At NEIA, we believe that in order for a student to flourish, they need to feel a sense of belonging, confidence, and self-love – the whole person needs to be healthy. As healthy individuals, our students are able to nurture their creativity. They develop into innovative thinkers who approach complex problems with empathy through human-centered design. This experience unfolds, in part, through students’ time in our Innovation Studio.

NEIA’s Innovation Studio is a cornerstone of our curriculum and the design of our school, central to our fundamental value proposition. The concept of the Innovation Studio is borrowed directly from the MIT Integrated Design & Management program.

How the Innovation Studio Fits In

It’s important to recognize that innovation can’t happen solely in a lab. The Innovation Studio at NEIA is both a construct and a concept to teach human-centered design. Our teachers are working closely together to align content and create interdisciplinary learning. Students are educated across a broad range of content areas and, whenever possible, these traditional subjects such as math, science, humanities, art, and wellbeing come together in Innovation Studio.

The best way to paint a picture is through an example. Imagine students are learning how to calculate the trajectory of a payload in math. In humanities, maybe they’re learning about the politics of 400 BC in Sicily. And in science, perhaps there’s a study of wood – different types of trees and their molecular structures, for example. Seemingly disparate, these topics come together in the Innovation Studio.

There, students might be asked to build a catapult. They might explore a museum or interview a person knowledgeable about the subjects at hand. They’d use their math knowledge about calculating trajectories, and their scientific knowledge about different types of woods to develop the most effective version of a catapult. They build empathy for those living in this time period to understand what necessitated creating a catapult and put themselves in the scene through roleplay.

Suddenly, students understand not only the value of how any one concept works in the real world, but how they work together, and they most likely will never forget it.

Entrepreneurial Thinking

Our approach using human-centered design is just one of the meaningful ways the Innovation Studio impacts a student’s experience at NEIA. The complex problems our students seek to solve in Innovation Studio could result in demonstrating their understanding of a concept, like the catapult example, but their work could just as easily result in a product or a process.

Part of becoming an innovator at NEIA is learning to create things of value that are accessible to others. While the act of prototyping and designing happens in the studio, the real opportunity lies in scaling the impact of the innovation and sharing it with the outside world. Entrepreneurship comes in to take a product, solution or service and get it out to millions of people.

As students continue their path at NEIA, we envision opportunities with local businesses, non-profit organizations, and other partnerships to learn how to scale an innovation by understanding marketing, presentation skills, and mass production techniques, injection modeling, supply chain, fulfillment centers, logistics and shipping.

We envision an experience where students could run a business within the school. Students at NEIA might get summer jobs and internships with businesses, but they might also make their own job for the summer. To make a living as an innovator we must teach entrepreneurship as well. This is the culture and type of thinking we seek to promote as the Innovation Studio evolves.

The Heart of Campus

As a physical space, the Innovation Studio serves as the heart of the NEIA campus. The teachers understand the practice and employ it in their day-to-day work with each other and with their students. In addition, the space itself is comprised of three components:

• Studio Space: In keeping with what you might see in a design or architecture studio, this area features flat desks with tables and chairs where students can collaborate on teams, think, discuss and assemble. This open and airy space is intended for ideation and offers a location to evaluate work and make adjustments.
• The Hive: A state-of-the-art makerspace that features all the tools a designer could imagine using to bring their idea to life. Specifically, the Hive offers assorted 3D printers, a laser cutter, vinyl cutters, and every machine tool you can imagine such as band saws and drill presses, and materials to make circuit boards. It’s a very high-tech version of a traditional makerspace. This is where students go to build, experiment, and create.
• Design Review Area: This is where students pin up their concepts or give presentations about the work they are doing. A critical element of being a persuasive innovator is to learn how to take feedback and give it in a way that produces positive results – both emotionally and in terms of the work.

Why an Innovation Studio?

When we began designing NEIA over a year ago, we used human-centered design to understand user needs. That told us what students wanted from a good school – and what they didn’t like about their current experience (no fun, too much homework, too much time learning about things that don’t matter).

