Design your (educational) design work series #2: culture and belonging through the co-creation of an artifact

Early 20th century educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky was a bit of a scientific rebel. He argued, against the tide of popular scientific opinion at the time, that humans are not just a tight bundle of biological instincts. In fact, he proposed that we are shaped by our cultures and our social interactions! Nowadays this isn’t quite as radical, but we still call this idea out as sociocultural theory.

Ok, so people learn from other people. What does that mean for us as design educators?

For starters, it helps explain why design education can be so transformative. Since good design work is always a social endeavor, just getting students to work together on teams on design projects turns out to be pretty good pedagogy. But it doesn’t have to stop there. For Design Thinking Studio this spring, Tess, Rich, and I decided to lean in to Vygotsky’s research findings and incorporate social learning as a core part of the class.

Sounds pretty easy, right? But building a sense of belonging between students, to feel part of the group, is essential to social learning. And it’s not always easy to do. specially for new design students who are still growing their creative confidence.

So what to do? Modern education researchers suggest co-creation of a shared artifact.* Which is really just a fancy way of saying “get the students to make a thing together,” something that they own and build upon for the entire class. That’s why a key leg of our social learning strategy is the class’ Design Work Board (pictured above).

The class is built around teaching the students design techniques, which we call “moves” (like chess moves). These moves can be techniques like empathy interviewing, “how might we” questions, journey mapping, or paper prototyping. Every time our students learn a new design move they add it to the class’ Design Work Board, choose which design abilities it leverages, and connect it with washi tape.

The first week we helped them do it, but now the students have taken full ownership of the Board. It is 100% theirs, and they decide what goes on it, when, and where. Every week they self-facilitate the placement of the “move cards,” and have a lot of fun and robust discussions doing it. They’ve even tested out different decision making strategies, from direct democracy to “benevolent dictatorship.”

The Design Work Board’s primary purpose is to be a co-created artifact, supporting the students in forming a positive collective dynamic, but this particular artifact also has the benefit of prompting a process of self-explanation for individual students, as they are evaluating how different moves relate to different abilities. This process is an essential step for learners, if they’re going to connect new learnings (the new moves) to past ones (the design abilities).

Further, it also plays into the productive agency cycle — Marx’s (yes that Marx) theory that we build agency through seeing our work come to life. At the end of each class the students get to add to take what they’ve learned, add it to the Board, and feel a sense of satisfaction about it. That satisfaction inspires them to learn more, so they can continue adding to it.

We’ve gotten to observe the sense of camaraderie the Board is creating between the students, their processes of self-explanation, and the role the Board plays in a productive agency cycle. All in all, we think Vygotsky would be pretty happy.

* To read more about strategies for group work, check out: Elizabeth G. Cohen’s Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom.

Notes:

Lev Vygotsky, a Russian teacher, and psychologist is credited with first stating that we learn through interactions with our peers and teachers. Social learning theory explains how people can learn in different social contexts and how creating a more active learning community can positively impact a learner’s ability and help meet individual learner goals.