The World Needs More Mathletes

For those uninitiated into the Mean Girls phenomenon, observe a dramatic scene from the single most quoted movie of our generation:

Now observe what an actual math competition looks like. Yeah, the real things are just written, timed tests. The exciting ones are the ones where you get to work in teams to solve the problems. Thrilling, right?

...Well—yes, surprisingly. I did these competitions up through high school, and they were actually a lot of fun. The speed and difficulty of the questions forced you to think creatively—it wasn't so much about the math as is was about the brain-bending challenge of creative problem solving, and you often did it collaboratively. That ability to strip a problem down to simple, solvable terms has been a huge asset in my life, and I attribute most of it to having been a "mathlete."

But here's the problem: being a mathlete isn't cool. As much great exposure we got in Mean Girls, the geeky stigma remains. Unfortunately, that stigma also extends beyond mathletics (okay, I swear that's the last pun). I recently spoke with a high school math teacher who told me that kids in his lower-tier classes are socially pressured into feigned apathy and mediocre performance. If they try to excel, they are ridiculed ("NERD!") and shunned by their classmates for making the curve tougher for the class. It's a depressing spiral that's probably contributed in some small way to the problem with STEM education in the US.

Libraries!

I love NPR. They cater to all my optimistic "the world is actually pretty great despite all that other crap" sentiments. They write a lot of articles on social progress, design, and innovation, all three of which happen to be things that I like. I click on basically every one of their posts on Facebook, so it's gotten to the point where there is little difference from my main feed and the NPR home page. This article particularly caught my social-media-photo-addicted fancy:

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/01/217211315/with-modern-makeovers-americas-libraries-are-branching-out?utm_source=news&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130901

Libraries are redesigning themselves to be the publicly accessible forums for content creation, consumption, and inspiration they were originally intended to be. Yay! I had been focusing on the classroom as a design context, but libraries have clinched a place in the running. If anyone has any resources on library innovation or stories of great/terrible library experiences that would help me explore this further, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

On transitioning from bookshelf archives to public innovation spaces:
"If we were going to serve today's people building economic value in their communities and being creative, we had to think about the world differently."
—Ginnie Cooper, D.C. Chief Librarian, who is clearly a total badass.

Hello, friends!

This is where I will keep public record of my thought/design/life process from now until the completion of my thesis exhibition next spring. The blog will track all the research, interviews, articles, posts, videos, and other interesting tidbits that inform and inspire me as I work on this project. I'll also keep it up-to-date with everything that I make as I progress closer to what will hopefully be a beautiful and usable product that adds some sort of value to the world. For me and anyone else who's interested in learning about the design process, this should be a fun thing.