Centering Mindfulness in Design Thinking Education
Centering Mindfulness in a Design Thinking Program: Notes from two sessions at the Future of Design in Higher Education (FDHE) 2019 Convening
By Andrea Mecquel and Rafe Steinhauer
A. Mecquel is a kinesthetic teacher and lecturer integrating applications of mindfulness and positive psychology within entrepreneurship at Princeton University’s Keller Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation Education, and Design Thinking. Bio.
Rafe Steinhauer is a visiting assistant professor of design thinking at Tulane University’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. At the time of this talk, he was a lecturer and entrepreneurial program manager at the Keller Center at Princeton University.
At the June 2019 Future of Design in Higher Education (FDHE) convening at UPENN in Philadelphia, they shared how they are integrating mindfulness practices in the Tiger Challenge, a multi-year design thinking for social innovation program, and they facilitated a discussion about potential connections between mindfulness and design thinking. Mecquel and Rafe led the session twice during a series of rotations; the remarks below are an approximate combination of the two.
Mecquel and Rafe: An opening provocation
Thank you for coming to the session, “Centering Mindfulness in Design Thinking Education.” We’d like to start by sharing a provocation: 7 statements we think apply to both mindfulness and design thinking:
- They can increase your comfort with ambiguity.
- They emphasize the importance of noticing emotions.
- They are often advertised as if you can master them in a one-week immersion.
- They require and cultivate curiosity.
- If you ask 10 different experts in each to define them, you’ll get 10 wildly different definitions, which suggests they may have each done the “comfort with ambiguity” thing a little too well.
- Among those who have been doing them for a long time, there is both excitement about their explosion in popularity and concern that they are becoming too watered down and divorced from their rich traditions.
- After any large-group introductory course, there are at least two people who think it was complete bullshit — as they expected it would be — and at least two people who believe their lives will never be the same again.
— — — — — —
Rafe: Why are we integrating mindfulness in our design thinking program?
We began integrating mindfulness and meditation into the full-time, 10-week summer portion of Tiger Challenge, a design thinking program in which teams of undergraduate students and faculty advisers work with community partners on multi-year social innovation challenges.
How did we come to integrate mindfulness to this extent? I’d describe the evolution in three stages:
Stage 1 — Sieve for Stress. I initially invited Mecquel to lead a weekly meditation session with participants in Summer 2016. This was as a response to the stress students were experiencing on campus, and my hope that meditation could serve as a sieve for stress, straining some of the anxiety out of our program. As Mecquel rightfully jokes, her sessions were initially “like a perk for Google employees.”
Stage 2 — Supplement for Designerly Mindsets. Over the next two years, with Mecquel’s guidance, I became aware of the research on how meditation could help cultivate aspects of empathy and creativity. We develop these mindsets in other ways in the program, so in 2017 and 2018 Mecquel led meditation workshops as supplementary ways to boost these core designerly abilities.
Stage 3 — Integral to Meta-Consciousness. We teach a lab in one of our courses in which students are given a task along with numerous clues that they’ll have to think boldly and creatively to be successful. By design, the students ignore these clues, approach the task analytically, and thus fail. During the ensuing debrief, students come to realize just how much they have been acculturated to think analytically by default. At some point in the discussion, I say “yes, analytical thinking is a superpower. But right now, you are Hulks not Supermans. Unlike Superman, Hulk can’t control his super strength, just like how you can’t control your analytical thinking right now.”
Because most of our students haven’t had many educational experiences past grade school that require creativity, empathy, and abductive reasoning (a third core skill set of designers), learning design thinking fosters some degree of meta-cognition. Meditation is the richest set of practices that exists for intentionally cultivating meta-consciousness, emotional self-regulation, and cognitive control. By integrating mindfulness (with meditation as one component) fully into our program this summer, we hope to still reap the benefits of decreased stress and cultivation of skills, but we also hope to hyper-charge our students’ ability to see themselves in context and work with greater intention, creating better designers and more resilient social innovators.
Mecquel: What mindfulness practices are we doing in the program?
When Rafe and I began to frame our goals for the student experience in Tiger Challenge, we considered the rigor of academic life at Princeton and that it often does not allow students to develop positive habits that contribute to a full, healthy, and productive life. Considering the high burnout rate among those who begin start ups and who work with vulnerable populations, we set out to create a program with the central goal that each student will have the supports and tools to thrive. We believe that this will benefit both their Tiger Challenge projects as well as their continued success at Princeton and beyond.
So what are we actually doing in the program?
