Happy new year! To say the world changed in 2020 is obvious. And it’s clear that 2021 is off to a similarly wild and turbulent start.

But while the science isn’t conclusive about how long it takes to develop a new habit, we have lived through the pandemic and this transformative period long enough to shed old habits and develop new patterns and routines—good, bad or ugly. So, like any strategist, I chatted with teammates to reflect on what’s truly changed from last calendar year and what might stick to shape the new one for individuals, brands and organizations.

TL;DR: In a year that seemed to stand still for many, the most notable shifts weren’t new, but rather existing trends that accelerated at warp speed.

Goodbye, digital and physical. Hello, integrated living.

Brands have long drawn a distinction between digital and physical worlds. And individuals have often curated a version of our online selves that may not completely reflect the offline reality. While these lines have been blurring for some time, they completely collapsed once the world went into lockdown and we collapsed onto our couches. In 2020, we changed how we lived: we brought bosses and teachers into our homes via video chat, we shopped for groceries online that were delivered to our doors, we worked out in our homes with others across the country. No experience worked without the true integration of digital and physical.

Even if 2021 doesn’t look exactly like 2020, the one constant is that change and emotional intelligence (or EQ-led leadership) are proven to build resilience. This doesn’t mean we abandon data or our “hard skills.” Instead, leading brands and organizations will understand how to listen and learn, find moments of emotion and empathy (at scale) in the data and continue to lean into what might feel uncomfortable. “We have to remember that the people and cultural factors are probably the most critical ones for success,” says Bruno Rebouças, Managing Director LATAM at MightyHive.

Whether you felt like everything came to a halt in 2020 or wouldn’t stop spinning, you made it to 2021. Breathe, but don’t rest too easy—for the strategists, designers and those who wake up every day to create the best experiences for others, this year is poised to be another one of change. Whether serving their teams or their customers, brands and organizations must know how to be resilient, nimble and empathetic. Fresh off a holiday break, I’m excited to explore and create better ways of living, learning, working and connecting with people at home and afar. Let’s get started!

This article contains contributions by Sarah Higbee, John O’Rourke and Joseph Sutton.

Now, expectations are that winning experiences are truly integrated, adaptive and convenient. Even when it will be safe to socialize less than six feet apart, our hunch is the home will remain a critical hub that connects every aspect of our lives: Warner Bros. is eschewing theaters to premiere new movies at home through HBO Max, dating apps are connecting people from afar and virtual events offer greater accessibility than traditional, in-person counterparts. To continue to deliver on these new expectations of service, brands and platforms must adapt and rethink how, when and where consumers make decisions across increasingly nonlinear journeys—what Google calls “the messy middle.”

Michael Leen, SVP Growth and Partnerships at MediaMonks, recently discussed this new reality of everywhere commerce. “What differentiates brands and sellers today is their ability to show up where their customer is, whether it’s the dot-com, on TikTok or at an event. Brands must make sure they are using all the channels that are appropriate in ways that resonate with their customer.”

As marketers and designers, we must double down on human-centered design—and perhaps even think about home-centered design—by understanding how the present moment continues to shape content and connection.

Goodbye, surviving. Hello, thriving.

We’re living through a pandemic. We have to talk about our health—which includes physical, mental and emotional health. All too often, in US culture, “I’m busy” also signals “I’m important.” But in 2020, busy reached a breaking point without boundaries or rest, resulting in unprecedented burnout: for parents, for healthcare workers, for teachers and any and all essential workers (we see you, and we’re grateful). We couldn’t ignore our rising mental health challenges any longer.

Leading organizations understood this reality wasn’t just an individual challenge but also an organizational one stifling creativity, collaboration and problem solving, to name a few. With that, 2020 was the year we (finally) began to normalize mental health and take control of all aspects of our well-being—a priority that Firewood Co-founder and President Lanya Zambrano has championed by sharing her own journey.

Stressors won’t vanish when the pandemic ends. The good news is the rise and adoption of digital tools can help us better manage our health as individuals, like seeing a doctor via video chat with ease. But we’re also hopeful the conversation in 2021 moves beyond an afternoon of self-care to cultural norms of flexibility and balance.

Goodbye, traditional classrooms. Hello, lifelong learning.

Learning looked different this past year. So much so that metrics we’ve traditionally used to measure success (classroom size, test scores, etc.) essentially lost their relevance. What emerged in 2020 was something closer to the learner-centered approach that’s been championed for some time. Opportunities for anyone, at any age, to learn from anywhere with an internet connection took off: time spent learning on professional development platform LinkedIn Learning has tripled during the pandemic, while MasterClass saw a double in sales and raised $100 million to fund new content.

