A primer in coaching design thinking
Letting go of pride, expertise and other things held dear
I’ve just finished my fifth go at running a large, studio-based design thinking course at The University of Queensland (UQ). At UQ, design thinking is a compulsory first year, first semester course for students in three of our degree programs: Information Technology, Multimedia Design and Interaction Design. This course presents a number of challenges for me as a university educator, and for our tutors, who get to spend much more time than I do in close contact with the students.
Prior to working at UQ I taught interaction design at a small postgraduate degree program in Denmark for a number of years. The small class sizes meant I got to know the students very well over the course of a semester. But that also meant I never had the benefit or support of tutors. I taught some of the same material I teach now, but marking, giving feedback etc. on every submission as well. It was a great way to learn how to teach. But it didn’t immediately prepare me to help others teach design. Over the past five years, at a much larger institution with larger class sizes, I have had the opportunity to work with a team of about ten tutors each semester, many of whom will only tutor the course once (before they get better paying, shinier full-time jobs). And this experience has given me a chance to think about the challenges in teaching design and being in a position to help others learn to teach design.
Learning design
Learning design is a very different kind of thing than many first year IT students are used to. The projects we set for our design thinking teams pull students into unfamiliar, and often uncomfortable territories. For one, projects are frustratingly open-ended (or, less charitably, “ill-defined”). We set problem spaces where students are not given examples of successful design precedents. On this model, a “good” design brief makes it difficult for students to pattern-match prior designs or solutions to the new context; this is done in an effort to compel them to exhibit creativity and judgment.
The nature of the briefs also require students to conduct their own original research—such as field observations, interviews and surveys—and to mine their research for insights that can help them define a tractable design problem from their respondents’ points of view. We deliberately choose contexts for these projects in areas where we are not domain experts, so that students are forced to develop, and rely on, their own emerging understandings of the people for whom they are designing products and systems. As teaching staff in the course, we are not in the role of their clients, their customers, their users, or their superiors. In an important sense it shouldn’t matter whether or not we like what they design, as they are not designing for us, for our personal or aesthetic (or other) sensibilities. It should matter whether, and how, they can show us their design works for the people they are designing for. As such, one of the more alien experiences in this course is to get students, through their own research of the people and contexts they are designing for, to identify and establish the criteria for success of their own design project. They are not designing to try to hit pre-established criteria that we have set, as if design tutors should know, in advance, exactly what a terrific design solution for this domain ought to be.
About 300 students enrol in the course each year. The studio model of education isn’t easily scalable to those kinds of numbers. This necessitates we have a team of tutors who look after “zones” of 18–24 students (3–5 teams) within a single large studio. Having multiple zones within the same space has a number of advantages: it means we can run studio-wide exercises (such as design sprints) when we need to, and it enables inexperienced tutors to see, and learn from, the way their peers interact with teams and run their zones.
Zoning the studio enables tutors to get to know individual students well. It also gives each tutor autonomy over how to run their zone. This creates different effects within the studio. Some tutors heavily emphasise particular aspects of design—critique, for instance—giving their zone a different feel and flavour than a neighbouring zone which may focus more on workshop-type activities, or design research, or team dynamics, or creative exercises. The lack of uniformity is deliberate. While there are many design experiences we ensure all students leave the course having shared (such as conducting primary research, generating concepts, prototyping, evaluating concepts with users, etc.) the fact that we permit, and encourage, zones to run idiosyncratically is a part of how we visibly show students that there is not a single correct recipe for a design process. Design cannot be shoehorned through a singular series of activities that will achieve uniformly dependable (or even acceptable) results. Specific models of the design process can be, and are often, valuable. But like individual design methods (such as those usefully packaged and shared by Stanford’s d.School), such formulae do not offer designers any guarantees.
Little surprise, students can find this disorienting. They sometimes misinterpret the permissible variety in the studio as “anything goes”. Of course, “anything goes” is as far from reality as it is from what we are trying to teach them. What we want them to see is that different emphases provide different benefits for their process; not always of equal value, sure, but beneficial nonetheless. The idea that “anything goes” can slide into “nothing really matters”, and this will suggest to them there is not really anything to learn, or at least nothing they have to learn. And that notion is something we need to guard carefully against. Of course the point is that everything matters; it just matters in different ways, for different reasons, opening up different possibilities for design.
