Musings from Yoxi Executive Director, Kaz Brecher
In our Field Notes series, we share perspectives and insights as we take a closer look at the work being done by Yoxi explorers on their inspiring journeys of discovery. Designathon Works founder and force-of-nature, Emer Beamer, has been unleashing the wisdom of children since graduating from her design studies and starting Nairobits as a social enterprise 25 years ago. Far ahead of her time in terms of European development projects in Africa, she used technology to enable young people to tell their own stories of what life was like growing up in poverty. Her experience across 22 countries and 10 years as a co-founder of Butterfly Works and head of the Global Learning team, winning prizes from the World Bank and United Nations, led to the development of a learning method grounded in design thinking. Designathon Works invites children to design a better world using new technologies, with an aim to reach 1 million children by 2023. Emer is an Ashoka Fellow and Lego Re-Imagining Learning Fellow.
“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.” Walt Disney
A Matter of Perspective: Invitation versus Exploitation
Have you heard about how the DNC has enlisted children in their fight against maleficent hackers? This isn’t the set-up to a techno-dystopian joke, it’s the pivotal conceit of a competition cosponsored by the Democratic National Committee at this summer’s Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas. Children, ages 8 to 16, were tasked with penetrating replicas of the websites that secretaries of state across the country use to publish election results in a contest to win $2,500 in prize money, awarded to the child who came up with the best defensive strategy for states around the country. Seriously.
As it turns out, there are many reasons why the DNC turned to children to help them harden their defenses (the fact that our election systems are so easy to hack that proficient adults can’t be bothered should be of top concern notwithstanding). But why aren’t more companies and organizations including young minds as a missing but critical ingredient in addressing the complex challenges we face? The implications for the future are more pressing to children after all, as they’ll have longer to grapple with whatever results from the graying leadership and workforce toiling to right the ship, too often complicating matters further.
It’s this realization that has lead to a handful of powerful, youth-centered organizations like Our Children’s Trust, who sued the government in 2015 to secure the future of the planet by addressing climate change. And they just might win, as it seems the government could very well be violating their Constitutional rights by not taking active measures to combat global warming and extreme weather. So, we should expect to see more children demanding a seat at the table.
Counterintuitively, the movement to protect the rights of children in the early 1900s — from iconic photos taken by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, exposing the realities of sweatshops and newsrooms, mines and poorhouses — may have resulted in ultimately detrimental unforeseen consequences, forming the foundation for why 20th century adults rarely engaged with young people as legitimate stakeholders of society at large. While one might smirk at the thought of kids on the anti-hacking payroll of the DNC, it begs some examination about whether this is really a craven exploitation of child labor or rather a bold invitation to bring unique skills to bear on an issue that will directly shape their lives.
There is hope to be found not just in the uprising of Parkland High School students questioning the service of politicians or the extraordinary courage of activists like Malala who have found themselves in the literal crosshairs of current struggles. Even the Founding Fathers of the United States can be thought of as the Millennials of their day — among the most notable signers were James Monroe (18), John Marshall (20), Aaron Burr (20), Alexander Hamilton (21), and James Madison (25). Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the document, was only 33.
It has often been the younger members of society who foment change (though even the young couldn’t outnumber the Brexiteers). But the moral argument to keep children from being used as cheap labor in the 1900s compounded with the industrial model applied to education meant that kids were recast almost overnight from being sold as a valuable resource to being viewed much less favorably as completely unformed humans, best seen and not heard until they emerged from the conveyor belt of schooling.
Emer Beamer, the founder of Designathon Works (DW), likes to say: “Children are the last frontier of emancipation.” Growing up in Ireland, as she tells it, Emer’s early years were overshadowed by her mother’s very undestandable sadness, having lost all seven of her siblings, leaving Emer longing to solve her mother’s (and the world’s) problems. On top of the difficulties at home, Emer found little support in the Catholic education system where obedience was key and asking questions was discouraged — children were expected to follow well-trodden paths. Her experiences left Emer wrestling with two big questions: how she could find her role to contribute in the world, and why there is so much inequality in it?
