visitors have saved in real time (think Traineo) by allowing users to report product usage & calculating their savings from the database.
Use that panel to set community-driven goals. Imagine a value of “$27,014,210.XY saved by our members!” XY is flying upwards. Right below that it reads “Goal: $38 million saved by the end of 2008!”
This site would gather some interest. People would be excited to check back and see the progress made. Teens would help their grandparents install new things to report it on the site & together the world would be motivated by measurable progress towards sustainability.
I’m actually already working on this very project. It’s at greenolution.com – as of this time of writing the site is only a placeholder until I finish the back-end. Competitors & collaborators welcome – my wish is just to see such a site in existence sooner than later. Let’s go!
Idea 2: Our current models for educational content suck.
I’ve already talked about this extensively so I won’t go into detail here. Take McDonough’s approach to design and combine it with a better model for educational content and you’ve got the potential to make millions. Whether you’re interested in designing the first prototype for a particular subject, or laying out a site where others contribute their expertise through a superior content framework, a solution here will be huge.
Idea 3: Establish ratings for educational content.
The internet presents an opportunity to advance education like never before. Companies like Microsoft and Google are building massive databases of educational content. At the same time, innovative organizations like Connexions are striving to create a global repository of educational curriculum by enabling anyone to contribute. With these sites offering increasingly massive amounts of educational information, we have no shortage of options to choose from. Given the choice between the hundreds of Geometry lessons available, the question we naturally must ask is which shall we use? Certainly one of these lessons is better designed and easier to understand than the others, the data we are missing tells us which.
Lessons designed by a better teacher likely outperform those of an inferior teacher. Lessons that leverage objectively superior learning methods from cognitive psychology likely outperform material that doesn’t. Lessons that are interactive and fun likely outperform those that are dry and passive. Yet the back of our textbooks don’t provide any bar graphs or otherwise persuasive evidence of their refined effectiveness over alternatives.
Information on the effectiveness of educational content is measurable, yet we lack a framework through which to interpret it. The design problem: create that framework.
As people’s awareness of objectively superior educational curriculum grows, so too will the monetary incentive, pace, and vigor in which cognitive psychology is studied. The increased emphasis on cognitive psychology will lead to further enhanced educational content, and an accelerating upward spiral for human education will emerge.
For my final thesis prior to graduating I reviewed current research in the learning sciences to identify the objective metrics for learning people are using. Several confounds emerge when you dig deeper into this problem, but in the end there is reason to believe we could create an effective solution. I won’t paste my whole assessment here; but if you’re interested let me know & I’d be happy to share the findings. Let’s make it happen!
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