We are all creative...

Often, we often spoke about the future and projected the values we have today on the designers of tomorrow without any qualitative or quantitative data to support or deny. With that in mind, I sought to investigate what young kids thought our future would look like and what the context of the future would be. With the innocence of age, their perceptions and solutions for the issues we will face are not encumbered by preconceptions or doubt of the power of people to solve them.

The students were led through a discussion on what architects do and how architecture performs in the modern context. We then discussed about what problems we face today and we would face in the future. They were then asked to draw a monument to a future president (as these were students in Washington, DC) and to represent the environment in which it existed based on our discussions. Some students drew anti-pollution monuments while others related architecture to pure form.

It was amazing to see the resulting drawings and to analyze them to see what third graders were concerned with now. Of course, the environment and technology were of serious concern but the political power of Pokemon should not be ignored.

Below are drawings from Miss Spencer’s third grade class at Key Elementary in Washington, DC.

Imagining Tomorrow's Designers
With Students of Key Elementary
2008-Ongoing