Believing no child should face similar struggles, Emer has devoted herself to children at large (in addition to her own daughters), to show them that they are important, deserving of attention and to be taken seriously in their wish and ability to contribute to making the world a better place. She strongly believes that education should therefore show children that their ideas have value, as this will allow them to find their place in the world as they develop, rather than confound them when they are abruptly pushed into adulthood.
Education X.0 for All
In parallel with our current watershed moment around education reform, albeit a scattershot approach to reengineering everything from models of learning to classroom configuration, a new market has emerged for what is commonly called life-long learning. This is the result of several factors, from retirement happening later or not at all to entire industries newly emerging or being decimated, requiring heretofore unheard of skills.
Indeed, organizations from McKinsey to the World Economic Forum have been making noise about the steep increase in demand for so-called higher cognitive skills, like creativity, critical thinking and the ability to process complex information. In many professional circles, design thinking has taken hold as a sort of panacea to boost mid-career skill sets, speed the adoption of alternative approaches to innovation in rapidly-changing complex ecosystems and save dying industries with a Hail Mary effort.
So, it should be no surprise that we’re experiencing an explosion of “creativity” retreats and bootcamps for grown-ups, which is both heartening but also potentially suspect, as some see these money-making boondoggles as merely the latest folly of the mid-life crisis set. However one feels, Emer found herself enrolling in an executive leadership program called THNK in 2012, where she dove headlong into the challenges of the education system not only as part of a group challenge but also as the focus of her accelerator project. (Full disclosure: this is where we first met Emer, as both Yoxi founder Sharon Chang and I were participants in the same cohort.)
Extending her research and prototyping, Emer supported THNK in its own experiments with varying educational models, including co-designing a curriculum that was piloted as part of the Netherlands School effort. But after several cycles, Emer felt more convinced of a central, blinding insight that has guided the development of and iterations around Designathon Works: what has historically been framed as a “bug” in unruly children (daydreaming, coloring outside the lines, refusing to follow directions) is better seen a “feature” in our present context.
Thus, Designathon Works centers on the belief that every child be welcomed and understood as a complete human being, endowed with great creative capacity that can be harnessed. This approach and its methodology enables teachers to tap into the natural space of play within a child and between children, to stimulate their interest and engagement in social issues, and to challenge them to design solutions for these issues within the context of their formal education curriculum while using modern technology.
Ask a 10-year-old how to solve the problem of cleaning up trash, and you might end up with a concept like the “De-Waster 5000,” a helicopter that scoops plastic out of landfills and the ocean–and then uses a solar-powered flamethrower to melt the trash into beds for homeless people. In other words, you’ll get something that probably wouldn’t occur to an adult designer.
“Often schools are teaching kids things they might never need to know again, and we’re not teaching them how to be creative, or design, or how to hack new technologies or deal with unexpected situations,” Emer says. “A lot of people are aware that we really need to change education, but they don’t know how. This is one method that could inspire people. It’s basically design thinking, adapted for children.” And, falling on the right ears, the ideas that children generate could spark new approaches to gridlocked challenges.
A slight digression but an apt analogy for the importance of cultural context: groundbreaking neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky, describes a theory on the potential roots of religious belief in his essay “Circling the Blanket for God” and points out the importance of context in how cultures historically have dealt with those who hear voices. A shaman or a prophet who reported hearing voices might have been given better social status or protection but a loner would have been more likely to have been shunned or locked away — much of that depended on when and where they were when they shared their auditory hallucinations and what was happening to the community more broadly (feast, famine or foreign occupation, for instance).
This is clearly a nuanced and complicated example, but perhaps the daydreams and flights of fancy shared willingly by children, often shut down or dismissed in the classroom when offered uninvited, could be eye-opening or revolutionary in the boardroom or design lab when genuinely welcomed. More and more leaders responsible for organizational innovation are recognizing that evolving our mindsets, orientation and perspectives might be more important for creating transformative change than updating our toolkits. So, how does Designathon Works weave its magic?
All Work and No Play is Killing Us
Their website describes a designathon as a workshop in which children (typically 7 to 12 years old) are tasked with working in a creative way as they are guided through a process to understand, frame and tackle a defined challenge. They explore, scheme, invent, build and present their own solutions for issues selected from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Designathon Works has created simple worksheets and teacher guides, so that workshops can be delivered by the DW team or trained partners or even taken into the classroom directly to dovetail into an existing curriculum. They developed a maker kit of materials to ease adoption, but the workshops are designed so that they don’t require anything you couldn’t find at a local hardware store or a recycling center.