Coaching design
In my experience, new tutors to design thinking also struggle with what we ask of them in running their own zone in the studio. Like some of the students they oversee, the occasional security of a template to work from would be appreciated. They would find it easier if they could start a studio session with, e.g. “we are now at stage X of the design process; today we will run a low-fi prototyping session.” After all, most of their other teaching and learning experiences have operated on a model of instruction that sets specific exercises for them to do. These exercises, most often, have predictable outcomes that can be right or wrong. In contrast, we ask our tutors to do other kinds of things with the students, some of which are unfamiliar. And all of these require some discipline to do well.
Prioritise engaging the students in dialogue rather than giving them specific things to do. A design thinking course needs to require the students to stop, and to think about what kinds of things they should do next to further their process. Getting good at promoting this kind of dialogue doesn’t come naturally to most tutors, and takes practice. We often try to encourage tutors not to answer students’ questions about content or advice. Instead, they should first ascertain the students’ own take on their circumstances. Questions about content (is this right?) and value (is this good?) beg process questions in reply: What do the students themselves think is a good answer to their question? What advice would they give another design team asking them that? Where could they go, or what activity could they do in order to get a reasonable response to their query from their context of use? Students learning design need to develop and rely on their own judgment; this is made more difficult if tutors provide immediate “easy” answers to their questions and problems in the first instance. So tutors need to become good at extracting from students their best ideas for activities and next steps, fostering their independence as active learners, rather than interacting with them in a manner that could create a dependence on the tutor’s knowledge and experience, rather than their own (more on this point below). This requires engaging students in very particular forms of dialogue that will initially feel unnatural.
Get students to work with their own material, whatever the current state of their research and early design concepts. With design thinking we are trying to train a sensibility and independence that will ultimately enable them to construct their own process from the materials of the design context and the people they are investigating. If students don’t have good material, let them try to work with it anyway—they won’t be able to differentiate valuable from unusable material without trying, and struggling to work with e.g. poor research or shallow concepts. In doing initial field research, many of our students often (despite our advice) default to online surveys. After all, they are quick to set up, easy to deploy and it is straightforward to recruit participants to respond. With a few exceptions, however, surveys give students very little valuable information with respect to design. But they don’t need to take my word for it—they can see for themselves. Experience might tell me that it is much easier to identify a design insight from a detailed narrative account of one person’s case, collected from a face-to-face interview in the context that I want to design for, than it is to do the same from fifty or more survey responses. (This is because with online surveys, I have implicitly imposed my own categories of relevance onto the questions I wrote, and directed respondents’ attentions to things I preselected as interesting, and then I’ve narrowed their format of response to a radio button or form field.) But students need to have their own, perhaps quite different, experience of working with survey data in order to understand its usefulness and limitations for design. And we need to permit them that freedom, even if it means they will struggle (or fail) at first.
Resist being an expert, and all the temptations that come with that. This follows from the other things I’ve been saying, but as a design thinking tutor, you are not an instructor so much as a coach. I may have some explaining to do here, since the master/apprentice model is a foundation of studio as a pedagogic approach to learning design. So let me try. Donald Schön is largely responsible for the renaissance of studio as a model for higher education in the professions. Yet even he found, in his celebrated studies of the architecture studio, that the studio master (with the pseudonym of Quist), when demonstrating how to design to a novice in the studio, moved so quickly and with such “mastery” that the student struggled to see how he had done it. Indeed, it took Schön’s remarkable skill at microanalysis to decompose the design moves Quist had taken in order to abstract out of them a recognisable (and abstractable) approach to design. In Quist’s case, the demonstration of design thinking in action managed to obscure precisely what the student was intended to learn from it. For design tutors who, from their own experience, know just what kinds of constructive things the students could be doing, and how to do them, it is difficult to not simply tell them what to do—to give them better ideas, or to try to manage their process for them. After all, most tutors for most courses at university are hired precisely for their abilities and their knowledge, and in order to pass on their knowledge to students. And it can be tempting to cast oneself in the role of expert, especially when students want you to be the expert, and when you know you have good advice and ideas to share. But novice designers are likely to learn more if they have to make their own decisions and chart their own course, even if that course doesn’t get them to very interesting design destinations first time around.
Discomfort, unfamiliarity and design
I have thought for a number of years that designing can make unique existential demands of its practitioners. Good designers don’t just need to listen to critique, but to court it. It can be personally difficult (as in you may struggle with yourself) to share early and ugly design propositions with others, when those are almost guaranteed to be poorly received. But designers need to content themselves to do these and other uncomfortable or socially precarious things (bodystorming, anyone?) for the sake of producing something better that will ultimately work better for people.
But teaching design comes with its own existential challenges—pride in having answers and being an expert are among the first casualties. I share these early thoughts as the beginnings of what I hope can become a longer conversation with others on the challenges in teaching design.
