Taking Design Thinking to School

How the Technology of Design Can Transform Teachers, Learners, and Classrooms

Shelley Goldman, Zaza Kabayadondo, Shelley Goldman, Zaza Kabayadondo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317327585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Design thinking is a method of problem-solving that relies on a complex set of skills, processes and mindsets that help people generate novel solutions to problems. Taking Design Thinking to School: How the Technology of Design Can Transform Teachers, Learners, and Classrooms uses an action-oriented approach to reframing K-12 teaching and learning, examining interventions that open up dialogue about when and where learning, growth, and empowerment can be triggered. While design thinking projects make engineering, design, and technology fluency more tangible and personal for a broad range of young learners, their embrace of ambiguity and failure as growth opportunities often clash with institutional values and structures. Through a series of in-depth case studies that honor and explore such tensions, the authors demonstrate that design thinking provides students with the agency and compassion that is necessary for doing creative and collaborative work, both in and out of the classroom. A vital resource for education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, Taking Design Thinking to School brings together some of the most innovative work in design pedagogy.

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TAKING DESIGN THINKING TO SCHOOL

How the Technology of Design Can Transform Teachers, Learners, and Classrooms

Shelley Goldman and Zaza Kabayadondo

Design Thinking in the World and in School

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a method of problem-solving that relies on a complex of skills, processes, and mindsets that help people generate novel solutions to problems. Design thinking can result in new objects, ideas, narratives, or systems. The excitement over design thinking lies in the proposition that anyone can learn to do it. The democratic promise of design thinking is that once design thinking has been mastered anyone can go about redesigning the systems, infrastructures, and organizations that shape our lives.

Design thinking has been visualized in many ways; most involve a user-centered, empathy-driven approach aimed at creating solutions through gaining insight into people’s needs. Design thinking also involves creating conceptual (and sometimes working) prototypes that get improved through feedback and testing with stakeholders. Learning with design thinking often starts with the method. The aim is to move beyond merely going through the steps of the process and to develop mindset change experiences such as empathy development, participation in “team collaborations,” commitment to action-oriented problem-solving, a sense of efficacy, and understanding that failure and persistence to try again after failures are necessary and productive aspects of success. As a technology, design thinking is meant to lead to insights that shift design thinkers’ perspectives and actions while problem-solving. Design thinking involves empathizing with end-user(s), learning to work collaboratively, and employing hands, minds, and intuitions in ways that drive creative problem-solving. Design thinking has been visualized in many ways: some visualizations emphasize the order of design process by instructing designers to start with empathy, then define the problem from a fresh perspective, then actively generate ideas (ideate). Next, designers must convert the ideas into questions that are embodied in physical artifacts (prototypes). Finally, designers answer the questions embedded in those prototypes (which can be products, services, experiences, narratives, or systems) by testing the prototypes with other people before finally cycling back to empathy. These five stages of action or modes of thinking—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—constitute the design thinking process. Once a learner becomes proficient in design thinking they no longer need to rely on cycling through the steps one after the other—they start to appreciate and fully exploit the fluidity of the design process.

The user-centered, empathy mandate of design thinking refers to many methods of capturing, observing, engaging with, and immersing oneself in the livelihoods of others. The empathy mandate not only puts the “human” in human-centered design; it also asserts that complex problems are not only technical in nature but have an equally complex social and real-world dimension. Design thinking is a technology that brings to life new kinds of inquiry for teachers, learners, and classrooms. In this volume we will explore how taking design thinking to school brings back into focus John Dewey’s vision of schooling as a transformative space for creative and collaborative inquiry.

A Short History of Design Thinking With an Eye to the Ideas of John Dewey

The first reference we were able to find to design thinking was as early as 1935 in a discussion about how the incorporation of electrical motors would alter the manufacturing industry (Dennis & Thomas, 1935). As Dennis and Thomas write, “Instances of skillful design thinking in the well-integrated handling of principles, materials, and appearance and style factors are evident in every branch of electrical manufacturing” (1935, p. 25). The authors refer to design thinking as a seamless building of a new component (electrical elements) into an old machine to create an electrically motorized machine with numerous new applications. In this early instance, design thinking is a reference to deftness in “harnessing” engineering principles and aesthetics to build a new age of machinery out of traditional materials.

The phrase gained more currency in the 1940s when industrial manufacturing journals were more prominent. Design thinking began to indicate a state-of-the-art use of engineering to create motors, as seen in an advertisement from a 1944 magazine Motor Boating:

While the sketch above shows no specific controls, it indicates today’s design thinking for one type of post-war craft on which BENDIX CONTROLS can function for your added boating pleasure.

