Good Morning 2012: creative thinking and diversity.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to attend the interdisciplinary event Good Morning 2012, organized by Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. A distinguished list of speakers and more than 600 participants met at the Grand Hotel. It was a day of inspiration, creative thinking, curiosity and diversity. 

Karolinska Institutes Professor Hans Rosling with his enjoyable graphics and his seriously sense of humor opened the event and declared:

We need to fight devastating ignorance with fact-based worldview everyone understands.
If you know the facts, population is a non issue for the climate, economic grow is the challenge.

Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, the inventor of sugru, tried to convince the audience about the necessity of fixing the things we already have as a way to live more sustainably. Sugru is a new material, a kind of self-adhesive modelling clay or play-dough use for fixing different kind of stuff.


Tom Beckman, Executive Creative Director at Prime, analyzed how the technological development will change business and communication. He focused in the value systems of the consumers and explain that there is a shift in marketing:

From building brands to taking stands
From earned media to earned your business
You can't win a heart without a heart.

He pointed out the importance of understand the context that surround the media for being successful in your communication.
But the most fascinating speaker talked about the rise of ecological cities. Senior TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong was really successful in her communication. The message was clear though it was a complicated issue about how advancing technologies can be used to create a more humane city. In an amazing mixing of artistic pictures, a poetic language and a passionately way to present her message she had the audience in a trance.

And the discussion about The Humane City continued. Alexander Bard, Darja Isaksson, Joel Lindefors summarized the results of the interdisciplinary workshops at the end of the day.

And at the end of this night some thoughts about the future of education that I red in an article in the Good Morning paper.  The authors, Nick Kaye and Dr. Ronald Jones quoted some facts from the report "Digital Media and LearningCompetitions":

"65%  of today's elementary school students would ultimately enter the workforce taking jobs yet to be invented." and "Only 35% of them will have jobs resembling those that exist today."

Then the question is, continue the authors, how should we educate these students for futures we lack sufficient imagination to envisage?

Some of their advices are:

• interdisciplinary methods is our best chance for creating change and for producing a high level of creativity
• collaboration between science and humanities
• critical thinkers
• strategists, capable of addressing cross-disciplinary problems
• creating cultural, social, political, economic and educational "systems".

And my own thoughts are: there is so much to learn, such a strong need for interdisciplinary approaches - and no time to lose!

Good Morning tomorrow and

Good Night today!

Foto: Violeta De Lundberg