News and blog posts from our students and faculty

The second set of readings in our Theory class revolved around creativity, strategy and design, and how those three concepts are practiced in design education versus business management education.

In my position diagram I used the two extremes of Objective and Subjective approaches to education. Where Business Management education typically focuses on a strict system of how companies and organizations operate “most efficiently,” the practice of Design is much the opposite; relying on subjective insights, intuition and abductive reasoning.

What I try to develop in the linked slides below is what the strict school & practice of Business can learn from the rapidly evolving character of Design thinking.

Bringing Design thinking into the Business world, I believe can contribute to much more innovative and agile business models for a world that is more and more user driven.

Position Diagram Presentation Slides

There is a lot of suffering in human society, and plenty of well-intentioned efforts to alleviate that suffering. But sometimes, a key component goes missing from the problem-solving efforts-  personal well-being and grounded happiness. Social workers are familiar with this concept in the form of “self-care for the caregiver.” Social workers work to maintain their own self-care to ensure they are stable reference points for the often unstable clients they are helping. Like a gravitational field, social workers provide a reference point of stability that guides often wide-orbiting clients back in to a more balanced center.

In a similar way, all of the great social or spiritual leaders (e.g. the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa), radiate or radiated a calming and clear presence allowing those around them to feel that everything would be alright, even if it wasn’t at that moment, it would be someday. That calming presence allowed people to face extraordinarily difficult circumstances that otherwise would have stopped them. It gave them the encouragement to keep moving forward, keep trusting their intuition, and keep working past the fear and challenges into better possibilities. This is basic empowerment, but it’s worth reiterating. Without it, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the Indian Independence Movement, and countless others, would have stalled in discouragement, unrest and in-fighting.

It’s that supportive, “you’re going to be fine,” way of being with others, that many people tackling “wicked problems” forget to employ as the very foundational way in which they approach the world.  As leaders, when we radiate happiness and calm, we allow those around us to face their problems with a dose of that same attitude and then achieve greater success.

Since, ultimately, large-scale social problems are simply the mass collections of individual human challenges, problems can be addressed by shifting the mindsets of individuals into further empowerment. For example, environmental destruction can be seen as individuals’ inability to conceptualize environmental change and alter behavior accordingly, disease epidemics can be seen as many human bodies individually needing greater care, poverty can be seen as many individuals unable to free themselves from institutional power dynamics, and so on.  It is the pieces, happy or unhappy, empowered or victimized, that make the whole. So as designers approaching social change, it is us up to us to generate happiness as a means to allow others the encouragement to face their challenges and keep moving forward, knowing it will get better over time.

You can feel it in your own life- at times of overwhelm or unrest, taking action is more challenging. At times of joy and calm, taking action is satisfying and easy. The more we can surround individual humans, who are part of these wicked problems, with an atmosphere of appreciation, collaboration, and playfulness, the more we are able to find the threads of yarn within us, and within them, that ultimately unravel these dense, challenging problems.

So that’s my goal for the coming weeks- infuse all that I do, and all that I give, with joy. Realize that happiness, especially in abundance, is an improving force on the world. And each moment we are happy is a gift to the rest of the world. Here’s to being kind to each other as we do this work, and to helping as many individual others as possible (who in aggregate form these wicked problems), to achieve that state as well- in whatever forms they prefer.

There’s a particular process hump that design students inevitably encounter: that of quality. This comes after they have learned particular methods, and they realize that they can make a thing. If the student has been taught critique and self-reflection, they’ll also soon realize that their thing isn’t very good, because it’s the first iteration of the idea. Iteration one is a thinking artifact, not a presentation artifact, and for a new designer, the gulf between thinking and presentation is enormous. In the dialogue between maker and material, iteration one establishes boundaries around a problem space but it doesn’t actually solve the problem. That’s because the level of craftsmanship and finish of the artifact is directly related to the quality of the solution, and for all novice designers, their level of craftsmanship and finish is poor.

This learning moment is inevitable, because it’s a place where method and tacit skill collide. Simply, it’s easy to learn a method, because a method is – by definition – procedural. Just follow the steps, and you’ve applied the method. But tacit skill is neither easy nor procedural; it comes through practice over time.

Once a student has produced iteration one, the best thing they can do next is to produce iteration two. And for most students, this is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Because producing iteration one was so hard, and took so long, and the results are so obviously bad, the student sees only failure. And they give up.

I think, in my teaching experience, this is a critical fork in the road for learning design. Does the student persevere and practice? Does she “play her scales” or “wax the floor”? Or does she cut and run, internalizing various rationalizations for her poor work? I’ve heard “I’m just not meant to be that kind of designer” more often than I care to count, always at this phase in learning. And I’ve also seen students practice through it, giving up their social life, practically living in the studio, and establishing a sense of confidence both with skill and process.

The separation of method and execution is a learning practice, a pedagogical trick for students to learn both. But in practice, there’s no separation. Methodology integrates with craft-based execution over time to form expertise. Once a student has learned method and learned about execution, the rest relies on their passion to practice. There’s no real way to game this system; expertise comes from practice and experience. And that takes time, personal and professional sacrifice, and a disciplined maturity.

The simple truth is that, for a student that’s gotten to this magical moment in learning, they have only one path towards success: practice.

In our latest batch of readings for our theory class, I was particular interested in deconstructing a lecture from Charles Pierce. He is considered “the father of pragmatism.” Given that he is a philosopher and logician, his lecture, “The Three Cotary Positions,” is particularly thick, and I found difficult to parse: which made it a great candidate for using diagrams to make sense of it! This brought to mind another reading, “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking,” by Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. So in this diagram, I’ve woven together both concepts to describe a process and relationship between abductive inference, synthesis, hypothesis testing, and sensemaking.

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