11. “The great herd of mankind pass their
lives in listless inattention and
indifference as to what is going on
around them, while those who are
destined to distinction have a lynx-eyed
vigilance that nothing can escape.”
-- American jurist William Wirt
12.
13. Design—The use of creative, artistic,
and scientific thinking to solve real-
world problems.
Good Design Not So Good Design
20. A “liberal education…aspires to nurture
the growth of human talent in the
service of human freedom.”
William Cronon (1998) “’Only Connect…’ The Goals of a Liberal Education”,
The American Scholar, Volume 67, No. 4.
25. ”All men and women require a liberal art
of design to live well in the complexity of
the framework based in signs, things,
actions, and thoughts.
Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”
Bet you weren’t expecting that.
Let me contextualize it…
Explain image, TED Creative Common’s license, Hockenberry “We’re all Designers Now”,
That’s the huge question looming over us, all of us, who are, as John Hockenberry says here, designers…What will we do now in the face of the chaos we have created? In essence, how will designers save the world?
Well, I’m going to tell you. We’re going to reinvigorate public education to rescue America and its students from its narrow focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—the so-called STEM disciplines, and in doing so we’re going to create an design based education to infuse an artistic mindset with these STEM disciplines to create a STEAM Powered Classroom that honors the liberal arts tradition of America’s educational forebears and powers us into the future.
So you came here to see what design-based methods might look like in a public-school classroom, and you’ll get that. But I want you to leave with more, I want you to leave… if you aren’t already…empowered to save the world.
Well, I’m a fool. If you’d like further confirmation, ask my wife.
So yeah…I’m a fool because I’m not a designer, I’ve never taken a class in design, and my familiarity with the field stems from my personal connection to the brilliance of Apple Computers, Oral-B Cross Action Toothbrushes, and the utterly useless telephone that hangs in my classroom. My degree is in English. I also took numerous classes in Religion and, due to an unhealthy love interest, I know quite a bit about Art History and could probably still write passable papers for Art History classes .
So
Well, I have, with the help of several colleagues, designed a class that has evolved from an initial focus on the connection between the arts to one that uses the arts, both static and performing, as texts and teaches students to read the world.
The class is not focused upon stuffing more content into student’s minds. I’ll quote one of my former students: Mr. Heidt, most teachers teach us what to think. You teach us how to think.
And one of the primary ways I’m doing that, is by creating design minded students.
So if this is a conference about the future, then that’s what I’m helping to design.
Let me take you inside the class where we use design-based methods and the design-thinking as ways to empower my students towards answering two essential questions that undergird all we do: “Why are things the way they are? How can I/we make them better?” ( A word about those questions…I lifted them verbatim from a contest I saw run by Sappi papers called “Ideas that Matter.”
I’m going to show you why those questions matter…
Repeat questions.
For me, Design in the class is really about offering students three gifts—
The gift of Thinking in a certain way, which is Investigating why things are the way they are.
The gift of Doing It addresses the questions of How can we make things better?
Finally, the gift of Being, which is learning to recognize one’s place in the world and how what one thinks and does in the world affects one’s self and others.
So the first step in developing design-minded students is to get them THINKING in a way many of them may never have thought before. Actually, it’s a skill which to me is about teaching students to Read, but not just words…No, my reading class is much broader…I’m trying to get them to read the world, in an academic sense, to recognize the world as signs and to interpret those signs.
This requires two things..
1) Students practice Empathy--listen with head and heart. To understand not only what was said but more importantly, how it was said, and to know who said it.. This also is practiced when they are interviewing users of the product or system they are trying to improve.
Talk about Touchstones and empathy—
2) Disciplined attention to the worlds they inhabit, both natural and, perhaps more importantly, the built/designed world
How do we do this?
One of the first things we do is develop the visual senses. We do this with a focus on some of the basic elements of the arts. Intense viewing exercises in class are combined with freewriting and writing and thinking exercises to develop background in creating focused self-guided dialogue with artwork.
One of the first things we do is develop the visual senses. We do this with a focus on some of the basic elements of the arts. Intense viewing exercises in class are combined with freewriting and writing and thinking exercises to develop background in creating focused self-guided dialogue with artwork.
Part of the process we use while doing this was developed in concert with Prof. Susan Shifrin, professor of Art history and director of educational outreach at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College which resides in our district.
