Rooftop Alternative K-8 School ART IS INNOVATION

Rooftop Alternative K-8 School

The experts on innovation side with Shakespeare. “The play’s the thing.” This year, Rooftop students will learn how artistic innovators turn playful ideas into reality.

RUBE GOLDBERG

You’ve entered a rare realm of accomplishment when your name becomes an entry in the dictionary. Look up RUBE GOLDBERG

in the dictionary, and you’ll see that the San Franciscan Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/sculptor/author, born in 1883, was best known for creating fabulous contraptions that accomplished “by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.”

Today, Reuben Lucius Goldberg is still inspiring and engaging the best and brightest young minds in the name of creativity, good humor and old-fashioned ingenuity.

Learn more about San Franciscan Rube Goldberg

IDEO

Founded in Palo Alto in 1991, IDEO (pronounced "eye-dee-oh") is a global design company that creates “impact through design.” The company initially focused on designing products such as Apple’s first trackball computer mouse or the first soft-handled toothbrush. Today IDEO has evolved beyond product design to also design tools, such as the Human Centered Design Toolkit, a free innovation guide developed with the support of the Gates Foundation, that help people to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. Design thinking begins with observation and fact-finding, widens to include open-ended questioning, inspiration, experimenting, testing and building, ending up with the final steps of production, implentation and distribution.

Whether designing new toys in the IDEO TOY LAB or freely sharing the companies insights about emerging PATTERNS, this Bay Area company is a case study of innovation and problem-solving through play.

IDEO’s Tim Brown describes the characteristics of design thinkers:
Empathy. They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives... take a people-first approach... They notice things that others do not, and use their insights to inspire innovation.
Integrative thinking. They rely on analytical processes. The ability to see all aspects of a difficult problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives.
Optimism. They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given problem, at least one potential solution is better than existing alternatives.
Experimentism. They pose questions and explore the constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.
Collaboration. The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other disciplines; many have significant experience in more than one area (ex: industrial designers, engineers, marketers, architects, archeologists and psychologists)

Download IDEO’s 10 Tips for a 21st Century Classroom.pdf

I'm a great believer . . . in luck, not a roulette wheel luck . . . but luck in, in connection with, uh, your effort.

RUBE GOLDBERG

“Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects”

DAVID KELLEY, IDEO

RUBE GOLDBERG

& IDEO