Design thinking has become a popular concept for business leaders to study, and many have written on its potential influence on business strategy. My current graphic design work is taking me into studying a less-known combination—design thinking applied to education. Designing deals with open-ended, contextual problems, and requires thinking abilities far beyond rote memorization. The twenty-first century labor market requires similar competencies in problem-solving, decision-making, knowing how to learn, self-management, and other skills typically fostered by design thinking. This list of competencies comes from the U.S. Department of Labor’s 1992 SCANS (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) study, and it has informed a large part of my research thus far.

Under the tutelage of Meredith Davis, I conducted a first phase of research where I studied the resources currently available for social studies curricula in American middle schools (particularly in North Carolina).

The poster here came out of that research and focuses on a matrix of resources which were generated from teacher interviews and journal articles. The matrix sets up an analysis of the resources list as measured against the foundational skills determined by the U.S. Department of Labor study. The fifteen skills, categorized as Basic, Thinking, and Personal, are the qualities that graduates of U.S. schools must have to support the labor market in meaningful ways.

The matrix shows my estimation of how the available resources stack up against these skills. I found that the most available and most heavily-relied upon resources support only a small portion of the skills. Reading and writing, both considered Basic Skills, are encouraged by almost every tool available, while Thinking Skills have less support. “Knowing how to learn,” “reasoning,” and “making decisions”, for example, are rarely supported, although “seeing things in the mind’s eye” is required quite often.

The Personal Qualities, especially “individual responsibility,” “sociability,” and “integrity,” have the closest connection with the social studies mission (to develop students’ ability to make informed, reasoned decisions for the public good in an interdependent world). These skills most often see development through new media tools such as social networking websites, which can be used for students to collaborate across the globe. On the matrix this translates to a higher density of marks in the “Personal Qualities” columns where these resources are concentrated at the bottom of the list.

Experts like communications media specialist Howard Rheingold stress participatory media’s importance to civic education. But unfortunately, the resources that best encourage development of Personal Qualities are not often utilized or available.

One teacher I talked with spoke of administration’s pressure on younger teachers to keep a very structured classroom, although participatory media tools naturally lead to unstructured work. A school principal roaming the halls, for instance, tends to assume students are making mischief if they are seen congregating around a computer instead of quietly reading alone. Many restrictions against technology—ipods, cell phones, etc.—keep administration in defense mode against these “distractions,” instead of proactively seeking ways to educate with them.

My next research steps will be toward seeing how technology, within a collaborative relationship between students and teachers, can help promote design thinking in learning—particularly in asking critical questions.

Further reading:
National Council for the Social Studies, on Media Literacy

And by popular demand: Poster pdf

I had already known that I loved teaching, but this really confirmed it. The students were so talented and did some amazing work that I was really proud of. They were so willing to learn and to work hard.

What probably made the biggest impact on me, after having sat for so many years in the students’ seats and now having the tables turned, was how clearly I could see the value in the “leap of faith” step in creative work. Each student had a day to complete their project (we had a total of 80 students over the course of the week, 16 of them at a time), so that part of the process was necessary for all of them, if only for time’s sake. I saw a number of them who tended toward the same hesitant and perfectionist tendencies as I do, and had to encourage them to lay their concerns aside and just make. There would be little value in spending all their time searching magazine pages for the “perfect” element for a collage (perhaps the equivalent of searching endless pages of the internet for the perfect idea?). Gary and I had done the project ourselves with the same time constraints, so we knew how much there was to do in so little time. I remembered that feeling of having to jump in feet first (rapid prototype style), just following your gut and seeing where your tiny seed of an idea could take you. I told some of the kids that it was like Alice in Wonderland—you had to just follow that white rabbit down the hole and see where it led. There was literally no time to sit and ponder the “rabbit” and speculate about where the “hole” went to. I had to take this approach for my version of the project, and the students would have to also.

