Artificial intelligence. Sophisticated UI|UX design. Predictive analytics. Recommendation engines. The Algorithm salsa. All of these have seemingly made the job of brands, marketers and organisations much easier than before. The outcome has been creating a large corpus of convenience for customers who have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.
If we were to look t the trifecta of human consumption and associated behaviour, it would ride on the trinity of convenience, status and affinity.
Convenience sells. Ask Amazon. And well before the world’s biggest online shopping mall permeated(trespassed?) our homes and lives lives for all things necessary and otherwise, convenience became the dominant force in our culture with product innovations like the microwave oven, the washing machine, the drive through fast food joint, the remote control, the automatic gears in your car and from the not so distant past articulating your voice over 140 characters on Twitter. We happily pay ‘ convenience fee ‘ to travel brands and airports. Can you beat it? And rather than creating more than we can consume, we fall prey to perennial doom scrolling and taking in all types of information, dis|mis information and be led by vested interests. The ROI on convenience is questionable.
And in the (must)scalable industrial complex of education, convenience holds the Doctorate. Howard Gardener might have had a theory of multiple intelligence (where each individual is as different from the other as possible) but education would have none of it- so, the outcome is standardised tests(you see one size fits all), a rigid curricula that never was sensitive to the heterogenous aptitudes and skill sets of the students and terms that seem to have emerged straight from the Republic of Shackles– Test, Conform, Uniform, Comply, Adhere, Standardise…toe the line…
If education were to segue into learning( which is what it ought to be in the first place), effort and discomfort will be its allies. Treading the path less trodden, embracing inconvenience in the quest for something new but better and realising unabashed curiosity can skill the cat. Explore the unexplored. Moving the needle from where we are to where we want to be. From status quo to status novis.
Con venience anyone?