We discovered that those students who are trying to invent, create and make are entrepreneurial in the way they think and quite self-directed. The experiential element that the Innovation Studio brings makes it fun – it provides them an opportunity to put things into practice every day. It also helps develop a deeper synaptic response to the new material, providing very profound learning without students even realizing it’s happening.

What’s more, human-centered design invites students to embrace their ability to be compassionate, loving human beings. The work in the Innovation Studio supports this growth throughout a student’s journey at NEIA. In the Innovation Studio, we are able to adapt our curriculum to the needs of the students, versus forcing students to adapt to what we want to teach. Undergoing the process of human-centered design not only makes learning more meaningful but also more sustainable and compassionate – it’s a mechanism for developing empathy.

I think NEIA is a very special place. NEIA is brand new like a little sprout emerging from the soil. It’s fresh, idealist, pure and delicate. I’ve been to a lot of special places, this is one of them.
And here’s why we’ve worked very hard to make this special place:

Independent Thinking

I grew up on a mountain in NH. The forest was my playground. Every day I would wake up and sit on my front lawn or in my favorite tree and think about what should I do that day. I’d see the barn, our pastures, the two sheds, the mountains beyond with the lakes and rivers nestled in their valleys. I would design my day, and I did this every day. I was a poor student because of this. School just didn’t interest me, so it was not part of my design. I suffered through it creating my own lessons as soon as I was set free for the day. This is one of my motivations for creating NEIA. A place for independent thinkers and self-learners.

Inclusion, Acceptance, and Love

As beautiful as NH was, I was in a school system that did not appreciate artistic folks like me. I was humiliated and bullied on many occasions by classmates and even teachers. It was terrible. However, I consider this experience to be one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It gave me tremendous empathy for everyone and anything. It caused me to always see the good in others, especially those who have been persecuted in some way. At NEIA, we worked hard to create not only a safe place, but a place that celebrates and appreciates being different (and normal too, whatever that means). We strive to build the most diverse community possible in every metric, from ethnicity to religion to gender to discipline. The only requirement is that everyone respect and appreciate each other and don’t ever rush to judge.

Professional Autonomy

I have never really had a job. My first real job was starting IDM at MIT (innovation leadership program) 7 years ago at the age of 48. I didn’t need the job because I have always been able to monetize my creations (aka entrepreneurship). As I got deeper into my job at MIT, I came to appreciate how autonomous I am, the power I have in the fact that I don’t need a job. I can make money whenever I want, doing whatever excites me. I am beholden to no one. NEIA is here to give our students this ability. The ability to go out into the world with the confidence that they can be successful any way they choose to be. That they are in control of their life. That they can design their day, every day.

Innovation + Entrepreneurship

Our vision is to create and enable people who are empowered with the ability to create beautiful things (we call this innovation) and monetize them (we call this entrepreneurship). These words are kind of trendy and come across as materialistic and pro-consumerism (one of our biggest environmental problems). But if done right, they are quite meaningful because if we can get paid to make beauty, we can keep doing it. And so then can others, and if everyone is creating beauty, we might have a beautiful world.

So what do I mean by beauty? I’m talking about the experience we create for each other. When I hold the door for someone, I have provided an experience for someone else, and I would argue that is a beautiful thing to do. When we cook a delicious meal for others like Mike and his team do every day for our students and did for us tonight, he has created a beautiful experience for us. When we design an elegant product, as Apple or Tesla does, a beautiful experience is had by millions of people.

When we talk about Innovation at NEIA, this is what we are talking about. Innovating with love. To stay on track, we use a process called Human-Centered Design, which is simply having the courtesy to ask people what they want before we make things for them. It means understanding their needs, emotions, dreams. It means connecting authentically with others before we take action or form an opinion. For me, HCD is the antidote to prejudice and fear, and NEIA is the prototype.

Getting back to beauty…to me the word beauty is interchangeable with the word love. Innovating or creating beauty using HCD is actually creating love. More than ever, the world needs love. It needs people who ask others what they need and make it. NEIA is here to help make those people.

NEIA is a unique and miraculous adventure. I am so grateful that you all have some sense of that, and may even appreciate what we’re doing. Thank you.

— Matt Kressy, Head of Innovation & Trustee