Humanistic Innovation: A Working Definition

What does it mean to be human in an age of AI? I couldn't answer that question clearly enough. What was missing was a better concept. Here's where I landed.

There is a term I have been increasingly using to articulate both what I have spent my career examining and what I believe will be of growing importance in the coming decades. The term is humanistic innovation. In what follows, I want to unpack what I mean by the term in hopes that doing so will help me, and perhaps you, be more purposeful in my actions and conversations in what is emerging to be a new age of artificial intelligence (AI).

Defining “Humanistic”

Traditionally, the word humanistic refers to anything dealing with the humanities as a discipline. As I reflect on my life, both personal and professional, I find it hard to deny that I have always leaned heavily toward the humanities, including subjects like literature, writing, music, history, and philosophy. As a child who experienced the instability of divorce and alcoholism at home, I found solace in the pages of books and the catharsis of making music. I majored in philosophy and English; I interned at Jazz at Lincoln Center; I became an English teacher.

The humanities can be defined in so many ways. Merriam-Webster defines the humanities as “the branches of learning (such as philosophy, arts, or languages) that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural processes (as in physics or chemistry) and social relations (as in anthropology or economics).” This focus on academic disciplines makes sense, yet also minimizes the powerful breadth of the field. For instance, philosopher Martha Nussbaum outlines a description of the humanities that includes Socratic self-criticism, world citizenship, and narrative imagination. Another philosopher, John Dewey, does not define the term at great length, but his championing of the value of aesthetic experience is, at its core, humanistic. Later, education philosopher Maxine Greene built on Dewey’s ideas of the aesthetic as the pinnacle of human experience and therefore learning when she argues for “wide-awakeness” to serve as the purpose of schools.

These perspectives inform my own definition of the humanities, a paradigm fixated primarily on understanding and celebrating the complexity of individual and collective human experience; it does so by foregrounding cultural and humanistic values (e.g. beauty, curiosity, criticality, creativity, community, joy, emotion, aesthetics, morality, ethics) in its methods of inquiry.

Defining “Innovation”

Innovation has its own contours. The first time I recall hearing the term in force was when I worked for the New York City Department of Education during the Bloomberg administration. I came to understand innovation to mean some version of newness: new school models, new uses of technology in teaching, new approaches to data. That worked at the time, but was severely limited. More accurately, and etymologically, innovation refers to newness, yes, but also the bringing of something into newness: renewal, adaptation, reinvention, a refresh. So, new and also anew. I find this distinction an important one. Too often we are so enamored by what is new that we forget new is not always necessary or better. I think of the millions of dollars that were spent when I worked for the city on interactive whiteboards. Yet, there was seldom anything innovative about the way teachers used those technologies; it was usually still the teacher at the board talking at bored students. Real innovation in the classroom rests in whose questions are being asked, the seriousness with which those questions are entertained, and the quality of their investigation. Technology is usually optional.

I define innovation as the process of solving problems in new ways because the old ways are ineffective or inefficient. This does not mean creating something new, though it can. Equally, it can mean approaching the problem from new angles using old inquiries and methods. Importantly, innovation often includes the application of concepts and methods from fields traditionally unassociated with the problem being solved. Innovation tends to disrupt the status quo way of thinking, otherwise it would lack the inherent freshness that constitutes innovation.

Humanistic Innovation-ish

Combining these words into the term humanistic innovation is not originally my own move. Others have used the term, though I have not seen a thorough examination of its contours. The closest I have seen is in the world of design thinking, made popular via the d.school at Stanford University. Design thinking puts a premium on human experience in the process of designing products. Though the term humanistic innovation appears occasionally in the literature, it is often a term in passing and never (so far as I can tell) a thoroughly developed concept. In the context of design thinking, the emphasis on human perspective and experience relates to designers starting the process of creating products by putting human emotions and needs first. As someone who has worked with many digital product teams over the years, I can understand why this is a revolutionary move. Too often, developers and engineers want to build the thing they believe they can build for the technical or business achievement its completion would represent. Design thinking tempers this urge.

