Human-centered design is the core value that I vibe with the most of the three LEANLAB core values. For me, I see us as a society, at a crossroads with technology. We’ve achieved and accepted a technology paradigm that creates ease, convenience, and greater functionality at a historically unprecedented rate. However, we’ve also accepted an economic paradigm that values productivity over inclusion.

It’s visible in the way we measure ‘full employment’. These two paradigms have created a macro-economic system that advances technological breakthroughs that have the effect of pushing-out and marginalizing the work of so many people. This reality is increasingly anti-human and causes much of the social and political friction we experience. It’s why I believe technology needs a human ‘checks-and-balances’ function.

Yes, we’ve made it quicker to deliver cargo, but what happens to the truck drivers with the CDLs? Yes, we’ve made energy conduction more decentralized and efficient, but what does that mean for the coal miner? The answers are inherently about human-centered design.

With Words Liive, we’ve placed the problems of the teacher and the problems of the students at the fore of our design function. We’re lead by a desire to make the role of teacher and student more efficient and effective, not to replace their function. Our technology is designed to engender greater human-to-human connection, so much so that ultimately want an opening-up of the classroom where music artists are co-producing lessons with teachers and students.

About Sage Salvo
Gil Perkins, doing business as Sage Salvo, is the artist, scholar, and social entrepreneur founder of Words Liive and a 2017 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School where he earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA). Armed with a patented algorithm to import song lyrics into classroom texts to augment literacy-based curriculum for schools, Mr. Salvo’s organization is dedicated to eradicating illiteracy across the world, and particularly in marginalized urban and rural districts

About Words Liive
Words Liive is a 21st Century education technology start-up intent on bringing three-fourths of US students to grade-level literacy by the year 2040 through a culturally responsive pedagogy needed to meet the instructional demands for today’s classrooms.