Innovation: Attending to the places left behind

“Space is the breath of art.” – American architect Frank Lloyd Wright

Creativity and innovation are propelling us forward and sideways and in directions and dimensions that boggle the brain. Virtual is supplanting tangible in significant ways. We hang out with friends on Google and shelve our movies, music, and books in the cloud. Exciting, for sure.

I’m left wondering, though: What should we do with what is left behind? In particular, what do we do with the very real brick-and-mortar, board-and-nail spaces that we once valued but may no longer need?

They include:

* Malls, celebrated in the 1950s for bringing convenience to shoppers’ lives and now increasingly abandoned, and “big box” stores closed by such specialty retail giants as Barnes & Noble and Best Buy,

* Public libraries designed to warehouse thousands of books that now fit on a personal hand-held device thinner than a single paperback, and

* Schools, once the hub of all formal learning and today facing growing competition from the Web, where on-line educational sources offer affordable study to anyone anywhere.

Innovation has spawned the need for other innovations–or perhaps re-innovations. Read the rest of this entry »