Beyond the Product: What We Should Be Teaching Young People
However, what is most amazing is not the set of products Kelvin has developed, but rather his daring audacity to ask and act upon questions that young people seldom dream of in his community. Why couldn’t he make his own battery? How could he repurpose electronic components from products that are found in the trash? For the challenges in our communities, how do we develop a robust local solution?
His ingenuity to understand a problem; his resourcefulness to find the materials, tools, and mentors needed to develop a prototype; and his appetite for risk taking are what make him special -- not the products he has built.
The goal of Innovate Salone in simple terms is to ignite creative thinking, to nurture invention, to encourage entrepreneurship, and to build integrity among young people. Why? So that they learn to identify the challenges in their communities, gather the resources available to solve those problems, and implement their own solutions.
At the MIT Media Lab, we focus on “the invention of new media technologies that radically improve the ways people live, learn, work, and play.” At the core of creating these technologies and products is a dense but diverse set of curious students and staff who collaborate to develop solutions that will change the world. Most solutions we develop are by-products of the process, an afterthought.
In a similar way, for Kelvin and the students whose stories I continue to share, the products should never be the focus. Our biggest goal is that we can provide them a platform that encourages creativity and dares them to dream about a future they can create as we build a culture of innovation. It is our job to enable teens to make things that they are passionate about. Kelvin gave an amazing TEDxTeen talk in New York City recently. He describes his life story, which revolves around a kind of persistent experimentation that has led him to develop the products his family and community need.
Innovate Salone (Sierra Leone), Innovate Kenya (Kenya), and Innovate the Cape (Cape Town) represent our own way of promoting this vision. Bill Drayton (founder of Ashoka) says that about 80 percent of Ashoka Fellows started something as a teen. To build a culture of innovation means more teens have to go through that process of making. We can’t leave it to chance. Recent efforts to promote project-based learning among young people are well placed within rigorous learning theories by Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick. For us, “making is learning and that is very different from education,” something my mentor Nicholas Negroponte often points out.
The young people I interact with in Sierra Leone and beyond are ready to make a future different from their parents' present ecosystems. That future starts with a dare to dream, and the use of their creative freedoms to explore solutions to challenges they understand. It is that process of developing prototypes and hacking products that will enable them to learn, become serial inventors, and transformational leaders of their communities. It is part of our task to help smart, but inexperienced youth appreciate the totality of resources at their disposal and to help them aspire ever higher on the basis of real, escalating accomplishments.
Photo Courtesy: Joi Ito/MIT Media Lab
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