At first glance, it’s hard to grok why the DW approach could be so powerful in its simplicity. But whether participants encounter a workshop as a public program, a bespoke corporate event, a classroom session or part of the annual Global Children’s Designathon (more on that in a bit), the magic really lies in the fact that all of the adults are fully committed to taking children and their ideas seriously. And why wouldn’t they, with more and more examples of young inventors, like Dutch 18-year-old Boylan Slat, who founded The Ocean Cleanup and is now a leading contender in the effort to design and develop the first feasible method to rid the world’s oceans of plastic?
Very often in the effort to do something innovative, frequently interpreted as coding or building a robot, schools and teachers leave their ethos unchanged, and the child is still treated as merely a receptacle for a given agenda. And while we have seen an explosion of parents buying home subscription kits, like Tinker Crates, which give kids more opportunity to create, they can actually be counterproductive, the design equivalent of paint-by-numbers. Instead, with designathon workshops, children are given the scaffolding and agency around how to investigate and define a problem, approach challenges in collaboration with others, and apply their unbridled ideas and creativity in the context of an expanding skill set.
So, is there an optimal age at which to unleash children as designers? Ever the experimentalist, Emer and her team have run designathon workshops with kids of many ages and across the globe, studying efficacy and differences in process and outputs. She points out that from 6–8 years old, children begin to refine their differentiation between fantasy and reality (apparently, the belief in Santa peaks at seven). And the Jesuits in Emer’s life often said, “show me a child at seven and I’ll tell you what they’ll be like as an adult” (noting that Holy Communion is also linked to this developmental marker).
Emer underscores how critical this time is, therefore, for shoring up resources and encouragement to help children maintain their creativity consciously, before their judgement takes over. Up until then, they don’t know they’re being creative — a poignant mirror to the model of conscious competence, which many adults pursue in the process of upskilling.
Apparently, it was at seven years old, right on track, when Emer took her first step into social impact work, writing and performing a play in her garden to collect money to help the homeless people in her neighborhood. By fifteen, she’d drafted and sent a plan to the city council, redesigning transportation to get rid of cars and using light rail instead (we’re relieved she didn’t hold her breath for it, as Dublin only opened the extension to her old neighborhood just last December). At seventeen, she called OxFam and said she wanted to save the world and asked for advice on what she should do. Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, they told her to study to become a doctor or nurse. The determination to contribute in her own way led her to art school, and Emer has been doggedly following her own path since then.
Indeed, What If and Why Not?
Maybe the early child labor proponents were onto something, they just focused on the wrong thing, seeing children as valuable only because they could perform certain tasks in factories and mines given their tiny stature. They overlooked what children do well naturally, unprompted and instinctively. In the tireless “why?” and “why not?” streams, we can witness imagination at its best — a willingness to question and dream and dare. Isn’t this why we often call their perspective on the world and the rules governing it priceless?
Children have no trouble imagining themselves as the hero of a story, and the seemingly insurmountable travails introduced by our most pressing issues are familiar in terms of narrative tropes, testing the protagonist with an invitation to call on their ingenuity. And we often delight in seeing how surprisingly kids can engineer their own triumph, evidenced by the popularity of documentaries about science fair heroes, like Inventing Tomorrow, one of two at the Sundance Film Festival last year. It turns out that the greatest blocker to utilizing the unlimited natural resource springing forth from our kids is us — the adults.
The 21st century shouldn’t just be about empowering children but also showing grown-ups why we should take them more seriously to begin with and how to find opportunities to meaningfully include them in shaping our shared future. Thankfully, there are signs that as innovation labs, hackathons and open-sourced contests have revealed their limits, organizations are more willing to try new things. And the Global Children’s Designathon is a fantastic proof point for what’s possible when minds are opened and children are invited to the table as relevant participants.
