FAITH IN HUMANITY RESTORED. THE FUTURE IS SHINY.

I had the absolute PLEASURE of meeting some of the smartest kids I’ve ever come across. Their willingness to ideate, their creativity, their involvement in creating an eco-friendly product, their movie, literature and music interests and finally their positive personality were the things I loved the most about the girls of the group Raquel and I leaded.

They were even outsmarting us not only by coming up with questions but answers at the same time when doing the Mouse Module exercise.

By the end of the project we had ideated “The EcoPouch” patent pending flat-pack design bag with a logo included. These girls went from realizing a problem (plastic bags) to ideating and prototyping the design (flat pack pouch), coming up with a marketing strategy by making a logo to convince everyone to use one, relegating Raquel and I to naming the object on the way and then themselves fixing the name we came up with since it didn’t work for the market.

It was a beautiful experience and I cannot wait until these children start to change things in the world. (And see them again soon.)

‘Owl’ Presentations

Hearing the different stories the students presented to us this week was a very interesting experience. We were testing the Meeting Owl 360 this time and the storyboard presentations happened virtually through it.

Firstly, the Meeting Owl is an interesting piece of technology. It did definitely allow us to have a virtual presentation session and it did feel like genuine, authentic experience. The only downside was that sometimes the children were out of view or their storyboards were too small for us to see on the screen. But these problems also exist in the real world when a child presents their work to a group. A unique side effect of using the Meeting Owl I thought was that it forced us to gather around the owl. The children were gathered around the owl (so that we could see them through the camera) and we were kind of also leaning towards the owl in our chairs so that we can all appear on the screen. The fact that we were gathering around an object called an ‘owl’ and it resembled an owl gave the experience a warm feeling in my opinion. This, coupled with my fascination with technology in general, counter-balanced any of the more practical issues I brought up before.

In terms of the ideas conveyed through the storyboards I felt that the students all took ownership of their stories/ideas when they started their presentation and that was really nice to see. But a few of them also seemed to lose their enthusiasm halfway the presentation possibly in reaction to the reaction they were receiving from us. When I felt a bit confused about their story, it was almost like they could sense that they were confusing us, which made them lose their initial enthusiasm. But I think this is when the audience-teachers could encourage them a little bit and nudge them towards an interesting point that they raised previously for example. I feel that if they can get over this small hurdle, they would really be unstoppable.

 

Stories as Systems

The storyboard/systems thinking exercise we did in class was also very interesting. When I prepared my storyboard for homework, I decided on the “what should my story teach children about?” first and then tried to come up with a story. The story revolved around species extinction and how humans can upset the ecosystem without even realising it. Not many people know that Passenger Pigeons, which used to be endemic to North America, are now extinct, or that they even existed. But an organisation named Revive & Restore is investing heavily into genetic research to bring back the birds. Their genetic engineering method involves introducing Passenger Pigeon genes to the birds’ closest living genetic neighbour – the Band-Tailed Pigeon – slowly over several successive generations to finally arrive at a very close genetic proximation to Passenger Pigeons.

Below is a storyboard that attempts to convey these different elements. I do think that the storyboard could be further adapted to a more traditional folk-style storytelling using imagery that also has folk aesthetic, with a touch of magic/science.

The class exercise we did involved analysing the system suggested by the storyboard yielding many interesting connections as to who sets the fire (see the storyboard above), who is/sends the visitor bird, and what’s in it for Revive & Restore if Passenger Pigeons were brought back? We separated the different elements of the story into different realms:

the real reality (a forest fire takes place, a visitor arrives, etc.),

the intermediary – used to describe how different events are connected to one another,

conspiracy realm where hidden connections may exist between events and characters that we may not be aware of (such as the visitor bird herself being a passenger pigeon spirit who wants to be revived and thus visiting the band-tailed pigeon at a moment of despair when the forest fire had just destroyed his home; or the Revive & Restore organisation setting the fire and sending the visitor bird as part of their master plan to bring back extinct species to make lots of money like how they do in Jurassic Park; and so on).

It was interesting to dissect the original story in this way and learn about the different layers as well add interesting layers to it. I’m looking forward to going through the LCCS students’ storyboards to see if there is a synergy between the story we developed in class.

I thought the visit to LCCS was so much fun. I underestimated how intelligent these students are based on their age. It was so inspiring to hear how much they know about climate change and their ways of dealing with the possible solution. I was very impressed by their vocabulary as well and really interested in how we’ll collaborate in the future. The group I worked with were very hyper but definitely knew what they were talking about. I can’t wait to bring creativity, awareness and solution with them!