But the ways that education changed in 2020 weren’t all positive. Pandemic lockdowns exposed a digital divide that threatened to set underserved students and communities back further and showed how ill-equipped our institutions are in engaging students virtually when needed.

As we look to this new year, there’s an incredible opportunity to imagine how we learn (anywhere) and who is a student (everyone) when we close the digital divide once and for all and consider new ways of learning. Might successful learning look like the Peloton model: personalized, entertaining and engaging group lectures supported by smaller discussion groups and communities?

“I believe that the most effective edtech experiences are built based on in-depth knowledge of what drives and engages kids and young adults,” says Vinne Schifferstein, Managing Director at MediaMonks Australia. “Only by truly stepping into their shoes can we motivate them to learn in a way that suits them best, ultimately resulting in better learner outcomes.”

I am not an educator and acknowledge that different solutions suit different ages and stages. But whatever this next year looks like, the opportunities for partnership, content and learning seem limitless.

Goodbye, geographical borders. Hello, shared values.

For the lucky industries and professionals who can work from the safe confines of home, how we work changed in 2020. And whatever model emerges (3-2-2 or others) this year, a distributed workforce will remain. Unrestrained by borders, the distributed workforce opens the door for more diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, which will not only create better work but also means teams can source the best talent from all over the world.

But without shared physical spaces, norms or experiences that hold everyone together, leading organizations must instead rally around a set of common goals, values and purpose to create a community. Our values of humility, authenticity, inclusivity and responsibility have not only kept us connected and grounded throughout an unprecedented year, but have served as guideposts for designing content, programs and events across S4Capital—with a unified digital home on our bespoke internal platform, the Shift.

While this is not a new idea, it has become a cultural baseline to set future organizations and leading brands apart.

Goodbye, small talk. Hello, emotional intelligence.

Small talk changed in 2020. In a non-scientific, anecdotal survey of teams and client partners, platitudes about the weather and generally forgettable, time-filling conversations disappeared. They were replaced with conversations of grief, social justice, and wildfires (many of our teams live on the US west coast) because ignoring these topics felt tone-deaf. We had tough conversations. And consumers and communities expected brands to show up meaningfully to support their communities, customers and employees alike.

In many places around the world, learning disabilities and impairments often go undiagnosed due to a lack of resources and access to facilities that test for them. But when missed, learning disabilities or color blindness can oftentimes discourage children from participating and excelling in class–sometimes eroding self-confidence in the process, which in turn can lead to far-reaching difficulties later in life.

But technology can help bridge the divide in communities where traditional testing isn’t scalable or accessible to students—so when children’s multivitamin brand Pharmaton Kiddi wanted to impact kids’ lives through technology, MediaMonks’ innovation team sharpened their pencils and put their digital skills to the test. The result is an assessment designed to determine whether students may have one of the learning impairments mentioned above—all while they’re having fun by playing their way through an engaging, interactive digital picture book.

Called Kiddi World, the app takes users aged 9-12 on a journey through the charming World of Words, which is populated with living school supplies and rendered in a charming, painterly aesthetic. Our hero is a sharp, courageous pencil named Lapi in pursuit of Gomba, an irritable eraser whose rampage results in the erasure of parts of the world and words becoming jumbled together. Through a series of visual and language-based activities, kids must erase the prickly eraser’s influence on the world and set things right. The app shows what edtech can achieve through a hands-on approach that brings together data, UX expertise and best-in-class creative storytelling.

Reducing Testing Anxiety with Under-the-Hood Innovation

“Kiddi World fills an empty space where you can pre-diagnose the child,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director at MediaMonks. He cautions that it isn’t meant to replace a medical professional’s diagnosis of any impairment. “It functions as an indicator based on professional tests,” he says, prompting parents’ or teachers’ attention if a child is likely to have an impairment.

Through AI, the test can measure students’ legibility with precise accuracy—for example, how much a student’s writing extends outside the bounds of a line. “It’s a matter of determining a percentage of error that allows us to apply some simple rules,” says Luis Guajardo, Creative Technologist at MediaMonks, “to tell teachers to look further into it and check in with the child.”

And that’s a good point; while children can play through the test by themselves (guided by text and voiceover instructions that lead them through timed exercises), the app doesn’t signal a reduction in the teacher’s role. Instead, it gives teachers a tool they can use to help them understand how individual students process information differently. They can apply this knowledge to how they educate their students—like making a customized lesson plan or supplementary programs—to aid in these students’ learning.