On 11 November 2017, 600 children from 18 cities around the world came together to work in parallel and design innovative concepts for Water, the theme of the third Global Children’s Designathon. They worked on topics such as water shortage, floods, water pollution and endangered habitats. One of the concepts was evolved into a real-life prototype called D-RAIN — the perfect solution for floods in cities, according to its inventors. These rain-permeable street tiles absorb rainwater, filter it and then store it underground so that it can be re-used in the city. D-RAIN was invented by Amalia (10), Rosa (7), Shira (9) and Tessa (10). The functional prototype was constructed by Fien Dekker using Rain(a)Way tiles and shells as a filter.
EWB is currently working on a similar innovation in which underground rainwater collection and purification systems are the solution for the negative effects of climate change. And it’s not the first time that children have come up with the same concept as adults. Heavy rainfall, heat stress, drought and desalinisation are just a few examples of this. Ger Pannekeok, of EWB, remarked on the similarity of D-RAIN to their own research, “What I particularly like is that the children looked further than solving just the flooding. They also thought about the fact that you should do something with that water. Fresh water is, after all, more expensive and more scarce. So why should we pump it over the dike and release into the sea if we can also do something useful with it? Adults can learn something from that.”
Kids Are Kids the World Over
In addition to the almost 200 inventions that came out of the 2017 Global Children’s Designathon, the DW team produced a hefty report, “Global Voices of the Next Generation on: Water,” which is an eye-opening and breathtakingly inspiring demonstration of exactly why we should be unleashing kids on our gnarliest challenges. And not just in Silicon Valley.
Since Designathon Works launched in Amsterdam in 2014, they have prototyped and held events around the globe, leading to seven chapters run by partner organizations opening from Croatia to Tanzania and the UAE to Singapore. In April, Emer was invited by the Shanghai Association of Science and Technology to train 60 primary school teachers in the designathon method in partnership with a translator. The project training was initially intended for children in the 8–12 year old range. While the teachers had a great time, it quickly became clear that the knowledge of basic science was so much more advanced, that the teachers decided they’ll be using it with 5–8 year olds instead. Even groups of 3–6 year olds have seemed up to the task.
And this touches on the question of whether the designathon method really can work anywhere. Emer is the first to tell you that her team faces an almost daily battle to convince people that this isn’t just a program for “gifted” children or those in more economically-advanced regions. Anecdotally, 8 of 10 teachers, policy-makers and parents begin by insisting the designathon process will be too challenging for this group or that one, or that running it in Europe will work but Africa won’t. (Try running a designathon at Burning Man, which they just did, if you want a challenge…) So, they have been diligent about studying factors that impact efficacy with the methodology and delivery (remember: adults are a critical factor).
Indeed, it can be harder to run a designathon in an African school, which isn’t catering to the elite segment of the population. But it turns out that the real challenge results from the rigid hierarchy and strict guidelines which govern daily routines, so asking kids to come up with their own ideas and narratives might happen more slowly. But once students begin working with physical models, the process gains enormous momentum. The sessions DW have run in Singapore also yielded interesting data points. As in many Asian schooling contexts, competition is so over-emphasized that the children struggle with sharing their ideas, worrying about winning and how collaboration might impact their chances. But as the designathons proceed, that fades.
Future of work trends rank teamwork at the top of the list for necessary 21st century skills (communication, listening, sharing, etc). So, while regional differences might require small adaptations to target age or dialing up or down steps in the process, the quality of ideas from children and the value remain clear. The methodology absolutely develops skills that future adults will need to steer our planet and their role in society. DW is committed to working with children of all backgrounds and abilities and keeping their methodology inclusive by design to build inner capacities, meaning that all children, regardless of their gender, race, class, ability or learning situation, can benefit. To date, DW has worked with almost 6000 children and trained 600+ educators to use this method in their classrooms and events. With a set of digital tools currently being developed, they hope to grow their impact to reach more than 20,000 children by 2019.
Inclusion Includes Children
The more pressing point for innovation culture writ large is not that children have all the answers, but that, in partnership with skilled practitioners, they can contribute meaningfully and uniquely to finding new solutions. In a recent paper published by the Designathon Works team, “Cultivating children’s potential as changemakers: Notes on rethinking how society sees children’s role in shaping the future,” they underscore that children usually have no role in shaping future policies or global issues despite their willingness and potential to contribute. “The importance of children gaining both agency and the abilities needed to co-create their futures in our complex world is imperative in a society that is constantly changing.” And sharing the findings from the field research they conduct during workshops and annual events is as important to the team as running the workshops.
