Bailey Mullens and Rodney Hill
A half-century of looking forward: At StoryCorps, "futures studies" professor Rodney Hill talks with apprentice Bailey Mullens about nurturing innovation and invention at Texas A&M by exposing students to the creative process, "helping them come up with new ideas that nobody has ever thought of before."
- [Bailey] So what originally brought you from architecture into this futurist thinking and anticipating future technology?
- [Rodney] I went to Berkeley because of the creativity and social and behavioral factors and things like that. And then the World Future Conference held their first meeting in San Francisco and the students demanded a course in future studies. Well, the dean was in a panic and he said, you're probably the only person crazy enough to offer the course. So, I taught the first futures course at Berkeley. Then when I graduated, I started interviewing around the U.S. Most deans were saying, well what do we care about futures, or what is psychology got to do with architecture? Except for the dean here, who was real forward thinking. And he was excited as could be about having somebody with completely different set of credentials, and so, that's brought me here. And he essentially said, you can teach anything you want, anywhere you want to, you can set up your class anywhere you want to, and you can invent new classes. So, I mean, you can't pass that up.
- [Bailey] Let's talk about your approach with the students. You start off the class with a visualization exercise. Very different than any other professor.
- [Rodney] I do a lot of creativity stuff. 'Cause if you're gonna be inventing and coming up with original ideas, you have to know how the creative process works and how to get into a flow state. So, that's a lot of those exercises that I do. And then every person every other week has to come up with an original innovation or invention or system or service, and then they're entering international competitions. We've had good luck with winning some of the competitions. One of my favorite students, she would write and illustrate storyboards. She won the Academy Award for Frozen. I think there's one girl over in, she was in animal science, and she came the first day of class and said, I don't want to be in this class, my advisor forced me to be in this class, I am not creative, so don't expect anything out of me. By midterm, she had come up with more ideas than were required. Her profs over in animal science were actually paying for a patent of one of the ideas she came up with in class. And by the end of the class, her parents were paying for another one. It's just exposing students to the creative process. A lot of them are creative, but they've never been given the opportunity in school.
- [Bailey] It seems like it gives students some type of confirmation that they're doing something and moving forward.
- [Rodney] So it's essentially helping them come up with new ideas that nobody's ever thought of before.
- [Bailey] Is there anything that you just want to get out to students and instill in them, with the future coming?
- [Rodney] I try to tell them that all the medical experts say probably college students right now will live to 110 to 120 years old. So, they're gonna be working 'til they're 90. And they'll probably have 12 to 18 jobs. It's not like their grandfather who worked at his company for 50 years, so they're gonna have to create their future. Most of them will not be working in the field they got their degree in in [sic] 10 years. So it's a state of rapid change.