New Skill City
The people of South Bend, Indiana, have the power to design a lifelong learning platform for themselves.
To succeed in today’s knowledge economy means you can never stop learning. But educational opportunities for adults have become difficult to access in the United States, just when they’re needed most. Employers are demanding fresh skills faster than Americans can acquire them, and that’s leaving many behind. To counter this trend, IDEO helped the city of South Bend and the Drucker Institute launch Bendable, a community-powered platform that connects people with opportunities to learn with and from each other. Free to all, Bendable is sponsored and run by the city’s library system.
25
programs and other resources offerings are now available to residents of South bend
four
states have begun to integrate Bendable into library systems
By 2025, as many as 85 million jobs will be displaced by automation, yet 97 million new ones could emerge.
More than a third of adults pursuing postsecondary education before the COVID-19 pandemic were forced to abandon those plans.
To create Bendable, IDEO worked alongside the people closest to the problem, so every important decision grew out of their experience.
IDEO and the Drucker Institute aligned with the library system and city leaders in South Bend, Indiana, on a single objective: build a learning platform that offered education opportunities to people affected by the decline of manufacturing in the region. But even the earliest phases of research revealed that there’s no common profile that matched the diversity of learners. There are innumerable reasons why people seek to learn and as many barriers holding them back.
Knowing this, South Bend residents were the acknowledged authority for this work, and a design consultancy all their own. This radically simplified crucial decisions. Negative associations around traditional education led people to seek knowledge from those they already trusted. And they often lacked awareness about or the ability to access the many free resources already available.
The residents of South Bend helped the entire consortium see that the city wasn’t under-resourced but under-connected. That insight, and the power the community and the library system held to rectify it, made Bendable into the people-driven, connection-based learning platform it is today.
To create Bendable, IDEO worked alongside the people closest to the problem, so every important decision grew out of their experience.
IDEO and the Drucker Institute aligned with the library system and city leaders in South Bend, Indiana, on a single objective: build a learning platform that offered education opportunities to people affected by the decline of manufacturing in the region. But even the earliest phases of research revealed that there’s no common profile that matched the diversity of learners. There are innumerable reasons why people seek to learn and as many barriers holding them back.
Knowing this, South Bend residents were the acknowledged authority for this work, and a design consultancy all their own. This radically simplified crucial decisions. Negative associations around traditional education led people to seek knowledge from those they already trusted. And they often lacked awareness about or the ability to access the many free resources already available.
The residents of South Bend helped the entire consortium see that the city wasn’t under-resourced but under-connected. That insight, and the power the community and the library system held to rectify it, made Bendable into the people-driven, connection-based learning platform it is today.
“We need to come up with solutions that work for us, sourced by people who live here. But having the creativity and design of people who have taken on ideas from all over the world and are among the best in their fields is a real win for South Bend.”
