It was a shock to here about the passing of Steve Jobs, so I want to dedicate this post to him. I don’t, however, want to focus on his death, and in the spirt of things…I want to focus on what we can do to continue his legacy to make the world a better place.

For one of my recent architecture assignments, we were asked to envisage what our prefect world would be like. Of course, as I do with most of my uni assignments, I wanted to use this as a way to express myself and what I believe…and I also thought this was a pretty cool assignment… (don’t tell anyone I said that)…

So, this is what I think an idea society would be like. For my vision I proposed to have a society where people are more skilled, more imaginative and seek knowledge actively to solve and discuss problems and issues within society. People in my ideal world would never comply to conservative ways of thinking; instead they are risk-takers, they are free thinkers…they are not ‘sheep.’

Here is a sketch I did to express this worldview visually!

Under the current societal system, I feel that we are living in a conservative and highly constructed reality. Where the framework doesn’t allow us to adapt easily to change, nor does it allow us to think for our-selves. We are embedded with old-fashioned, moral codes of thinking. What would our society be like if Steve Jobs didn’t challenge the conservative society? would we still be listening to music on portable walkmans? or portable cd player? The people in my ideal society are curious and open minded individuals who openly seek for knowledge and they respect diversity.

So, how do we achieve a society of imaginative, self thinking and highly educated individuals?

The change needs to be in the structure of our educational system. From an early age we are taught what is right and what is wrong; if we obtain and understand the information correctly we will be rewarded academically. What this system fails to take into account that this is just a regurgitation of information. We are not taking the initiative to think for ourselves. Nor does our system function to develop independent thinking.

Our education system, starting from primary education, needs to encourage independent thinking. Students need to be guided and encouraged to seek and explore; to find and to discover; to make mistakes and to learn from them and to discuss their findings with their teacher and fellow students.

Fashion evokes diversity even within a single trend or fad! What fashion allows us to do is to have a culture that is able to adapt quickly and readily to change!!

Anyway, these are my thoughts…Feel free to leave a comment below to let me know what you think of my world vision any problems you might see with it, etc. I’d also like to know what your idealistic society would be like? How do you think we can make change for the better? Or is it to late for that? (I like to be optimistic that change can be made!!!!)

Carmichael