But such temperance alone is not, in my view, what constitutes humanistic innovation. Humanistic innovation does not primarily borrow from the humanities in order to improve a process. Humanistic innovation borrows from the humanities in order to determine the problem and product. There are three steps: 1) identify an experiential problem at the core of which is a 2) humanistic value and then adopt and adapt concepts and methods from across disciplines--including computational and technological fields--to 3) create an innovation.

Examples of Humanistic Innovation

Allow me to share a few examples from life and work to help bring humanistic innovation into sharper focus. At least a bit sharper.

Plotting Plots. Plotting Plots is a blog and website I have created over the past several years. When computer science education was being promoted in K-12 schools across the world, I noticed that humanities teachers were mostly being moved to the sidelines. My worry was that computer science had been overly promoted as a content area that belonged to science, technology, engineering, and math (experiential problem), whereas I saw computer science as equally a method for inquiry. Computer science could be used to both launch a space shuttle and to create art and beauty (humanistic values). In response, I began using computational methods to explore the teaching of literature in ways that could be adopted by K-12 humanities teachers, posting my creations and resources on a single website (innovation).

Inspiration Index. The Inspiration Index refers to a framework and instruments I created in my leadership role at the nonprofit The Academy for Teachers. The Academy is committed to inspiring teachers to fall deeper in love with teaching by offering uniquely elevated learning experiences and community. However, we had no rigorous way to measure inspiration in teacher development, which made improving our programming and reporting metrics really hard (experiential problem). My team and I were committed to the belief that inspiration (humanistic value) must serve not just as a fluffy nice-to-have but rather the epicenter of our work. The resultant Inspiration Index weaves together concepts and tools from behavioral science and psychometrics in order to pilot a system of surveying our teachers specifically for inspiration levels (innovation).

Co-op Coach. As someone who served on the board of my co-op apartment building for many years, I was struck by how fundamentally challenging it is for a group of volunteers to work together for the betterment of the building (experiential problem). At its core, the issue was that there was no clear orientation for our board and the sheer number of issues to keep track of could easily overwhelm even the most organized and well-intentioned person, making it impossible to trust in the democratic process that undergirds co-op life (humanistic value). So I built Co-op Coach, which is a platform that focuses on building trust and efficiency for building boards by leveraging new applications of AI-powered business intelligence (innovation).

What these examples demonstrate, at least roughly, is humanistic innovation in action, and the process by which one might humanistically innovate. It is also helpful to consider briefly what humanistic innovation is not. Let’s use AI as an example. From afar, AI might appear to be a humanistic innovation. It produces written and visual texts. It engages in human-like ways with actual humans. It can be put to myriad humanistic uses. But here is the catch: AI itself does not clearly solve an experiential problem in a way fixated on deepening a humanistic value. As a tool, it can be put to such uses. But AI is not a humanistic innovation inherently. A technical innovation, yes, but not a humanistic one. As is quite clear from the current state of AI development, its fundamental purpose is business and economic (even if some AI companies are hiring philosophers to their ranks.) I view AI as a powerful option in the humanistic innovator’s toolbox.

Outro, for Now

What I hope I have accomplished here is to briefly sow seeds for a steady exploration and development of humanistic innovation. Though I believe versions of humanistic innovation have existed for millennia, the current moment makes naming it essential. As AI continues to spread throughout our society, it will be vital that we have consciously chosen language, concepts, and methods to articulate what it means to be human, to act humanistically. There are experiential lines between human writers and ChatGPT, graphic artists and Midjourney, and actors and Tilly Norwood. Increasingly, our capacity to articulate those boundaries and to be purposeful in how we traverse them will be essential to the future of society. Only with such intentionality can we ensure that the future is one of joy, creativity, community, and love. Humanistic innovation is one way to assert such intentionality, and one I very much look forward to continuing to explore.