Halcyon Imagines

Imagining answers to some of the most intractable problems...

 

Google recently asked the global public for ideas to address the following societal issues:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas.  Voting is complete and Google will announce the winning big ideas in the near future.

What other answers can we dream up and enact together?

Imagining being able to learn, earn and return...

  

The idea that life should be one third learn, one third earn, one third return is appealing, even if not necessarily complete (where is the time for playing, for reflecting, for relaxing etc?), and provides a neat encapsulation of Charles Handy's advice that we should carefully "chunk" our time in order to lead a "portfolio life". 

Others are trying to scale this idea to the societal level, advocating living in intentional communities.

Imagining schools of the future...

..could schools in 2050 be like this?

Imagining extending higher education to the underprivileged...

 

...through new online, global, low-cost universities.

Imagining children - and adults - being given time and help with tools

The Tinkering School allows children to build, experiment, become deeply immersed in and committed to projects (decoration has a special and surprising role to play).  Do many mainstream schools (still) offer such opportunities?  If not, how can we help them do so?  Imagine too how many adults remain secretly and ashamedly short of confidence about their own practical skills, and how such an approach might help them too.