Seeing the world of education as it could be.
The Pillars of Design Thinking
Design thinking is about seeing the world not as it is, but as it could be (Martin, 2009).
The interest in the uses of design thinking as both a pedagogical tool and way of approaching issues, problems and opportunities is new and promising in terms of the scope of application in curriculum and beyond. The hope is that design thinking can drive innovation in schools. Design thinking is also a skilled behaviour to be learned and novice designers interact with the design process and design problems very differently from experienced designers. So, as design thinking methods enter the world of education, what ways of working should educational practitioners as novice designers work to honour when developing their knowledge and skills in design thinking?
Design
The wide array of frameworks that have been developed to depict the necessary skills and mindsets of design thinking can be somewhat confusing. However, what they all attempt to communicate is a general process of research, design and delivery.
It is vitally important to realise that the process of design begins with a phase of research and discovery. Your aim here is to develop an understanding of the context you are researching whilst also building empathy with the people you and your design team are designing for. Design thinking is primarily insights driven so any insights gained from this inquiry then inform your future design work. Design thinking is therefore more than a method to solve problems. In education it is an emerging field of inquiry and research where we work to develop an informed understanding of our contexts and to change existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1996 in Koh, Chai, Wong, & Hong, 2015).
As we learn to actively engage with issues, problems and opportunities in our contexts of learning and teaching to design for change, what are the core principals of design thinking that we need to honour? John Kolko (2017) provides insight by stating that it is the combination of building empathy, exploring problems and low-resolution prototyping that is design thinking.
The Pillars of Design Thinking
The following discussion assumes that as educators we are designing with K-12 students as our end users. The general question is how should we work and think differently when designing to improve education.
Empathy
Empathy is about emotion, to compassionately feel what it is like to be another individual, to stand in their shoes and to understand the world through the eyes of others (Brown, 2009, Kolko, 2012).
To ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’ our first challenge is to develop an informed understanding of our existing context while also building empathy for our end users. The insights we extract from this contextual inquiry will drive our design. Some commentary on design thinking talks about building empathy for a problem and empathy for context but I suspect this thinking conflates empathy with understanding. There is a tendency to assume that if we have one, we have the other, but empathy is not the same as understanding. As Jon Kolko states “…like wisdom, empathy is difficult. To empathize with any degree or rigor requires a great deal of time, and emotional energy” (Kolko, 2012, p.45). As educators and novice designers how should we tackle this challenge ?
We can begin our immersion by undertaking end user research that has us observing and listening to our students. For example we might shadow these students for a day and watch how they interact with each other and their learning environments. What do they talk about? What do they do? Can you also spot what they do not do or do not say? What inconvenient situations can you see them quietly and unconsciously adapting too? As they improvise their way through their daily lives what inexplicable or ‘thoughtless acts’ can you spot. “If we are to “borrow’ from the lives of other people to inspire new ideas, we need to begin by recognising that their seemingly inexplicable behaviours represent different strategies for coping in the confusing, complex and contradictory world in which they live.” (Brown, 2009, p.48). The goal of this work is to build empathetic ties with your groups of students and via these interactions generate insights that guide your work as a designer.
However, an approach tha treats educators as designers and students as consumers of teacher centred designs can be problematic.
“when designers attempt to engage in social change, they are often viewed by the community they are trying to help as part of the problem rather than part of the solution” (Kolko, 2012, p.45).
The research activities described above may prepare our minds to find insights but I would argue what education really needs is a radical collaboration (Brown, 2009) where our students are invited into the design cycle. In this space our students stop being consumers of our designs but instead become co-designers (Brown, 2009, Kolko, 2012). This shift towards participatory design will challenge the traditional perception of ‘us versus them’ or ‘us on behalf of them’ where the designer (or educator) is construed as the person with the answer. Participatory design is about forging links with our students by building and maintaining a very inclusive, and democratic environment. Here empathy is built by designing with versus for and the participatory process is fundamental to ensuring a humane design solution (Kolko, 2012). These words of wisdom from the design world provide hints as to how we might begin to break down tired old educational paradigms. Certainly, what education is looking for are participatory cultures of learning where our students feel empowered to build and create rather than being passive consumers of a process that is designed for them.
The risk is that as novice designers we misunderstand empathy and view it as a moment in time — something finite that can be achieved as a step in a larger process (Kolko, 2012). In the education sector we see this misunderstanding played out in short workshops and hastily constructed student personas that are reduced to worksheets completed during a 15 minute round-table discussion. If explored with depth these activities can be an effective way of extracting and making visible the assumptions and biases we hold about our students. However, these ‘worksheets’ are not empathy building tasks per se; particularly if built without interacting with our learners. Our professional challenge is to build participatory cultures that amplify student voice where we do not speak for them, they speak for themselves.
In summary, our goal is to know and empathise with our audience — our students. Our challenge is to shift how we cognitively and emotionally interact with these students. Tim Brown (2009) reminds us that it is the actual behaviours of people that can provide invaluable clues about their unmet needs. What better way to unearth unexpected insights but by designing with our students and not for them.
Exploring Problems
“…dealing with wicked problems demands that attention be paid to understanding the nature of the problem itself. Problem understanding is central; the solution secondary.” (Martin, 2009, p.95).
Our world is full of indeterminate or wicked problems — those social or cultural problems that are messy, aggressive and confounding — their causes are ambiguous and it’s difficult to know when they are solved or what the solution might look like when you reach it (Martin, 2009). For example, inequality, famine, poverty and climate change are all socially significant wicked problems. Education is full of wicked problems, such as student engagement or inequality. They also have no definitive formulation (Kolko, 2012), for instance disengagement in one school is similar but different from disengagement in another school.
