Fast Company has an intriguing interview with Richard Florida, author of The Flight of the Creative Class and moving force behind CreativeClass.org (which to be honest I’ve not paid particular attention). Considering I responded to a Nussbaum blog entry this morning with my take on how uninformed the industrial design community seems to be, I thought this particular comment by Florida interesting:

I think our {Western} education system brings people together who might not otherwise interact, and in that more social sense it can be an extremely useful incubator. But our K-12 system, and even our universities now to some extent, are still stuck in an industrial-age mindset. Churning out factory workers for assembly lines served us very well 50 years ago; in the creative economy, it’s a recipe for stagnation, not success.

I’d point out that even the so-called “creative” disciplines are churning out factory laborers; people so focused on the minutiae they don’t see the big picture. How else can anyone otherwise explain the dumbfounding lack of understanding for intellectual property laws that directly affect anyone involved in a creative pursuit? I don’t blame the system – the schools that determine the curriculum or the corporations that take advantage of the uninformed. We “creative”‘s (and also those who aren’t actively employed in a creative field but are none-the-less engaged in creative pursuits) have no one to blame but ourselves.