"In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor assembled an extraordinary innovation consortium that brought together IDEO, ObieCo, and a network of community colleges from across the United States. Our challenge was both ambitious and unprecedented: design a human-centered curriculum capable of cultivating the creativity and innovation skills required for the workforce of the future.

 

The three-year initiative became known as INTER—Innovate Now Through Education and Retraining—a name I coined early in the project.

Our first objective was to understand creativity itself. We explored, at a granular level, where creative thought originates, how innovation emerges, and the many ways creative minds perceive and solve problems. From this research, our team identified twelve core traits shared by highly creative innovators.

 

As Experience Architect, I developed the conceptual framework that organized the curriculum around those twelve traits. Inspired by the bird's-eye logic of a theme park map, I envisioned each trait as its own immersive "land"—including places such as Synthesis Land, Evangelist Land, and Intuition Land. Within each land, students encountered carefully designed experiences that encouraged them to discover, strengthen, and express that particular creative capacity.

 

Following development, the curriculum was implemented and evaluated at community colleges across the country. One of the project's most revealing discoveries was that creativity cannot simply be taught through instruction alone. Rather, our work demonstrated that thoughtfully designed experiences can uncover, nurture, and accelerate the creative potential that already exists within a small percentage of individuals.

 

INTER remains one of the most intellectually rewarding projects of my career, combining design thinking, cognitive research, experiential learning, and systems design to better understand one of humanity's most remarkable abilities—the capacity to imagine what does not yet exist and bring it into being."

– Obie