My daughter went to elementary school with a boy named Jerome, one of the brightest kids in the class and now, some 15 years later, sitting in prison serving a long sentence for some sort of violent crime. Jerome lived in a tough neighborhood, had an unstable home, and saw...

I recently attended a gathering of diverse leaders in the Twin Cities to envision how we would respond to some of big challenges headed our way: climate change, disruptive technologies, the obesity epidemic, an aging population and so on. Hosted by the Urban Land...

The health of higher education has received a lot of public discussion of late. The symptoms of the system's ill health have included tuition increases far exceeding the rate of inflation, administrative bloat expanding the waistline of many institutions, declining levels of...

We don't have a political problem in the U.S.; we have a metaphor problem. The two dominant political parties have so much difficulty agreeing because each uses a different metaphor, which in turn affects how they see the world and how they want to change it.

Republicans tend to use...

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

We have so mystified, romanticized, and idealized creativity, so convinced ourselves that it remains primarily the purview of artists or "geniuses," that far too many people believe that they are not creative. In fact, they have not been allowed,...

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

Colleges and universities teach to their students' intelligence. Those students who have musical intelligence gravitate to the music school, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to the dance department or intercollegiate sports, spatial intelligence to the art school or design college, and so...

Two nearly simultaneous events -- Hurricane Sandy's devastation along the eastern seaboard and the public broadcast of Ken Burns's documentary on the Dust Bowl of the 1930s -- couldn't seem more different. The Hurricane involved too much water, after all, and the Dust Bowl too little....

The term "academic exercise" has long had a pejorative meaning, as something with little or no relevance to the world beyond academe. But the current generation of students -- the millennials -- seem to view the academic exercise with even greater disdain, not even worthy of their attention,...

Most conferences have a topic or theme, but the WWW conference, held a couple of weeks ago at the ESRI headquarters in Redlands, California, focused on something else: what it takes to become an "outlier," to use Malcolm Gladwell's term, and have a transformative...

Why, with more information available to us than ever before, do those in positions of power seem so unconcerned about the facts when making statements or decisions? Has the sheer quantity of information and the increasing pace of life so overwhelmed us that we no longer have the time or...

The old Joni Mitchell line, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone" applies to public higher education these days. Most states have dramatically cut financial support of their research universities over the last several decades to the point where public funding, as a percentage of most...

Most agree that the U.S. needs more students studying the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering, and math. As U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has stated, "Inspiring all our students to be capable in math and science will help them contribute in an increasingly technology-based economy,...

Not everything in Washington ends up in gridlock, especially when it comes to expanding roads and bridges in order to, well, prevent gridlock. A case in point: President Obama recently signed a bill authorizing the construction of a large $690 million highway bridge over the scenic St. Croix...

To understand how the next economy differs from the one we have known, consider just one statistic: analysts following small businesses see the number of "contingent" workers -- the self-employed, free-lancers, or "accidental entrepreneurs" laid off from full-time positions -- growing to 40 to 45 percent of the...

On the Monday after Christmas a bullet left a firearm, traveled across two streets, a front yard, and a vacant lot before striking a house and hitting the head of a three-year-old Minneapolis boy, Terrell Mayes, who was climbing the stairs with his three other brothers to hide...

The need to cut the cost of health care in the U.S. has become obvious to almost everyone, as Ezekiel Emanuel discussed the "Billions Wasted on Billing" in the New York Times last weekend. But we may never achieve the necessary savings if we leave it up to...

With the untimely death of Steve Jobs has come an outpouring of commentary about the role design played in the success of Apple's products. In a country that sometimes seems blind to the value of design, Jobs recognized that humans respond to what good design brings to our...

Many people on the political right believe that by reducing expenditures on social programs, we can permanently reduce the size and cost of government. On its surface, that argument seems to make sense: spending less will cost us less. But when we look more carefully at what that...

As part of his efforts to stimulate a slow economy, President Obama has called for $30 billion to rehabilitate schools and community college facilities. Republicans, like the representative from my state, John Kline, Chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, have already -- and predictably...

Although we tend to wear a lot of black, designers generally see the world in shades of gray, continually trying to find win-win solutions to design problems, accommodating different needs, and creative resolutions of seemingly irresolvable conflicts. Because of that, many in the design community -- like many in the...