 

On Feb.11, we went on a field trip and visited the Learning Community Charter School in New Jersey. I was excited about working with middle school students in the class, they are super smart and creative. We started with the “I wonder” questions, which they did for homework, then we narrowed them down to frame “how might we”questions. I also enjoyed the process of building quick prototypes with them, they surprised me with their talented ideas. They are so young and full of energy, I got many inspirations through their unique perspective. However, it was a bit hard for them to frame “HMW” questions at the beginning since they were not familiar with these design terms; they started brainstorming and throwing questions to each other, which is another excellent approach to frame questions.

Soo…! The visit to LCCS. It was a bit of a hike, visiting New Jersey first time in my life, seeing how a new state looks like at the other side of the river, even if passing across with PATH, you don’t get to see that much. It was very interesting to see how a middle school looks like in the US, as compared to the one I attended in Poland. The environment was certainly new and the introduction a bit too fast-paced. I have gone through the material that we registered on our class before (really strong material in regards to Design Thinking skills and the more technical alike) and to some degree I found it to be a bit varying, perhaps just too constraining (but in the end, that’s how I sort of always felt with design thinking techniques anyway)

1. What did you think of the visit?

The visit itself was grand, I am a big fan of field trips and especially changing the environments is good for anyone (can’t keep spending all my time at D12!). LCCS looks like a decent school, the environment was quite different compared to other schools that I have gone through and that I know at least from the conceptual viewpoint (I studied at a faculty centred around Architecture). Interestingly, the students seemed to be dedicating their extra time to this project as well but that’s just my observation. I had trouble following the rules however, especially the 10 Whys and the pace seemed a bit quite extreme. Or perhaps I’m just slow?

2. Was there anything you learned from the interactions with the LCCS Students?

I learned that taking a role of design facilitator does not quite work in terms of interacting with middle school students. Usually that’s what I would do, facilitate a co-design session, drive brainstorming sessions but being rather as a person who provides all the necessary utilities and the environment and try keeping to the guidelines and techniques and make sure as to not deter the people involved with the design thinking from their own thoughts or channel them in some way or influence in any form. That does not quite foster engagement from middle school students, where active participation seems to be just required. Although I wonder at which point does the line start to blur, after all, design thinking despite as an idea, supposed to facilitate coming up with new, refined and great ideas; at which point does it just turn to just play if not adhere to the rules?

3. Your general thoughts about collaborating and ideation with this population.

The students themselves vary greatly in terms of their personality and that is highly reflected in terms of their attitude and and performance. As a design facilitator I left the ideation on the students’ side, rather prompting them with questions in relation to what would they want to create? What inspires them and whether they know of anything they like or don’t like and how that could fit the whys (these were not exactly the questions I asked, these were more questions to make them think about the subject, from their own personal standpoint and so they could come up with their own solutions and share among themselves as to how they would like to prototype it). In such case, I can’t really comment on the collaboration part. I believe I received feedback in relation to the need to engage at a much more dynamic level, literally do all the activities along with the students in order to direct a pace and just keep things moving. Regardless, I liked the ideas that the students came up with and where they originated from, as the thinking process was elaborated on by the students. And the setting, creative part and all reminded me of my own childhood years of me being a kid, which was a kind reflection to have but that didn’t really prompt me to change the collaboration form. In the end at the time (during my childhood years), I kind of wanted to do whatever I wanted and so I gave the freedom to the students to do exactly just that. But at times, even at kids’ age, I guess some goals need to be drawn so that motivation is enkindled.

First Impressions

Last week’s visit to the Learning Community Charter School was without a doubt the highlight of the semester for me so far. I quickly realised that the group I had picked was made up of three highly energetic, enthusiastic boys full of ideas (literally full of ideas!).

When I asked them questions like “what do you want to fix in the world?”, the boys initially seemed unsure, hesitating to give an answer but then one of them said “the ocean”. What was interesting was that the other two boys both responded to this in agreement, nearly shouting “yes, the ocean!”.

When I asked them to try to be more specific about the problem and prompted them with the follow up question, “what about the ocean?”, they all pointed to the problem of waste.

We then followed this with “So, how will you start to tackle this issue? Where will you start?” This made their responses much more specific and one of the boys suggested that we should stop dumping waste into the ocean in the first place. I thought that this was a forward-thinking answer suggesting a more long-term solution to the problem than a quick fix up. Therefore, the focus of our exercises became “How to prevent more waste from entering the ocean?”

Iterations

For every iteration of this general idea, what was almost amusing to me is the fact that the boys each took turn leading the team. If one of the boys presented an idea genuinely as a solution and with enthusiasm, the other two always tended to support that with a “Yea, and we can add/do/make…”. But of course, oftentimes ideas that were presented only to emphasise a funny point yielded more jokes from the team. The boys obviously were good friends and most of the times behaved as one unit. In such a unit, it was easy to see an idea take shape, morph and evolve as the boys easily followed each other’s newer additions.