I’m really glad now for being able to experience that alternate perspective. To know, very intimately from my own experiences, the anxiety the students felt, but being able to see beyond it and lead the students past it. Part of the joy in that was from the outcome, that so many of them did excellent work as a result of being pushed, but for me it had even more meaningful implications for my own design work. I can see a little more clearly the faults and time-wasting practices in my own process. And now I have an idea of what’s needed to push through my own fears and hesitancies toward making better work. Just follow that little white rabbit… take that leap of faith, plant that tiny mustard seed… and see what happens. 90% of the time it will be something really good.

I don’t actually write very linear-ly. My thoughts are scattered all over the place. I have to spew them all out, trying to group them a little and make some order here and there, until a pattern starts to emerge, or a theme, or something significant I can hang my hat on… or just write substantially about.

So maybe we don’t necessarily think in a linear fashion. One thought connects to another, leads to something totally different from another weird association, is interrupted by something else from outside… Maybe our minds are more rhizomatic than I give them credit for. The world outside us is that way too, but we live our lives being exposed only to parts of it at a time. Time is what forces us into a linear mindset. Reading happens over time; writing assumes that the reader moves over your words in time…

My crazy scattershot thoughts that eventually are crafted into a piece of writing have to be edited into something linear for another person to be able to make sense of them. Writing is editing. Maybe design is editing, in a similar way. You have to put all sorts of crazy stuff out there and then edit it all down to something that would work for what you’re trying to do. Just a thought.

She told a student thinking of starting over on a project (switching from a current direction to another one the student had thought of at the beginning)—just because you hit an impasse on this one doesn’t mean you should abandon it, because you’ll hit an impasse on that other one too.

It occurred to me that systems design means working through the kinks and impasses that inevitably develop, figuring out how the system will address anomalies and exceptions to rules. (Type design being the system of rules of how ascenders/descenders are dealt with, what rules do all of the letterforms within this font follow? etc.) Seems pretty obvious now that I say it, but I hadn’t really thought of typeface design as being a form of systems design.

“Significant aesthetic debates have been superseded by consensus: not a fight over which style but agreement on all styles. The bedrock principle of pluralism asks not in what style we should design, but rather says that we design stylishly. A plethora of these benign styles exists to mix and match according to the logic of the marketplace. Once style was a defining gesture, unapologetically ideological, and a signal that differentiated and codified its subject. Today style has been reduced to a choice, not a matter of conviction but one of convenience.” Andrew Blauvelt, “Towards Critical Autonomy, or Can Graphic Design Save Itself?” Emigre, 2003.

(For those outside this program, this is a post of work in progress on a series of static one-sheets that express a point of view about a design strategy relative to the rhetoric of authenticity–our symposium topic.)

After feedback from the last critique, I decided take my visuals away from being so closely tied to historic design styles. This is the iteration I had presented then (here is what it is based on: Depero’s Futurist manifesto).

For a second time around, I made posters whose colors and message, over the series, converge further into homogenization through the blending of their subtractive colors. I want to show the designer’s voice getting lost, overriden, by the practice of picking among design styles with the convenience we are able to today. While postmodern design has emphasized personal expression, appropriation and easy access to new design work has led to a homogenization of (exhibit A: corporate branding) and even neutrality in design. (Ironic: how far have we really gotten from modernism?) Should the designer’s voice become more apparent? And if so, can it become that without some level of subjectivity, or conviction?

For an alternate version of these posters, I incorporated some postmodern disintegration.

I’m still wrestling over the best way to explore this concept visually. Dan mentioned looking for an analogy as a means of getting into the subject matter, which I thought was an intriguing approach. I’m starting to think of analogies involving convenience stores and the like…

I’ll admit that during my first attempt, the “prototype,” I could make neither heads nor tails of the project goals. I hadn’t fully digested the reading yet (Have I by now? Good question…) and wasn’t finding much help there. So I designed a starter idea, a mini-site to initiate my antiques resellers’ online community into taking better photos for auctioning antiques online.

