"The devil works hard, but IKEA works harder..."
Garry Lu
You can learn a lot while walking through an Ikea store. Perhaps more about your self and a potentially toxic reaction to having your free will conscripted but maybe that was just me.
On the other hand, behold a lesson in expert level engagement design. I won’t dismiss my bayesian-style prior of always looking for efficient and effective design but think about an Ikea experience and now think of creating a course.
For our purposes think geospatial and location intelligence.
You could follow a path directly to kitchen design and purchase a stove and be on your way. But what if your goal was to build an omelette? When can we assume that you already have the pots, pans, spices and dare I say—eggs?
On the other hand, you have already renovated your kitchen twice and really only want that pan and those really tasty cardamom biscuits that only you enjoy (perhaps that was also me).
Geospatially, you may have the deep knowledge of open-source tools but your interest in climate science is burgeoning and needs more context. Or this is your first foray into working with QGIS, python, SQL or a host of other resources you will need to finally taste that omelette.
Observing the layout of Ikea gave me lots of ideas. You need exposure to what you don’t know, that you don’t know. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of my dwindling supply of towels perhaps but what if I had an extra dog thrown in the mix for a few weeks over the holidays during particularly wet weather? The visual prompt of neatly stacked affordable towels certainly would trigger something—one would hope.
A good course presents as a guided route. Here is the lobby to Ikea or here is the platform we will be using to build a map or gain insights from an area. This is where we learn to put an “ing in the thing”. Instead of building a map or code for geospatial analytics we should focus on the knowing, discovering or learning — not just the output or the thing.
Once inside the Ikea showroom or QGIS canvas, where do we need to go?
The little showrooms we pass through allow us to imagine how to live in the spaces or in our geospatial analogy imagine the questions we can build depending on the spaces or in our case, layers. A hero’s journey through a labyrinth often not of our choosing. Yes, we eventually will make it to either a checkout lane or an exit but think about the thought and experiential contemplation that guided us there.
Courses and other shenanigans…