- A weekly mindfulness class (90 minutes). In these classes, we are teaching the skills of mindfulness through group interactions and physical experiences (we want all of their senses involved). This is important because we want the skill of mindfulness to translate into everyday life. Each week we focus on one skill of mindfulness, such as attention, awareness, observation, or perspective-taking. For example, in one mindfulness experience on attentional listening, the students used only the tips of their index fingers to suspend a three-foot wooden dowel between two partners. To begin, the partners were directed to simply hold the dowel between them to get accustomed to the pressure that is needed from both sides to keep the dowel supported. Next, the partners were invited to move the dowel back and forth; this is a more dynamic experience which requires steady attention to keep the dowel from falling. Finally, the partners were invited to begin to move the dowel in all directions, including moving around the physical space, without any verbal communication; they were encouraged to explore their movement conversation in many body orientations; standing, crouching, even coming down to the floor. This experience fosters the skills of attentional control and relationship-building. The students have a physical experience of what a focused and balanced interaction feels like. Additionally, students can gain insight into their tendencies to dominate or to be passive. They are also practicing the skills of flexibility with ideas: because it is a non-verbal exercise, one member might make a movement-suggestion that the other partner is unwilling to accept or perhaps fails to understand. By creating a physical experience of conversation, relationship, and problem solving students can more easily identify when they are in balanced and effective verbal communication, and they are developing the skills to do so.
- Daily meditation practice. In order to more fully cultivate mindfulness they also have a 15–30-minute guided meditation. Each meditation is introduced and recorded on Monday and then made available to the students online for the remainder of the week. They are strongly encouraged to develop a personal practice, and they are also invited to create small groups to practice the recorded meditation together creating community, accountability, and support.
- One-on-one sessions. Recognizing the sensitive nature of internal work and that it is not “one size fits all,” I have a bi-weekly 20-minute session with each student. This allows me to check in with each student’s experience, form connections, and create personal well-being goals and strategies tailored to the individual’s current needs and experiences. Some of the goals that students have identified are: monitoring destructive self-talk, learning to cook, asserting opinions with others, creating original music, forming regular sleep habits, dancing, practicing listening, exercising consistently, and keeping a nature journal.
- Weekly small-group discussions. In our desire to create a culture that values group experience, vulnerability, and support, we created cross-team groups of three that meet for a check-in and to discuss a central question from each week’s investigations, such as “In what ways were the dowel exercises similar and dissimilar to verbal conversations?”
Mecquel and Rafe: Where are we directly combining mindfulness and design together?
Rafe: We’ve collaborated on a workshop on each of the three core skill sets of design: empathy, abductive reasoning, and creativity. These workshops are important because they form the basis of our belief that these two disciplines belong together. These skill sets are central to design thinking and are cultivated by mindfulness and meditation.
Mecquel: For example, in the empathy workshop, we used Daniel Goleman’s framework (Emotional Intelligence Series: Empathy, 2017) for three types of empathy, all valuable to human-centered design: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern. We began by setting up an empathic situation in which I — without any prompt or explanation — picked up several gravel-filled buckets. The intention of the activities was to elicit the experience of Goleman’s three different forms of empathy, but something far more fascinating happened. As I struggled with the buckets, two students jumped up to help because, as they later said, “We couldn’t watch any longer!” Rather than stopping them, I waited to see what would happen next. Once I let them help me, several more students jumped in and starting playing with the buckets in different ways while continuously glancing at me and Rafe to see if they were doing “it right” yet. We let this go on for 10 minutes or so, all while the frustration and anxiety of the group mounted. While we did have an interesting conversation about empathy afterwards, we had an even more revelatory discussion about comfort with ambiguity and how dominant the “presumption of one right answer” is: even when they were playing with toy buckets filled with gravel, the college students still assumed that there must be something they were supposed to do with them.
Q&A: An approximate combination of the short discussions that followed
Q: Are you using the words “mindfulness” and “meditation” interchangeably?
Mecquel: No. Mindfulness and meditation are separate practices and states that are helpful to keep distinct both in our language and thinking. Meditation is a way that we can cultivate mindfulness, but not all people who are practicing mindfulness will meditate. While we are incorporating meditation into our program (because of the overwhelming documented positive effects) there are many ways to experience the benefits of mindfulness without ever meditating. As there are many who associate meditation with spiritual or even religious practice, it is important to maintain a distinction between the practices because this can become a barrier to new practitioners.
Additionally, there are some populations for whom meditation is not recommended (those who have experienced certain traumas, for example). In these cases, there are other ways to cultivate mindfulness that are beneficial. This is also why we have incorporated one-on-ones with each student so that we can be sure that we are recommending and supporting the most beneficial practices for each individual.
Q: Was there any pushback to incorporating meditation or mindfulness from the students?
Rafe: Surprisingly, there wasn’t any pushback. There is such an experience of anxiety on campus that I suspect students are open to trying things that have a reputation for helping with mental health. Also, it seems like students were intrigued by the conversation about increasing meta-consciousness and self-regulation — enticing superpowers to try to develop.
Q: What about the response from other faculty and administrators?
Rafe: Well, to be honest, we just started doing this. The importance of this work quickly shifted from “something we could add to the program” to “something for which I felt it would be irresponsible not to try.” But since we started sharing about the work, the response has been positive. I think meditation and mindfulness are now topics most people in academia have at least heard of (which is not the case for design thinking yet). We’ve been using Altered Traits (Goleman and Davidson, 2017) as both inspiration for material and for academic credibility. The book is a fantastic overview of peer-reviewed research on meditation — what’s been claimed, what’s been shown, what hasn’t been shown, etc. While it’s important not to over-scientize these traditions, empirical research should be one important component for building credibility in higher education.
