The role of design in education innovation
Over the past couple of months, a spotlight has been turned on America’s education industry, from early childhood to higher education. Now more than ever, the inequities and long-accepted ‘truths’ in the American education system are coming to light. Families without access to technology in the home — or the time and resources necessary to focus on their children’s education — are struggling to support their kids as the burden of learning delivery shifts to parents. Traditional four-year colleges seem to have finally reached a tipping point as they search for a value proposition that justifies exorbitantly high tuition costs. Education is being forcibly broken out of its traditional time and space constraints. We know that learning is a lifelong endeavor, that one size does not fit all, and that a lot of learning happens outside of the classroom. Yet, most of our education delivery and assessment models do not reflect this.
As we move ever more swiftly away from industrial era mindsets, how might design play a role in catalyzing change within entrenched institutions such as education?
Design is beginning to play a larger role in four major social institutions: government (civic), finance, healthcare, and education. These are massively complex systems where the problems to be addressed are not always clear and the opportunities for intervention are often even less clear. Well known for its Bauhaus history and pioneering Human-Centered Design (HCD) methodologies, ID now focuses on systems design as a way to address structural inequities and deliver design recommendations in complex problem spaces.
The education industry is poised to become the next frontier for design. Curriculum, spaces, tools, roles, professional training, infrastructures, and lifelong learning practices all offer an immense opportunity for design to create transformative experiences and make a difference in people’s lives.
Why Systems Design
Education is a system. It’s big and complex with deep roots in industrial era mindsets of standardization and bureaucracy. We cannot design education, but we can design elements within the ecosystem to empower people to make change across different scales. This is where ID’s approach to systems design comes into play. At ID we learn about three different levels of design. These levels are interconnected and are not mutually exclusive.
The first level: Intervention
This is where things that provide specific features, touchpoints, and interactions, such as UX and product design, live.
The second level: Service
Here we are designing end-to-end experiences that connect people to the values and goals of an organization, institution, or community.
The third level: Systems
This level is more complicated because we are designing for things like behavior, mindsets, and relationships.
Approaching education innovation from a systems perspective allows us to work with complexity in three important ways:
1) Designing incremental changes for disruptive transformation
It is important to be empathetic to the difficulty and implications of change while maintaining a sense of urgency and forward momentum. Quick incremental wins can provide the short term momentum and motivation that is necessary to continue working toward transformation in the long view.
2) “Futures-thinking”: Humanizing existing systems to make long-term change tangible
While human-centered design helps us understand people’s current contexts, complex challenges are constantly changing and systems design can help us play an active role in shaping that change. Design can provide a way for people to imagine alternative futures in order to generate optimism, hope, and a belief that a different kind of future is possible.
Erin Huizenga, Co-Owner and Chief Designer at Desklight, works at the intersection of learning, human-centered design, and branding/UX to turn strategy into implementation. In her words:
“There is often too much for people to get their heads around. Tangibility is so overlooked sometimes. As designers, we have to use our collective ability to make things actionable and make it come alive for people. If we can do that, there will be people willing to make that change and want to uplift that. From an equity perspective, if things are so high level that people abandon it emotionally, change is hard to make come about.”
3) Embracing codesign
Codesign is a generative design approach that brings end beneficiaries into the design process as experts and problem solvers. In the words of Chris Rudd, Founder of ChiByDesign and Community-led Design Lead for the Chicago Design Lab at ID, we have to “empower those closest to the problem to be agents of change”. By putting people at the center of decisions we can give them a voice and agency in shaping their experiences.
Education, the New Frontier for Design
As I look to the future of design in education, I see parallels to the healthcare industry. Design in the healthcare sector has seen traction in the past few years due to the success of design-led services that put patients and providers at the center.
From Tomoko Ichikawa, an ID professor who focuses much of her work in the healthcare industry, I learned how this relies largely on internal capacity building around collaborative decision-making. HCD can help develop creative solutions through empathy and understanding the user perspective, but it takes patience and a willingness to adapt on the part of the institution.
Healthcare and education tend to be rigid, locked into doing things in particular ways, so it is necessary to start small by building internal allies who will commit to acting on new processes. Acting on the information gained from users and communities is critical to building the trust and buy-in necessary to sustain impact at the systems level. A person’s learning and health are a reflection of their relationship and experience with the products and services that institutions provide. Patient and learner engagement can be much more successful if those products and services are rooted in the context of the user — at the human level.
By humanizing complex systems like healthcare and education, design can play a central role in identifying opportunities for meaningful intervention.
Education, like healthcare, has its fair share of barriers that prevent the equitable distribution of benefits. However, extensive disruption is happening right now across both industries. People are ready for and demanding change in the systems that best serve the privileged few.
The role of design is not to fix, but to empower and bring people together, to work across scales, and help scaffold a vision for a different kind of future. Education is a new frontier for design. I can see the seeds of change of the design processes that have proven successful in other industries begin to stem. As a new and uncertain school year nears, I am excited to be a design partner with the people, companies, organizations, and institutions eager to innovate and serve all learners better.
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