What is Invention Literacy

Invention  literacy is the ability to read and write human made stuff, from  toasters to apps. People think inventors perform magic, but invention is  no more magical than reading and writing a sentence. There is a grammar  to inventing from mechanical tools, to design thinking, coding, and  beyond. There is a literature of inventions, from bicycles to  televisions, all around us to draw inspiration from. Just as Thoreau  read Emerson's writings, so too did Edison read Tesla's inventions. The  functional pieces of inventions: transistors, bent sheets of aluminum, a  "for loop" in software, these are like a large alphabet. As one learns  to "sound out the words" of inventing, one begins to see a product not  as a "black box" but as a collection of comprehensible pieces which come  together to make up a blender, a pair of Nikes, or a ferris wheel. The  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be incomprehensible to someone who  doesn't know the rules of reading English.

Beyond understanding, emotion plays a role too. Words are actually scary  to illiterate people. We have to stop thinking of inventions as some  unknown future phantoms to be conjured by alchemy. Inventions, from a  clay pot to an iPhone, are simply the human-made part of the world that  we live in.

Not everyone will be a professional writer, but everyone needs to learn  to read a menu and write a text message. Likewise people should graduate  understanding how things are made and how to build their own ideas, at  least at the proficiency equivalent to writing a 5 paragraph essay.  Right now we have single digit invention literacy percentage, and we  have an accompanying fear of "how things work." Invention literacy is a  hidden literacy, and I'd like to uncover it. It's the true 21st century  literacy as human innovation speeds up approaching a crescendo of nearly  instantaneous innovation (at least through the lens of last century).

Humans have brought more than just tech gear into this world. Humans  have created drugs, wars, religions, economies, and governments. We  don't have to accept agriculture industries, schools, or banking systems  the way they were offered to us. If it can be created by a human, then  it can be recreated by you, me, and all of us. But only if we all  believe in ourselves as inventors (and re-inventors).

So let's offer everyone the opportunity to learn the basic alphabet,  vocabulary, and grammar of inventing. As people learn to read and write  the world they live in, they gain a special empowerment that I call  creative confidence. When we reach 95% invention literacy, we won't be  able to believe that in 2016 only special people — similar to the  scribes of ancient Egypt — were engaged in reading and writing  inventions. The result is that we will live closer to a world made by us  all, and what a beautifully diverse mosaic that will be!