1. What did you learn about what we are doing in this studio for the semester? Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?

This semester we are partnering with several nonprofits/organizations to carry out a project centered around educational technology and co-design. Specifically, we will be collaborating with students from the New Jersey based Learning Community Charter School to design experiences/projects that will be showcased during Parsons Play Tech on the 13 April and Earth Day on the 20 April. The possible topic/theme we will be exploring is The Hudson River ecology as one of the project partners is the NY/NJ Baykeeper organization. During this co-design process, we (including students from LCCS) will be teaching and learning from each other using innovative tools such as the Rumii, the virtual classroom platform, and Mouse Create, an online educational platform by a nonprofit dedicated to making technology education accessible to children.

Personally, I am fascinated by the fact that learning and teaching is increasingly moving into a digital, or virtual, space. This is opening up opportunities for learning in under-served areas around the world but it also presents unique challenges of its own around internet connectivity, device availability etc. The opportunity to experiment with both Rumii and Mouse Create is very exciting and I can see this experience later informing my work in the nonprofit sector. There are definitely many questions I would like to try to answer through this class in relation to where best designers today should invest in if education is where they would like to contribute to. Additionally, working with real-world stakeholders – the students, the school, those creating new educational technologies, and a community partner – is going to be an invaluable experience for any designer who wishes to act as a bridge between disciplines and stakeholders. I’m excited by this challenge.

2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?

I think originally ‘design thinking’ was referring very much to the unique thought process of designers that is reflected in their making; hence the ‘thinking’ in the phrase? It consists of initial surveying (research) of the problem/focus area, iterations of possible improvements/changes, with evaluations of each iteration. But more recent uses of the phrase seems to have a more action-focused explanation – that you’ve got to start making something even if you cannot foresee a perfect solution no matter how much you think everything through beforehand. At the core of the phrase, though, is the idea of breaking down a problem into smaller pieces (part systems thinking as explained in Thinking in Systems: A Primer) that can be easily ‘processed’ and ‘digested’. It is generally encouraged in many problem-solving contexts because together the smaller components make up more than just their sum (e.g. an effective solution!).

I think the ‘design’ part of the term is interesting because although the iterative process described above is present in other disciplines – say, engineering – perhaps it is called a ‘design thinking’ process, as opposed to an ‘engineering thinking’ process, because in design there is more room for mistakes and failures. As well, designers know that they cannot know everything, and cannot have all relevant data before they make a decision. Part of the task of being a designer is to follow their intuition, and part of design thinking is also about making the whole, and then analyzing its impact on the world to learn from it, before fully understanding, or knowing, what the smaller components do/should be. In effect, it’s a forward thinking process that enables you to get unstuck from an unfamiliar and ambiguous situation.