(1944, p. 133)

The usage hinted at a masterful and complex level of thinking that was simply evident in the finished products and tools. This usage continued throughout the 1950s, as in the periodical Electronic Design:

Undoubtedly a lot of excellent design thinking is being embodied in these devices. Because of the nature of the projects however, these design ideas are part of the working knowledge of a relatively small number of engineers.

(1955, p. 4)

Other early uses of design thinking point to the evolution of an idea into a product that can be observed in the methods that designers strategically employ. In 1957 the American Ceramic Society Bulletin issued a manifest on how designers could learn good design thinking. They emphasized the need to carry design thinking from the conception of an idea all the way to the production line into “design action” (1957). By 1965 L. Bruce Archer had started to emphasize the cognitive and multidisciplinary aspects of design practice as rationale for developing a methodology and curriculum for design. Archer (1965) called for a methodological approach to training designers who had to find ways to incorporate knowledge from ergonomics, cybernetics, marketing, and management science into design thinking.

From this early history, we can see design thinking invoked as a cognitive process that is evident in the finished product. Design thinking started to influence the study of how people think (cognitive science) and learn (the learning sciences). Unlike the manufacturing and design journals of the mid-twentieth century, the research on design in the 1980s and 1990s sought to shine light on those cognitive processes that were hidden behind designed products. After two decades in which the concept of design thinking was progressively developed in the arts and professional design sectors, more cognitive scientists and learning scientists started to pay attention to what design thinking could mean for general education. Learning scientists were focused on the background thinking and talking and acting that is necessary for designing or building prototypes, what is referred to as “cognitive residue” (Pea, 1993) or “reified ideas in solid medium” (credited to D’Andrade as used in Cole & Engeström, 1993); they suggested that this leftover thinking material was what humans accessed when they used tools. This understanding of the relationship between designed tools and cognitive function built on the work of Lev Vygostky that emphasized the ways tools mediate between a subject and object (see Vygotsky’s introduction of the meditational triangle, 1978). Bamberger and Schön (1983) describe the ability of designed things to “hold” meanings as a “reflective conversation with materials.” Learning scientists such as Edwin Hutchins later saw the connection between human thinking and the tools designed to ease computation as a “cognitive ecology”—a system of interconnected and interdependent elements that enables humans to perform more sophisticated actions and engage in inquiry.

Building on Dewey’s theory of inquiry, Schön set an agenda “to develop the idea of reflective practice, in the spirit of Deweyean inquiry that seeks to integrate thought and action, theory and practice, the academy and the everyday world, but also in the spirit of a constructivist approach to the variety of ways in which we construct the reality of problematic situations” (Schön, 1992, p. 123). We return to Dewey later in this introduction and focus on Schön here because his ideas also inspired research on the relationship between design and learning. The connections between Dewey’s and Schön’s thinking are often overlooked but Schön clearly set out to emphasize Dewey’s influence on his own work. Schön (1992) was interested in designing and discovering as examples of knowing-in-action (knowledge put into action), and he likened the process of designing something to a reflective conversation with its constituent materials and also with oneself. As Schön writes,

When a designer reflects on the strategies and assumptions that underlie her choices, daring to disrupt them, she may learn critically important things about herself. Mimi, for example, might learn, by reflecting on her work, how she had confined herself unawares to a particularly narrow and untested conception of the task at hand. U-Chin, considering his uses of materials in relation to Rex’s, might become aware of possibilities for expanding his vision of the technical universe. These are ways in which designing includes, or stimulates, learning. It is also fruitful, however, to think of learning-in the mode of puzzle or problem-solving as a kind of designing.

(1992, p. 132)

In the above excerpt about three designers, Mimi, U-Chin, and Rex, Schön draws parallels between learning and designing. Schön’s designers were working through complex, ambiguous, uncertain, or wicked problems, a term popularized by Rittel and Webber (1973) to give a new language to the kind of problem-solving design thinkers were engaging in. While Schön credited Herbert Simon for his 1970s support for the need for a science of design, he was, like Dewey, more interested in how designers resolved constraints and how they engaged with wicked problems as a means of developing knowledge-in-action.

Later, Buchanan brought together the connections between design thinking, wicked problems, and Dewey’s theory of inquiry in his 1992 article. Buchanan offered a definition of technology that is useful for understanding the role design thinking will play in transforming our shared human culture and in helping our students become responsible agents of that change. As Buchanan writes,

What Dewey defines as technology is not what is commonly understood in today’s philosophy of technology. Instead of meaning knowledge of how to make and use artifacts or the artifacts themselves, technology for Dewey is an art of experimental thinking.

