Author Archives: Garreth Heidt

Purpose and the Story We Tell Ourselves: Wayfinding our own Oceans.

In 1995, the prolific warbler Neil Young (and members of Pearl Jam) released Mirror Ball.  The album featured one of Young’s iconic cries of independence, “I’m the Ocean.”  With a chorus declaring the title’s metaphysical conceit and lyrics probing smaller, stranger metaphysical comparisons (eg. “I’m an accident/I was driving way too fast), Young contrasts beingContinue reading “Purpose and the Story We Tell Ourselves: Wayfinding our own Oceans.”

The Most Amazing Day(s): Teaching as Experience Design

For the past few days, ever since inNOVAtion Lab’s phenomenal trip to Corbett Inc.’s Fluxspace, I’ve been trying to figure out what has been happening in class.  The trip to Flux was a highlight of a very young year, and it comes on the heels of another highlight, our trip to the B.Phl Innovation Festival Continue reading “The Most Amazing Day(s): Teaching as Experience Design”

Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education

At the beginning of the year, I discovered that a local design firm in my neighborhood was opening an incubator/maker/presentation/learning space in a turn of the 20th-century woollen mill. Dubbed Flux, the space was exactly what I have been trying to create in my own school, only about 7 times bigger!   So I had toContinue reading “Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education”

Innovation: “This Must Be the Place”

When I was barely in 9th grade, I first encountered the music of Talking Heads.  It was the summer of 1983, and Speaking in Tounges was on heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman as I sat on a rusting, red Wheel Horse tractor cutting acres of grass for my house and my neighbor’s. Hours of idle passesContinue reading “Innovation: “This Must Be the Place””

Empathy: The Museum

Museums come in all shapes and sizes.  This one, which I found through @tombarrett ‘s “dialogical learning” e-mails, offers a look at Empathy, and it does so in a rather ingenious way. We talk so much about empathy as the key to design thinking, but the concept is far deeper than the utilitarian implications spurredContinue reading “Empathy: The Museum”