Alex Wolf : Take Back Wonder & Create Your Own Livable Life.

Alex Wolf starts with the premise that traditional education is not serving talented kids, resulting in disengagement and poor self-esteem among learners. With a robust research team, a clear set of sequenced research questions and design systems for patterns and spatial skills, Alex, and the team at Na2ure believe it is possible to impact learning and its emotional component to align talents and motivation. 

Alex’s epiphany and pivot was the birth of her daughter. Alex wanted to give parents confidence, joy, and to make the time that they spent with their children, special. She decided to make games, toys, puzzles, and books that you would keep reaching for to find the magic in the moment. 

Alex’s perspective begins with the concept of joyousness. As you grow in adulthood, if you still have questions, you’re still reading, you're still wondering, you are starting your own self education. Using joy to create opportunities for parents and kids to imagine and wonder about what they see, how they can draw or create something, and make it, it becomes tangible. While the natural world is one of biggest ordered, yet unordered systems, Na2ure aids learning in a visual mode for all ages. It encompasses things like weather, plants and more. Alex wants people to start priming their eyes to nature and its relatedness. For example, a spiral, a curled fiddlehead fern, a seashell, a hurricane, the galaxy and more. Her motto: Take back wonder.

With her own path in mind, Alex wants to help people find what they're good at, what gives them pleasure, which will lead them to pursue learning more on their own.Alex was deeply influenced by Richard Wurman: “Design a life that you want to live”. Your job is to create your own livable life. Don’t let fear stop you, do interesting things and become an interesting person. Do things that are worth doing. Listen to where your heart  takes your curiosity. 

Alex believes it’s time to shake things up. It's time to be brave, step up and change how we're delivering a lot of learning. It needs to be more fun. There needs to be more time spent physically moving through and exploring nature, so we can connect and make necessary changes. It's the alphabet of natural forms that we'll need to use in design. The radical shift that needs to occur will come from learning more about nature, so that we don't destroy her, and are able to live with her. The more we learn about her, we will stop destroying habitats, species, and ecosystems.

Alex’s perspective is that it’s important that we start respecting individual skills and individuals, for people with those skills to learn what they are attracted to and what they're drawn to. From cradle to career, we are hierarchizing jobs and employment which will only make life more challenging. We value the work of a doctor over the work of an essential employee, even though we need both of their work every day. All the displacement and unhappiness our manufacturing segment has experienced, including the exodus of jobs from the US needs to be reimagined. All those who are spatial learners, including our builders and our artists and our plumbers and electricians are part of a segment that needs to be re-built with a fresh perspective.  Our plumbers and electricians are just as important as our engineers and their skills set needs to be recognized and rewarded, the old class structure, white collar, versus blue collar is no longer relevant.

To Alex the future is green in color and bright. She believes we all need to see ourselves as green employees of the future. That will help us live sustainably and not perish, which is a critically important task. We all need to see where we can add value to how we solve problems, from a multitude of perspectives. We can and must change how we see ourselves, the natural world, and our participation in it.

Takeaways & Quotes:

Alex’s father told her that you will know when you've succeeded in your field, "When people can't discuss your field without discussing you and your contribution to it."

I tried a lot of things. I trusted my own curiosity, and as Rilke would say, “live the questions until you live your way into the answer.” Alex had this faith that this perspective would lead her to where she needed to go. 

“Take back wonder”

Richard Wurman says, “Design a life that you want to live”. Your job is to create your own livable life.

Being the only person without a PhD in the room was the key to my success.

The future is green-collar.

How to reach Alex: 

Twitter, na2ure.com or na2ure.org na2ure on Instagram and na2ure on Facebook.

Bio:Alex Wolf had a playful childhood and a bang-up education at a NYC girl’s school, Exeter, Rhode Island School of Design and in programs abroad. Ever since, she has been trying to dissect her RISD know how and give it to children in breadcrumb-sized pieces, one bit at a time. As an artist/designer/inventor, she researches and designs for spatial intelligence with a multi university team. Her PatternABC is in use at NASA and has been tested for UNICEF. She co-authored a chapter on the pattern ABC for the first textbook on Biomimicry due in 2022 from Elsevier.  She designs systems for learning: a pattern alphabet for natures core patters, a periodic table of biology to help make a formula for an animal or plant; and a motion alphabet to introduce babies and toddlers to motions and positions to understand spatial relationships before, and then as they gain, language. Convinced that children are bright creative thinkers, from 0-5 especially, and need literal and figurative space and tools to express that creatively, she works in how they see and perceive space, form, pattern, and motion.