Describe close viewing, the process, it’s mindfulness—(If you were to come in while we were there…you’d be amazed.) There is no “project” for this unit. Instead, the culmination of the study is the trip to the museum itself.
After this introduction to design and design thinking, I get to introduce one of my favorite parts of the class…
Discuss Toothbrushes
Close viewing from art becomes close viewing of the designed world
Individual observations functional and aesthetic and inferences about innovations.
Then they share their toothbrushes… ( )
Describe this process
Then how they find and object and do same process—show and tell
Finally, this leads to the formation of teams with diverse skill sets that then become design firms.
These firms then engage in the actual design project that involves the creation of prototypes (some 2-d, some 3-d) . In that, then we move from the development of a certain type of “Thinking” (Reading the world) to actually focusing more on “DOING” and affecting some change. Which brings us to the second guiding question designers ask…[CLICK]
DOING
We teach students a form of the design thinking process—Exploration/observation/iteration/creation/evaluation/implementation
Students come up with problems they feel affect their lives as teenagers either in school or out of school
They do research, interview users, develop quantitative and qualitative data
Iterate Create
Test (on 8th graders)
And finally present to class. This year, some of our students also had the honor of presenting to a group of engineers and designers from Knoll furniture, which is about 20 miles north east of our district.
So…what’s the impact of this kind of teaching..?
Power in three ways:
Students
X Consumers—producers/creators/collaborators on projects as well as in knowledge
X Reactive—Problem Finders and Problem solvers of all types…even perhaps Wicked Problems
DT Heuristic=self –directed learners…people for whom failure is part of the process of learning and creating
Finally, the 4Cs 21st Century skills
But there’s another reason why I’m sold on design-based methods in the classroom
[CLICK]
Because:
Because for me, this class, teaching in general, it’s not just about imparting a way of THINKING, or even a manner of DOING things. More importantly, teaching, especially teaching design and design thinking is about opening students to a way of BEING.
And that way of BEING derives from one of my deepest convictions which is this—A Public Education in America ought not simply prepare students for a job, or for the inevitability of college and the decades of debt that come with it. No, public education ought to be a liberating experience, something that frees us not only from the chains of ignorance but which also frees us from limiting self-concepts and images that come to populate our minds through the media and too much of the rest of our school experiences.
Quote “Only Connect: On the Goals of a Liberal Education”,
This is what you do….
This is what I see as the potential for design in education. Design brings together so many of skills that I’d even say it’s a “perfect” educational paradigm. Take a look at the 10 goals of a liberal education that Prof. Cronon outlines:
(next slide)
So here…these are the 10 goals Cronon lists. [go over them]
I’ve been a teacher for 20. In all those years only design has presented the potential to pull together all these goals into one discipline…
But I believe there’s more to Design’s power in the classroom
Because once you do this, once you believe in design as a way to express all the goals of the liberal arts, You move from an imagination limited to these science and technologically based disciplines, to an imagination empowered to CREATE a better world.
And it starts with two simple questions…
This equates to a primary skill I want my students to learn--Reading the World
As I tell my speech and debate students, make sure you always give your judges, your audience something to do at the end of your speech…even if it’s just “vote for me..” So let me tell you what I’d like you to do.
1st—Memorize this quotation from Richard Buchanan’s “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”
Second…
Teach and involve yourself with your community, much as Knoll Furniture did for us—if you’re not involved in public education, think about how you can work with a teacher to introduce students as young as possible to design, perhaps through the IDSA’s Design Learning Challenge,
Look, kids love this stuff. There’s an immediate hook here because while not all students are great mathematicians, not all are talented writers or historians…all children make things—they make sandcastles, LEGO vehicles, families with dolls, forts out of blankets and boxes…they’re human, they’re creators. Show them where this natural drive can take them.
Ok…I’ll admit it, perhaps there’s a bit of naive hyperbole here. As a teacher, I’ve no qualms about saying that I have a huge influence on the future of the world. Designers do, too, though. Again, you are molding, shaping, creating the built world. Combine design with education…to me, that’s a huge opportunity to save the world.
Paraphrase Apple Computers.
So when in the future I hear the echo of John Hockenberry’s query—”What shall we do now in the face of the chaos we have created? God! I hope I hear your voices answering in chorus with my own students to respond with—Perhaps design a better world.
4) Lastly…take one of those worlds with you…it’s your reminder that in the face of the chaos we have created, you have the power to save the world.