(p. 13)

Buchanan went on to demonstrate how design thinking, a process for tackling wicked problems, could be seen as the antithesis of siloed disciplinary thinking. For Buchanan, design thinking is “a common discipline” (p. 21) that has emerged to connect and integrate useful knowledge from the arts and sciences. As Buchanan writes, “Designers, are exploring concrete integrations of knowledge that will combine theory with practice for new productive purposes, and this is the reason why we turn to design thinking” (p. 6).

More recently, David Kelley and Tom Kelley (Kelley & Kelley, 2013) and others at IDEO and Stanford University have been influential in popularizing design thinking as a method to be learned outside of professional design fields for innovating in businesses, university education, and organizations. They take the very democratizing idea that anyone can become a design thinker. We agree, and work closely with the school of design thinking taught at Stanford University.¹ We view this technology—design thinking—as one that provides the agency, the aplomb, the catalysis, and the compassion for others that can transform our schools.

What does design thinking look like in action?

One Monday morning, three collaborative design teams are presented with a design challenge to transform the meaning of patient comfort for seriously ill patients. Forty-eight hours later all three teams show their life-size prototypes to their clients. One client, a cancer survivor, is shown a new concept for a chemotherapy center that accommodates patients, relatives and friends, and includes a smoothie bar and lessons about cooking for the long waits during chemo. Another client, a son who took care of his ailing father, gets to try out a portable shower equipped with wheelchair access, heated floors and towels that could have helped his father stay extra warm. The third client, a hospice caretaker for cancer patients, is presented a hospital room with a high tech wall for video-call messaging, slide shows of family, and a touch-screen patient-readable medical chart and treatment schedule. All three clients are touched by the brilliance of the prototypes, delighted that their concerns as patients and caretakers were listened to so closely, and grateful for how connected the ideas were to their needs. They wanted these ideas to be implemented and thought many others would benefit from them.

These design solutions were not the products of professional medical designers. They were prototypes designed by three teams of ninth-grade students who were brought together for an intensive design challenge over a three-day period.

The students were guided by teacher-coaches using a design thinking process that centered on the students creating designs based on empathy they developed for their clients and their unmet comfort experiences as patients or patient caregivers. For the students, different connections were made with peers and topics of interest—the challenge built confidence. When the teams demonstrated their designs, all that were present recognized the students’ contributions—many wept. One principal implored the students to start work with him immediately to “design our school so that students would not want to drop out.” Within a week, the newly minted, ninth-grade design thinkers were also asked to train as design thinking coaches for younger students.

What does this example have to do with making education stay relevant to 21st-century demands for productive family members, citizens, and workers who can solve the world’s problems? The patient comfort challenge shared elements related to design and innovation pedagogies, and those approaches approximate many of the skills that are thought to be essential for next generations of educated adults. The challenge was characterized by deep and critical thinking, active and collaborative learning, relevancy to in-the-world problem-solving, the production of knowledge and products, the use of design practices, and an orientation to creativity and innovation. Teachers and students engaged in hands-on design challenges for real patients that focused on developing empathy, promoting a bias toward action, encouraging ideation, and developing metacognitive awareness (Goldman et al., 2012; Carroll et al., 2012; Carroll et al., 2010). Design thinking involves a focus on acting creatively, thinking critically, communicating widely, collaborating, and exercising meta-cognitive competencies. Design thinking is a reflexive practice and learners often invent something new while reframing and bolstering their own agency in the world. In this volume we use the term design thinking as an umbrella term to help us describe these approaches, their variations, and their impacts in both K-12 research and practice. Design thinking pedagogies are complex in their aims, actions, and outcomes. They are about teaching and learning concepts, processes, and dispositions for guiding thought and problem-solving.

Design thinking is especially aimed at generating solutions to undefined and “sticky” problems. Nigel Cross (2005) and others suggest that design pedagogies can be difficult to teach. Cross writes that they are “ill-defined, ill-structured, or ‘wicked’” (recall Rittel & Webber, 1973). They are not the same as the “puzzles” that scientists, mathematicians, and other scholars set themselves. They are not problems for which all the necessary information is, or ever can be, available to the problem solver. They are therefore not susceptible to exhaustive analysis, and there can never be a guarantee that “correct” solutions can be found for them. In this context a solution-focused strategy is clearly preferable to a problem-focused one: it will always be possible to go on analyzing “the problem,” but the designer’s task is to produce “the solution.”

Design thinking encompasses activ...