As it turns out, this was a good example of problem-solving-oriented design, which graphic designers are trained to do, and which most designers practice. And which we’re not doing in this program.

As I told Denise, I’m still crossing the bridge from problem-solving land into the larger world of design that looks at issues and raises questions. In problem-solving and solution-oriented design, the questions are generally supposed to be answered: a logo that solves a business’ need for a more updated image…  a website that provides a store’s customers with more convenient shopping possibilities… etc. Those things have a place, but miss the point in the type of work we’re doing. What does it really mean for the business to have an “updated image”? Why do the store’s customers value convenience? We’re creating designs that look to raise bigger questions, that provoke discussion.

So for the final round of this project, I took the seeds of some of the ideas I was dabbling with in the first prototype and explored them further.

1. The visual representation of antique objects plays an important role in the discourse of my chosen community. Members upload large photo collections to share with others the objects they are selling, buying, collecting, or just have a fondness for. Those photos become the centerpieces of their discussions. I wanted to create something that looked more closely at members’ attachment to these objects, as represented in visual form.

2. Part of me wanted to completely revise their homespun photography methods, as evidenced in the “how to take better photos” prototype. And the other part of me fought that desire, wanting to avoid a top-down “education” with a high-design veneer forced onto an unwilling community.

3. I wanted to retain aspects of the community’s visual language (and visual conventions… and visual rhetoric… some of our catchphrases). Visually, antiques resellers tend to speak in ways that project their appreciation for personality, character, quirkiness (evidenced by the typography in their store signage, which often uses multiple exaggerated “period”-looking typefaces). They are also very comfortable with what, to outsiders, may look like clutter. Their stores are filled with unique items from a range of cultures and historic periods, objects of many sizes, colors, and uses. This expression of a love for collecting and diversity seems to reflect in their visual vernacular, as the community website is just as much an amalgamation of familiar and foreign, small and large, old and new–a hodgepodge–as their stores are.

I had the idea to give community members a viewfinder–a simple paper tool, a card with a shape cut out of the middle–which artists and art students use to frame the objects they are studying to depict. Viewfinders help to give them a different perspective, to see something in a way they may not have thought to look at it otherwise. This would be an initiation into a new way of looking at objects–into artist’s perspective. After experimenting with some viewfinder models, I decided that I wanted to incorporate layering in my design, as a metaphoric way to point to the amalgam language the antiques community is used to.

I started with a very simple rectangular viewfinder, and took photos showing it framing different antique objects. At first, I wanted to bind all the photos into a book, but decided that presenting them loosely, as cards, would help to reinforce the layering idea. The photos themselves also became layered, as I arranged them on cards in collages. The stack of cards started with a brief explanation (with a nod to personality-filled type choices), followed by a viewfinder card, then a single photo of an object the way it might “normally” be seen, then a card with a collage of viewfinder photos of the object. More cards followed, showing objects and their viewfinder collages, and ended with a set of viewfinders in different shapes.

I grappled with both being “stuck” on the photography medium (trying to purge myself of the problem-solving mindset of my prototype), and presenting the initiation in steps, over time. Photography was hard to get away from, in the end, since it was such a large part of how the antiques community speaks to each other–but I tried to avoid being too prescriptive with it. And in class we talked about how initiations should be immersive, transformative, and should happen over time. This is why I chose the book format, to guide users to move through a set of steps (the book was unbound but kept the same effect), and why I used a repetition of seven antique objects, each followed by its own viewfinder collage.

The critique raised interesting points, such as how the photo presentation could be taken a step further by next showing images without the viewfinder–what these new views could look like in themselves. And how the images could have explored perspectives like that of a person who is actually sitting in the antique chair. This made me think about the correlation between the collages and cubism, in the ideas of exploring new perspectives.

