Reimagine

Today we use the word "reimagine" casually. But that was not always the case. In fact, this word only has recently entered our collective consciousness with force.

And it happened just around the time when the Macintosh computer hit the market as a tool of creative potential.

That moment when the visions of J.C.R. Licklider, Seymour Papert, Alan Kay and others began to manifest. Where the computer began to empower our collective imagination to reimagine through a new human-computer symbiosis.

When I first found myself standing in front of students in a classroom in Dayton, I talked about these things. Before they would launch into daily sessions that defined their Learning Cycles, I would share a story to help them begin to understand the greater context of this agile experiment that they were now a part of.

Not a single one of them knew of the book 1984, much less had read it.

Context. We derive meaning from context.

So we talked about George Orwell. About the dystopia he envisioned as our human spirit became oppressed by those in power.

I then shared with them Apple's famous Super Bowl ad. That one for the ages. The one that introduced a new vision for computing to the mass market. The Macintosh computer that had many of the experiences originally designed by the team at PARC.

An ad worth remembering:

A promise held within a single word, "reimagine".

A word, whose use hit an inflection point, just at that moment in human history.

I used these words to inspire and empower these students as makers and creators. To know that we needed them to step back and explore possibilities on a Blue Plane, then implement on the pink plane.

To see if we might unleash their Creative Genius.

It worked.