Design Your (Educational) Design Work #5: Reflecting on 2019
We decided to teach Spring Design Thinking Studio without any trace of the beloved hexagons design process. This meant a complete shift from many of the activities any of us had used before. Our learning objectives were for our students to develop a shared mental model of each design ability. And, enable them to design their design work as a way to navigate ambiguity.
Given the focus on ambiguity, we decided to use an explore before explain pedagogy to approach how we taught the class. This pedagogical approach draws on the “constructivist” approach to learning. Constructivism is founded on the idea that knowledge is constructed and shaped by one’s experiences and their interactions with the world. Cognitive Scientist Jerome Bruner observed that it is most efficacious when learning starts by being action based or ‘enactive’, then is furthered by visual or ‘iconic’ representations, and then solidified through language, discussion, or ‘symbolic’ representations.
Our explore before explain approach to teaching design encapsulates all of these ideas. Exploring involved curated experiences of the concepts we wanted students to learn so that they could learn through activity, discover the concepts for themselves and engage in a process of Sense-Making. Explaining involved, student’s visualizing what they just experienced and discussing it so that they could engage in a process of Meaning-Making. While at times leaning in fully to this approach was time-consuming, hard, and tested our limits as educators, practicing this pedagogy helped us see that learning design is a lot like learning chess. A realization we wouldn’t have come by otherwise. Let us explain…
Design isn’t a process; neither is chess.
We’re going to assume you have played chess, or at least seen it. But in case you need a quick refresher, it’s a game played on a chessboard where each player has sixteen pieces. The goal is to capture the opposing team’s pieces.
What differentiates a chess master from a chess novice is their ability to look at a board, evaluate it, and picture what different moves should come next. Moves in chess represent options for changing the board.
Since no game of chess is the same, like no design problem is the same, there’s no one set of moves that will always achieve victory. But at any given time, there are a set of possible moves that will impact how the game progresses. It’s essential for chess players to learn a set of possible moves AND how to evaluate and see the impact of any given move.
Bringing this back to design, “moves” let us separate the set of possible actions (design tools, techniques, methods, etc.) from a predefined process. Each of the possible “design moves” becomes a way of strategically exploring the problem space. In our class, these moves gave us a concrete and actionable language to encourage students to design their design work.
In chess, there are countless moves but at any given moment only a limited number of possible moves. There are even fewer that will move you towards your goal. Same in design work. The number of potential moves are nearly infinite, but the moves possible right now — and moves that would get you closer to your goal — are a much more limited set. Mastery is designing your design work. It’s knowing what moves to make to get you closer to checkmate.
Moves connect to abilities.
The concept of moves helped us develop an active and “explored” understanding of each design ability. Each class started with students exploring a move (i.e., build to think, interviewing, how might we’s, analogous exploration, know-think-feel synthesis, etc.). And ended with students “explaining” and co-constructing their meaning-making by articulating how each move relates to the design abilities (design abilities) and mapping it on to the Design Work class board.
Designing their design work with moves and abilities.
We set out to enable students to design their design work as a way to navigate ambiguity. To achieve this goal with our explore before explain pedagogy, students designed their own design (home)work. Each week students had to select and rationalize what design move would help them move forward towards solving a human-centered need in their problem space.
The Design Work class board allowed students to collaboratively map the design abilities as they explored and experienced them.
Freaking out? So were we at first and our students were frustrated with not being provided a clear rubric of what to do. But we trusted the pedagogy and- to our great relief- found that aligning design moves to design abilities helped students self-evaluate and decide which moves to use in their projects. This is the design version of the chess master.
Developing an embodied understanding.
Delightfully, students started to propose their own moves, not just the ones we had taught them in class. These new moves typically drew on their experiences in other d.school classes or methods from their disciplines.
Ultimately, our categorization scheme (i.e., “what design abilities does this move draw on?”) seemed to prompted deep self-explanation and embodied understanding in students. This allowed them to apply it to any move that they came across that practiced a design ability — thus crossing the line that once separated the design process from the techniques of other disciplines.
The Spring Design Thinking Studio Team (Tessa, Rich, and Colin)