With so much happening under the hood, children are free to enjoy the assessment without feeling the pressure and anxiety that comes with being tested. Instead, the experience is designed and built to emphasize a child’s unique journey exploring the world with Lapi.

One of the more interesting ways the app achieves this is through handwriting recognition, which aids in identifying dysgraphia automatically as students write. Many touch devices, like Apple’s iPad, natively offer handwriting recognition to translate users’ handwriting into print text. This feature is great for extracting meaning from handwriting, like if a user is jotting down notes. To detect atypical writing behavior from typical ones, MediaMonks took handwriting recognition a step further.

“We used an external tool that could measure stroke speed and density, helping us measure if a line was made fast or slow,” says Eichhorn. These variables are key for making a precise assessment for whether a student might have dysgraphia. “We employed a set of rules that identify aspects of dysgraphia that are particularly notorious and can be examined by the app,” says Guajardo.

In addition to native handwriting recognition, the team also had to disable spell check native to iOS apps. If a student’s spelling mistakes are corrected as they go, it would impact their score—an obvious, but easy to overlook, barrier to accuracy. “Instead, we use an API that determines if what a student has written is a real word, or close to a real word,” says Eichhorn.

Building Immersion Through Design

The tech under the hood is remarkable, but the designs on the surface of the experience are what bring Kiddi World to life. For every action, students write or draw something on the screen, adding to the sense of engagement as they make their mark—literally—on the story’s world. This is why the user’s avatar is a pencil: Lapi reflects the everyday tools that students use in class.

Narrative is ingrained into each of the challenges that kids must overcome in their journey through the World of Words. First, they’re tested on color blindness: Gomba has erased a path through the land, so readers have to draw it back by tracing a line that cuts through a pattern commonly used in tests to determine the type and intensity of color blindness that one might have. Users complete this challenge by drawing a series of segments of the path, which then come together like comic panels to create a full scene.

If a student is color blind and therefore can’t see one or more paths, they can simply skip that segment. This way, students aren’t penalized for something they can’t control, which is critical to how the assessment is designed and progresses. No matter how students respond or interact in any of the exercises, results aren’t telegraphed to them nor do they affect the narrative. Instead, results are saved in a report that’s delivered to the teacher upon each test’s completion.

Eichhorn notes that the narrative is constructed in a way that gives students a real sense of progress. “In the first chapter, students are working with Lapi to respond to what Gomba has already done,” he says. “In the middle, they’re about the same level as him, and in Chapter 3, they’re ahead of him and trying to thwart his plans.”

The flow (and lack of scoring interrupting the narrative) ensures students feel confident and empowered regardless of difficulties they face in the assessments—of which there are a variety. “A lot of testing is required for accuracy,” says Eichhorn. “We found that we needed maybe six times as much information than we originally imagined to come to a reliable and accurate result.”

Still, the team was able to deliver the necessary assortment of tests seamlessly integrated into an engaging narrative—a good test for partners who understand both tech, user experience and visual design. From responding to a direct regional need and offering a familiar and engaging narrative experience, Kiddi World shows that innovation doesn’t have to come at the cost of usability or accessibility. In fact, it can help us facilitate better accessibility to users who need it.

Tools like this can have a profound impact on education—not just by aiding students who might have one of the tested learning disabilities or color blindness, but by initiating more personalized educational plans. By providing measured feedback on how students process information, edtech like Kiddi World enable closer, one-to-one connections between students and teachers, helping them identify the best individualized approach to enhance a student’s learning.

Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve been at the student’s end of a classroom, but I’d like to think I haven’t totally lost touch with my childhood education. And as much as I enjoyed being in school, my fondest memories—prior to discovering the internet—are probably those that were most hands-on.

Field trips and practical lessons gave me the chance to learn on my own terms. Rather than learning through the filter of others, these outings allowed me to create my own educational narrative and learn through first-hand experience—escaping the usual set up where you sat staring at a teacher as they talked at you from the front of the room.

However, since my earlier expeditions to the local science museum or treatment plant—yes, my school was very progressive—educational technology (edtech) has changed the game considerably. Smartboards (digital whiteboards), laptops, and smartphones have made their way into the classroom and the curriculum. And as with anything concerning children, this influx of technology in the classroom adds fuel to the fire of the helpful vs. harmful debate.