We talked in critique about how opting not to “ape” a community’s visual rhetoric actually leads the designer to take a particular new stance within their discourse. In a way, I think that trying to introduce something new into a community’s rhetoric makes the choice to design “from the top down” almost inevitable. I had wanted to avoid that way of designing, but in introducing a new visual rhetoric (which I saw as the modernist, streamlined, artistically de-cluttered language of my card set), I created something that my community would recognize as coming from outside their circle. This is an issue that probably all designers working with communities will face: is it better to innovate and bring something new to the table, or to speak steadfastly within the boundaries of the community’s defined conventions? Perhaps it depends on the purpose, and the community.

If we are designers, and almost by definition creating new things in our work, we will always be introducing new rhetoric to communities though, right? This project really gave me an appreciation for how incredibly complex a community’s visual language is. For instance, diligently parceling my initiation into steps, to occur over time, forced me further from the community’s amalgam language. My rhetorical stance became simplification, which stood diametrically opposed to their “hodgepodge” language. I wouldn’t want to tell them that their current language is wrong… but is that what my design implies? I hoped to introduce something new–a new way of seeing–that could be added to their arsenal of ways to appreciate their belongings. But looking so different, and coming from the outside, I suppose, itself implies judgment.

Like Denise pointed out in class, taking a particular stance by using a different rhetoric is like the dialogue you have when you say “I could design that better.” So what exactly do we mean by that?

Another of our readings, which seemed to play a large part in my thought process during this time, was an interview with Bill Gaver. I found his discussion about culture probes working to help discover a picture of people’s lives, as opposed to hard facts and information, pretty fascinating. Ambiguity and uncertainty become no longer weaknesses, but assets.

It’s a picture that is fragmented, and often impossible to interpret with any confidence. That is crucial to the approach. Taken the right way, that uncertainty becomes a license to imagine and over-interpret, to tell stories that can lead to designs.

With this as inspiration, I set off to design a culture probe, which would theoretically be placed in the coffee shop Global Village. At first I generated some simple ideas involving tracking foot patterns and people drawing on their tables (in the spirit of the 1000 Journals project). Then, after a conversation with Denise about ritual, I started thinking about how interference with a person’s ritual could tell you more about it. If ritual involves a measure of emotional attachment, how will a person react if their routine is interrupted?

One of my observations from the shop included a young woman who was there to study. I found it interesting to watch her preparations for the process of studying, and wondered if this could be a ritual. It was most likely procrastination–getting coffee, then getting up again to get food, checking the cell phone, fiddling with the ipod–all before settling down to work. But wouldn’t people have a sort of attachment to that procrastination? Perhaps it is a ritual for some, and not for others.

So I wanted to create a table that would interfere with someone’s ritual somehow–perhaps the ritual of studying, and/or procrastinating. My idea was for a table made with thermochromatic material (what mood rings are made from), which would respond to changes in temperature. How would a person sitting at this table react when they discovered that it would respond to them? Would they play with it and enjoy it, or ignore it, run from it?

In revisions I added journal gifts for users of the table, to be displayed at the ordering counter, which would direct them to use this table for studying (in exchange for allowing us to videotape them–the method of retrieving feedback). I wanted to lead people into the mindset of studying, and then see how they would respond to a table that would distract them. Perhaps some people have a routine of procrastinating which would easily incorporate a playful piece of furniture. Perhaps some would ignore it and go on with their study ritual. Perhaps others would invite friends to interact with the table and create a new social ritual.

Although I struggled with it some (with that whole “ambiguity” thing), at the end I decided that I’d really enjoyed the culture probe project. It’s exactly the sort of thing I imagined myself doing in grad school. I imagined myself using design to solve problems, but more than that, using it to venture out into the unknown and discover new things, in the style of good old-fashioned research. I’d like to push the bounds of what design can be used for, and not in the typical sense of pushing artistic boundaries, as designers in the professional world speak of. Not just what can be more “cool,” but what can be more useful, more illuminating, more educative?