Roger Martin (2009, p.68) asks “How do you solve a paradox”? Well, you have to know what the paradox is.” And so when dealing with wicked problems, designers dedicate time and effort to problem finding and problem setting (Martin, 2009), problem exploration (Kolko, 2018) and problem seeking (Kolko, 2012). The theme here is that there is typically a preparation and incubation stage before moving to the solution stage of design thinking. This incubation allows us to actively develop an informed understanding of the issue, problem or opportunity that is intriguing us to increase our chances of developing creative and appropriate solutions. This is a significant shift in how we work in education where the general bias is towards quick development of solutions.
How might this preparation and incubation stage look in a school setting? Just by way of example, you are perplexed by the negative behaviours being exhibited by your current Year 8 students, who were a highly motivated and very amenable bunch when in Year 7. They have come to Year 8 and quickly developed a reputation for being disengaged and difficult to teach. As design thinkers we view such a ‘mystery’ as an opportunity for design. We do not even assume that ‘disengagement’ is the problem and therefore open the door to finding other problems. Contextual research and empathy building activities will allow us to generate data on ‘disengagement’ from a multitude of perspectives, including that of our students. If we analyse all of our collected data thematically we’ll begin to see a whole range of issues are unsettling our Year 8s. This problem exploration will make us hungry for solutions and when they come they will be more creative and appropriate for our context.
It is very important to note that when working with wicked problems our goal as designers is to improve a situation rather than solve it (Kolko, 2012, Martin, 2009). Furthermore, our measures of success shift away from correctness towards appropriate/inappropriate, elegant/inelegant, better/worse or sustainable/unsustainable (Owen, 2007). This is a refreshing and empowering shift in how we work in education to solve real world problems.
In summary, design thinking is so much more than a way to solve problems. As designers we must work towards developing an informed and deep understanding of the issue, problem or opportunity that we are working on. The incubation stage will also allow you to find the really interesting problems to solve within your organisation…which just might not be the initial problem that sparked your interest. Good design is full of breadth and depth. We’ve spent time getting to know our students and in this problem space we also need to make sure we understand the problem at hand otherwise our solution is not going to be appropriate.
Low-fidelity Prototyping
A third pillar of design thinking is characterised by making things at rough levels of fidelity; testing them with real people to understand if they are usable, useful, and desirable; and using prototypes to communicate a value proposition (Kolko, 2018).
The prototyping phase of design thinking is all about experimentation to bring ideas alive, to make them tangible, actionable, testable (Scheer, Noweski, Meinel, 2012). An exhilarating quality of design thinking is the move to quickly externalise ideas. This externalisation of ideas can be thought of as prototyping. The physical prototype provides a tactile and playful experience. It holds just enough information to enable us to try our idea, discuss it and learn from it. This sharing of our idea allows it to be developed further.
What’s your idea for increasing ‘engagement’ in Year 8? Your prototyping will be shaped by how your perspective on this problem has shifted during over time but, you’ll have developed just enough of an idea to do a rough pencil sketch. Other teams might may have prototypes built with paper, lego or some other building/craft material. You share these low resolution ideas amongst yourselves and with the verbal feedback obtained you update your rough drawing. Other people’s prototypes caused you to also see the problem in a new light, especially the student’s own ideas. Multiply this effort a number of times and in a very social and collaborative manner you are able to shift you thinking about both the problem and the solution. You’ve developed a clearer understanding of the issue of ‘engagement’ at Year 8 as well as modified your ideas of your future vision.
This physical form of sense-making shifts very fundamentally how we (educators and students) access, create and share new knowledge. This is a profound pedagogical and epistemological shift. No matter where we look, education is largely devoid of contextually relevant prototyping as a physical form of sense-making. We tend to make things when we think our idea is ready for sharing rather than building to think…collaboratively. A low-resolution prototype that has gaps or flaws will allow your customer/participant to input their ideas into your design. Design thinking supports and sustains a beautiful culture of rapid low-fidelity prototyping where you make visible your vision of the future.
Conclusion
Design as problem solving views the world as a series of issues to be optimised. Another perspective thinks of the world as a place to be experienced (Kolko, 2017).
As novice designers these three pillars provide concrete and practical guidance on how we can immerse into and experience our places of learning while participating in active, collaborative design work. Successful integration will open your design teams to emergent opportunities and empower them to change behaviour and reshape their cultures of learning.
What have we not explored… yet?
The way we think to innovate needs exploration. Roger Martin (2009) says it is abductive logic that that is at the heart of design thinking. This is where we need to learn to think differently and develop those ‘moonshot’ ideas that will shift our cultures of learning away from the status quo. This will be the topic of my next post.
References:
Koh, J. H. L., Chai, C. S., Wong, B., & Hong, H. Y. (2015). Design thinking for education: Conceptions and applications in teaching and learning. Springer.
Kolko, J. (2012). Wicked problems. Problems worth solving. A handbook and a call to action. Austin Centre for Design. Texas.
Kolko. J. (2018). The divisiveness of design thinking. Interactions 25(3), 28–34. Retrieved from http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2018/the-divisiveness-of-design-thinking.
Martin, R. (2009). The design of business. Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Harvard Business Press. USA.
Owen, C. (2007). Design thinking. Notes on its nature and uses. Design Research Quarterly 2(2), 16–27.
Scheer, A., Noweski, C., & Meinel, C. (2012). Transforming constructivist learning into action: Design thinking in education. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 17(3).