We have to deal with the fact that progress is inevitable. My parents for one, missed out on most of the digital revolution, leaving them oblivious to a lot of its benefits. Who would have expected that with just a smartphone and a selfie-stick, you can discover parts of life on earth that are otherwise invisible or out of reach? That’s the innovation that Google Expeditions, an educational tool launched in 2017, offers by showcasing the promising ways in which AR and VR can turn your average lesson into an extraordinary expedition.

While we might not be able to avoid progress, we can influence it by deciding how to expose future generations to innovative tech. What better place to start than by using innovative tech to take children to places beyond their wildest imagination—creating experiences that even field trips can’t match?

Back to the Chalkboard

I’ve never met anyone who learned to play football just by reading about Cruijff’s biggest feats alone or could ride a bicycle after watching Peter Sagan pull-off a winning sprint. If we want to develop certain skills and learn valuable lessons, we have to live them. And even though offline teaching increasingly revolves around exploration, there’s still a gap between many areas of applied learning and everyday practice.

Why not close the gap by using technological advancements to our advantage? By giving children access to experiences that are quite literally out of this world, we can further encourage the development of real-world skills—without having to leave the classroom. 

Others are taking note of this potential; investments dollars have risen in edtech over the years, with over $1.45 billion raised by US edtech startups in 2018—beating the $1.2 billion raised the year before. But that money is also going into fewer and fewer companies, demonstrating a need for edtech tools and startups to stand out with unique experiences and demonstrable educational results.

As this increasingly competitive environment matures, the winning edtech startups are those that provide differentiated experiences. They won’t use tech for tech’s sake, but will find the best medium for the message and iterate upon it. Sitting for hours on end scrolling through our feeds is not something you want to actively encourage, but exploring a virtual visualization of a DNA string is.

Designing these experiences requires educators to build an appetite to try new things and innovate—essentially, they must become students themselves, seeking out ways to innovate. A publisher can translate their book into a CD or internet portal, which might offer some interactivity and exploration, but that does little to make the lesson significantly more engaging or meaningful to a student. Instead, edtech requires an entirely new mentality around learning.

The Next Frontier  

It’s not just earthly life that’s suddenly at our fingertips thanks to new technical interfaces. VR offers the first real means of making “space travel” possible for everyone. The SPACEBUZZ project is something particularly close to my heart. TLDR: a real-life rocket pulls up to schools, virtually launching students into orbit.

While working on SPACEBUZZ, I got to see first-hand how an interactive VR experience can leave a lasting impression on developing minds and encourage curiosity. Guided by real-life astronaut André Kuipers (who helped develop a fact-based script and serves as Mission Commander in the experience), kids get to gear up and produce in a 15-minute space flight.

What really makes a difference is giving children the hands-on experience to learn. While children who watched just the VR flyover film were impressed by the view of earth from space, the students who experienced the onboarding mission first got into the mindset to better investigate and understand what they were seeing from the stellar view—like the visible effects of deforestation, air pollution and more. Similarly, the Lockheed Martin initiative, Field Trip to Mars, shows just how much influence a positive application of technology can have on the appetite for learning, bolstering a positive perception of digital experiences.

By embedding practical technology in the everyday lives of the next generation, in the right setting, we’ll not only see a continuation of positive technological experiences but also provide access to a broader educational experience. In addition to giving children a new perspective on the world around them, these digital experiences could inspire deep engagement with their passions across a variety of subjects, helping cultivate the next generation of scientists, teachers, astronauts, manufacturers and more. We could tailor parts of these experiences to speak to individual needs, because who knew that according to one study girls learn better from a virtual teacher while boys prefer tutoring from a drone?

The above gets at the heart of what makes edtech such a powerful tool: teach students in a scalable way that’s personalized to their individual learning styles. In a Medium post that serves as a primer to the different styles of personalized learning, the Office of Educational Technology within the US Department of Education defines personalized learning as “instruction in which the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each learner.” The key thing is that “learning activities are made available that are meaningful and relevant to learners, driven by their interests and often self-initiated,” and edtech offers an excellent opportunity to prompt that sense of exploration in students.

With this potential for individual enrichment, edtech doesn’t have to be limited to education throughout the formative years. Imagine what we could do if we applied the same theory throughout the entire educational infrastructure? In supporting lifelong learning, edtech could play a key role in training across disciplines, including fields in which the stakes are high, like in the medical industry, combat training or of course: space travel.

From digital experiences that inspire to the possibility of personalized courses and expert guidance based on personal data, edtech can set students up for a lifetime of learning, helping them discover and apply their passions to benefit society as a whole.

I might not be in formal education anymore, but I’m definitely still learning—and look forward to continue paying that experience forward to help tech users of any age better explore and relate to the world around them.