Q: Is there a wrong way to do this, or anything that others considering incorporating mindfulness into design programs should worry about?
Mecquel: In addition to nearly 20 years of practice and teaching in contemplative arts, I also have a background in psychology and experience in therapeutic settings including drug and alcohol rehabilitation, as a behavioral therapist for children and families, as well as training and education in trauma and trauma-aware teaching. It is important to have a skilled facilitator who has experience both in contemplative practices and how they can interplay with an individual’s psychology, history, and sensitivities and an understanding about when to connect a student with on or off campus psychological services.
A few things to think about: This is not “one size fits all.” Adding mindfulness to any class or program is beneficial. Feel comfortable starting in small ways that feel natural to you and your programs or classes. For example, make a practice of starting the class with a few moments of quiet, inviting the students to pause, allowing their attention to fully arrive where they are. If you are thinking of adding a short meditation to your program or class, give the clear support that students can opt out of the guided meditation, using that time instead to sit, noticing their breath or even quietly drawing or journaling.
Q: What are ways you’ve used this when you don’t have a trained instructor there, or during the academic year when the students aren’t full-time?
Rafe: I’ve led the dowel activity once on my own, and I’d feel comfortable leading some of the non-meditation mindfulness practices without Mecquel; there’s a lot less risk of triggering trauma during the interactive experiences. Additionally, the students keep regular journals, and I could imagine updating the prompts to more directly prompt reflections that promote mindfulness, such as asking students to write about both their thought processes and their emotional journeys. I’d like to do a lot more than I have in future academic years, but of course it’s always harder when there’s less time.
Q: Can you say more about meta-consciousness — how is this different from mindfulness?
Mecquel: I’ll give that a stab, but the boundaries of many of the things of which we’re speaking aren’t so clear. Meta-consciousness is an important ability for being aware and making choices about our type and process of thinking: like having an air-traffic controller for our brain. This, as we know, is significant for effective thinking, problem solving, and learning. While mindfulness is a tool for cultivating meta-consciousness it also expands the subject of observation beyond thinking, and makes aware the whole of our experience; emotions, the physical body, our environment and others. We are looking to be aware of everything that is going on while it is going on.
Q: How are you thinking about equity and inclusion in this work?
Rafe: There are two things we’re considering: first is the inclusivity in our program — will all our students feel safe and empowered by the work? Second is how this impacts our students as social innovators — will this help them in their community work in the program and in the future?
First, the inclusivity of our program. At their cores, design is the practice of world-creating and mindfulness is the practice of seeing one’s self in context with greater clarity. Both have rich practices and traditions across all cultures. But, as could be expected with increased popularity, the strains of each that have attached themselves to colonizing or other hegemonic forces don’t represent this diversity of practices or people: what’s most visible in western media can look white and affluent (think haute couture or Lululemon). So when we began, we kept a close eye on whether all of our students were feeling safe and empowered by this work.
Mecquel: This was another driver in committing so much time to one-on-ones with the students: this allowed me to personalize a mindfulness plan with each individual, create a personal rapport of support and trust, and to quickly identify areas where our group culture needs to be shifted or attended to.
Rafe: In addition to monitoring the inclusivity experienced by our students, our hope is that this work will also help them be more mindful as they engage across difference in their work in the program and in the future. There are many books to be written here, but to highlight two ways that seem most germane: first is the ability to balance both awareness and openness as they engage with stakeholders. I wouldn’t have predicted this when I started this work, but the white student who has taken classes on, say critical race theory, often struggles to engage with people of color equally if not more than the student who is ignorant of important political and historical racial contexts but who is generally open-minded. Of course, the student who has both learned important context and can still engage without assumptions is the student who is most equipped to learn from and empower people from different backgrounds. Balancing awareness and openness is a difficult mindful skill.
Second, I believe mindfulness is crucial to cultivating genuine empathic skills, rather than the shallow, performative empathy that has become so fetishized in design thinking in business spaces. Empathy is not about walking in another person’s shoes; it’s about noticing how you are experiencing and interpreting others’ experiences. Empathy must always be paired with self-awareness as well as reflexive thinking — asking questions like: what are the power differences between Princeton students and the communities in which we’re working? What are the origins and ontologies of design thinking and social innovation? Holding these lenses present while feeling empathic emotions and understanding others’ perspectives … that is a mindful superpower.
Q: How could this be replicated at other schools?
Rafe: I strongly encourage others to consider integrating mindfulness into their design programs. But like with all good design, the approach is more replicable than the output — a lot of what we’re doing might change based on context. Mecquel and I started noodling on this over a year ago, but we began designing in earnest about a semester out. We had a number of (really fun!) conversations about how to do this appropriately for this program and for undergraduate students. If you are a design instructor and are thinking of going whole-hog, my chief advice is to find a collaborator as well … or see if you can work with Mecquel because she is truly one of a kind!
Thank you for joining us today!