So, given this as a premise, I felt that the group only needed very few gentle nudges to arrive at the final idea that they presented: an incentivised method of reducing waste that goes into the ocean. Melting the plastic that would otherwise go into the ocean to make other things with was the first idea that the team came up with. When prompted with the question, “What should we make with the plastic?”, ‘a boat’ was the answer.

Embrace Technology?

An app was another one of the first ideas. The purpose of the app was to keep track of how much plastic a person was recycling and receive points for each piece. When asked what the points would be for, one of the twins answered, “When you collect a certain number of points, you win something”. Immediately after he said this, he seemed unsure about what that reward would be and trailed off. Previously he has mentioned about giving away the boat made out of recycled plastic, but this time it seemed that he did not want to just give it away to the person with the most points. From here onwards, the other two boys took over and the conversation started to change direction. But it was obvious that our boy who wanted to reward the person with the most points was still fixated on his idea, but just not sure how to express his idea in its entirety. The team also seemed to be well aware about fraud and how digital accounts are vulnerable to hacking. Their way of thinking revealed that they wanted to prevent any such things that may impact their product negatively by eliminating the possibility of such issues arising from the very beginning. I am not sure if they knew it, but they were designing an entire system – casually, while making lots of side jokes.

Systems Thinking

Eventually our system became one that operates in the same way to lotteries. The recycled boat is not simply given away but is given away as the ultimate prize to a lottery-style competition. For every certain number of plastic pieces that get recycled, the recycler receives a point that can be confirmed in their app. This means each recyclable plastic product will have a code on it that will be scanned at the ‘recycle bin’. For our presentation, we paper-prototyped the boat, the bin and the app.

The experience of interacting with these kids revealed to me that children are natural idea generators, and their interactions are the most fruitful when they make a team effort. Feeding off from one another, children make a unit and it appears that they are more effective if they are with their friends as friendly competition keeps the team moving forward!

Lastly, our team struggled a little bit to follow the actual structure of the class and the given instructions for each design exercise. The boys seemed more fixated on their current ideas and less willing to adapt their idea to the given design prompts. But I think that from the midst of the ensuing chaos, some partial follow through with their original ideas and some partial adaption to the exercise questions, our team came up with a very interesting idea.

For the third week, we visited LCCS and met our collaborators. From the short time we had together, it is already obvious that each middle schooler has a different personality and way of looking at things. While they were all cheerful and energetic, some of them were more creative while others were more down to earth. Although they were younger than us and sometimes gave very unrealistic ideas, they offered a different perspective on the issues we’ve been discussing. This could help us look at problems in a simpler way and find unique solutions that might have been obvious but overlooked. I am very excited to work with the children and help them bring their ideas to the public.

 

We traveled to see our colleagues in Jersey City yesterday. We would love to know what you thought of the whole experience. From the moment we met on Fifth Avenue to the PATH train to the taxi to LCCS. We were met by Tammy and she introduced us to the LCCS students and Kimberley Smith, their teacher. What did you think of the class, the goals, the ideas we discussed? What did you learn? What do you think the LCCS students learned? Be as detailed as you can be with these notes, we will need them at the end of the project. I will post your assignment for the 25th in an email announcement. Look for the PPT we used yesterday in the Files folder on Canvas. Looking forward to the next adventure!

While going through my notes, it is clear to me that the two most interesting points we discussed/touched on last week were the youth readiness skills, as highlighted by the UN, and the I wonder exercise we discussed about.

Upon doing some research on the readiness skills, I found the “Global Competence Model” which describes Internal Readiness Skills and External Readiness Skills.

Global Competence Model

Internal Readiness Skills start from the self, focusing on Self-Awareness, followed by attitudes which include Risk Taking, Open-Mindedness, and Attentiveness to Diversity.

External Readiness Skills include Global Awareness and Historical Perspective which may include hidden aspects that inform a person’s values and beliefs. This group also includes interpersonal skills that a person develops over their lifetime and reflects a person’s level of experience interacting with others. Intercultural Capability refers to the more pragmatic ability to apply cultural knowledge to personal interactions, to modify their behavior to show respect for different cultures, while Collaboration Across Cultures refers to the ability to work effectively in diverse teams.

More information at https://globallycompetent.com/global-competence-model/

I wonder, too…

The I wonder exercise in my opinion allows us to frame a problem/task in a way that really capitalizes on the creativity that young people (and old people!) are able to bring to the table when tackling global issues. When problems are seen through a less nuanced lense and with genuine curiosity and a healthy dose of naivety, sometimes a valuable discovery is made and/or insight is obtained.