Predicting the future – with art
Discovery College student Susan Park has a vision of what classrooms will look like in the future, and it’s pretty cool
[First published on 9 October, 2015] Susan Park is an artist with a unique talent. She can predict the future. The 16-year-old Discovery College student put her talent of foresight to use when she was asked to visualise what classrooms would look like in the year 2030 for a competition for IB World magazine.
Susan put pen to paper – or in this case, stylus to tablet – and her digital artwork showing the classroom of the future was chosen as the winner, and featured as the front cover of the magazine’s September issue.
While most of us would make leaps into sci-fi and fantasy when it comes to imagining the future, Susan took a more practical approach.
Susan says her inspiration came from the differences she had seen with technological advancements over the past few decades. “You see all the different decades in the schools and they have these different things and different characteristics based on the times,” she explains. “So I just based it off what I saw.”
Her research into the past gave her an idea of how classrooms have evolved and allowed her to see into the future to predict what technology schools might be using 15 years from now.
Her artwork shows a teacher projecting a 3D image of planets for a classroom full of excited students. The use of projection, Susan says, was a common theme she noticed when looking at how education technology has progressed. “The main difference between each decade was the projection, or the use of projections,” she says.