On the basis of the outcomes of ethnographic observations and interviews, the DW team outlines the best strategies for cultivating children’s creativity and potential as changemakers through interactive and mutually supportive processes where adults and children can ideate and prototype as a team. But it might be simply that adults need to see it to believe it. Often, engaging adults as co-facilitators in the process is the best way to change their minds. Emer has built a team which is critical to creating those opportunities, exemplifying the very kind of adults we need in the mix.
With an unwavering commitment to inclusion, co-founder and Creative Director Ina Conkic is a Zagreb native living in Amsterdam, who volunteered at the first Global Children’s Designathon and then ditched her successful art direction career in the fashion industry to manage the entire global event and all chapter relationships for Asia and Europe. And Anne Sallaerts, DW’s General Director, discovered her passion for design thinking at THNK Vancouver and rediscovered a wish to improve the lives of children. She leads strategy, institutional relationships, contract design and tackles ways in which to harness network development of a global community.
In case it’s not obvious by now why including children in innovation is both the right thing to do from a future-proofing standpoint but also advantageous from a business standpoint, consider this. A 2018 study looked at the performance of 3,000 publicly traded companies in the years 2001–2014 across nine measures of diversity. Companies were marked down for diversity failures: For example if they paid fines for discrimination or they hired no women to their boards. The researchers judged innovativeness from patent and patent citation data and the number of new products companies announced over the time period. And they normalized the results for company size, presuming that larger companies file more patents and produce more new products than smaller ones.
Fast Company noted, “The big takeaway: Companies that fulfill all nine positive diversity requirements announce an average of two extra products in any given year, which about doubles the average for a major company (those that tick fewer boxes are less innovative proportionally). Moreover, the researchers find that companies with pro-diversity policies were also more resilient in terms of innovation during the 2008 financial crisis.” Apparently, there are a few reasons why more diverse companies may be more innovative. A top factor, somewhat obviously, is that teams with a broader range of people have a wider range of interests, experiences, and backgrounds to draw upon, thus ending up more likely to understand potential users of products better than less diverse teams. And they tend to be better problem-solvers, coming up with blue-sky solutions more often.
Emer is continually surprised by what children invent in the course of a designathon, even though she has been doing this for years and in myriad contexts. Recently, she had the opportunity to work with children managing varying forms of hearing impairment. They had a teacher signing as they ran the designathon. And, though some children could read lips while others had cochlear implants, it was almost impossible to tell what was different in the classroom from other sessions. Emer notes that she often prefers working with special education groups because the programs are run by extraordinarily dedicated teachers, who are practiced at rolling with new things and comfortable staying flexible. Indeed, as talk of radical inclusion and adding diversity by using neurodiversity as a competitive advantage enters the mainstream, could children be framed as the next new source of “diverse thinking” to complement what organizations are already doing on that front?
More than a Moonshot: Collaborating with Children
The 2018 Global Children’s Designathon, which happens November 3rd, has more than 1000 children enrolled across 26 cities worldwide and growing! The theme this year is Life on Land (SDG 15), with sub-themes such as: how we grow food, the needs of wildlife, deforestation, desertification and biodiversity. And, Tony’s Chocolonely, a rapidly-growing premium brand pushing the industry towards slavery-free production of chocolate, stepped up to sponsor the event overall as well as events in Ghana and the Ivory Coast where their cacao production is based, as so many of these themes directly impact their business, stakeholders and consumers (present and future).
But, as Emer learned at THNK, innovation happens when you keep your feet on the ground with your head in the clouds. So, it’s fitting that they are bringing a designathon to Bilbao this October at Space4Innovation, where children will come together to explore space to come up with concepts and prototypes around how space development can contribute to benefits for humanity back on Earth. Amid almost weekly cries for a new age of innovation and creativity, we don’t even have to teach children to think big!
But our leaders must find the the courage and curiosity to meaningfully include kids in shaping the future using new methods in addition to new technologies. And while we recently shared some research we’ve been developing around the idea of creating more impact by scaling small, Designathon Works gives that a whole new meaning. So, take the challenge, and the next time you have a chance to chat with a child, check yourself. If you’re not taking them seriously, you know where to start having an impact.
