Why ATLAS

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Digital Fluency: Preparing Students to Create Big, Bold Problems

How do we in higher education help students prepare for the future by becoming not only problem solvers but also problem creators? Read more

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TED: “The Playful Wonderland Behind Great Inventions,” by Steven Johnson

Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Well, not always. Steven Johnson shows us how some of the most transformative ideas and technologies, like the computer, didn't emerge out of necessity at all but instead from the strange delight of play. Read more

The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

Danny Hillis's article in the Journal of Design and Science is an empowering chronology of humanity's ever increasing knowledge and control of the natural world. Despite some dangers, he argues collaboration between humans and machines could make the future bright. Read more

Hackers and Painters

In this longer essay, the named programmer, writer, and investor dissects the stronger-than-you-may-realize relationship between the work of what many consider a pure creative, painters, and the programming-driven work of hackers. Read more

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How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity

A surprising number of the conveniences were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident. Author Pagan Kennedy makes you want to make mistakes as you read through this brief exploration of accidental discovery, and the benefits and educational value such discoveries offer. Read more

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Diversity Makes You Brighter

Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions. Our findings show that such diversity actually benefits everyone, minorities and majority alike. Read more

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Can Innovators Build a Future That’s Both Disruptive and Just?

There’s a very good reason we have seen a long wave of entrepreneurship around the internet – the internet enables a near-infinity of new business ideas. But its high-tech nature tends to obscure what’s really special about the net as a platform for innovation: the fact that it is pervasive, cheap enough to hack, and open enough that we can innovate on top of it. Read more

Solving the Innovation Equation: A Strategy for Creativity

Creativity is commonly associated with a flash of insight, such as Archimedes stepping into a bath to discover water displacement or Isaac Newton uncovering gravity thanks to a strategically falling apple. Unfortunately, these delightful stories are the historical equivalents of the “five-second rule” popularly attached to dropped food: false and even dangerously misleading. Read more

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could engineer a better world

In this quick, thought provoking video, inventor Saul Griffith challenges the viewer to curiously inspect everything around them, while always asking “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” He bolsters this creative focus with the often neglected reminder that scientific rigor is a necessary component to true ingenuity. Read more

Wood Shop Enters the Age of High-Tech

These days, tinkering is a bit more high tech. The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands. Read more

Democratizing the Maker Movement

The fact that millions of Americans are building airplanes in their garage, meeting at makerspaces to work with strangers on customized robots, and collaboratively solving society’s problems at hackathons, is a beautiful thing. Read more

The Creative Engineer

We engineers are often accused of being uncreative. In fact, many nonengineers would say that the phrase Creative Engineeris an oxymoron. Why is that, since much of engineering is inherently creative? Read more

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Why ATLAS