Blue Lobsters and Aristotle: Introducing Deb Mills-Scofield
Long-time friend of Better World, social media superstar, and “groundbreaking systems engineer turned consultant/venture capitalist/ teacher” Deb Mills-Scofield will be joining us once again at this year’s conference! Her work seems to span entire disciplines and her awesomeness seems to know no bounds.
We had the opportunity to ask Deb a few questions in the lead-up to our time together this September.
What's your square one and how do you build from there?
What's the last great article you read or exhibit you went to?
-- “Actually, I’m going to break your ‘request’ for the latest and talk about the exhibit that had the most profound impact on my life…. Growing up in New Jersey, commuting distance from NYC, my mom took me into Manhattan every Tuesday because the museums were free (I didn’t go to school on Tuesdays). Art was a ‘routine’ part of my life. In my senior year in high school, the Guggenheim had the first large-scale exhibit of Mark Rothko’s works after his death. I was 16 going through my ‘existential’ stage. I don’t know how many times I went to see that exhibit, but it was a lot!
The exhibit started on the top floor with Rothko’s early works, multi-colored and detailed, and ended on the ground floor with his last black/grey painting. Sometimes, I started at the end and went up to the beginning; sometimes I started in the middle and went up or down. The dramatic change in his art combined with the spiraling down/up of the museum was very powerful, teaching me how critical perspective was to everything - life, ideology, etc. The different emotional, sensual, intellectual experiences between going down or up made it clear to me how varying one’s perspective, how looking at things differently, impacted how we viewed the world, each other and ideas. Less than a year later, I was a freshman at Brown where learning to think differently was the norm. Then I went to Bell Labs, where perspective made a huge difference in how one invented and innovated. Who knew that the Rothko exhibit would stay with and guide me decades on?”
(a.k.a. the best ‘broken request’ we could have asked for)
Write us a haiku.
Please it would be so funny.
Seriously though.
-- “Oceans deep hide rare
Blue Lobsters found in ‘random’
Serendipity”
At the conference, Deb will be leading a “workshop on applying Aristotle's classic virtues (e.g. love, courage, faith) to the design process.” We’re pumped.
