A book by the design software company Autodesk, called Imagine, Design, Create, provides what I believe is the most comprehensive definition of design:
“Even with all the dramatic changes being wrought by technology, design remains, and likely always will be, a fundamentally human endeavor, fueled by the insights, ideas, passions, and talents of people in pursuit of progress.”
Since the earliest developments of tools to do tasks more effectively than bare hands, to the development of machines in the industrial revolution, design is a way to answer or anticipate human needs.
One of the biggest changes over the last century has been this transition from answer to anticipate.
Our consumer society has created a demand for innovative consumer goods, but there is a growing pressure for these innovations to not just answer the today’s needs, but those of the future as well.
Over the last twenty years, since the rise of the internet era and the ability to research and compare different products, the bar has elevated.
It is no longer enough to be clever; now design must be thoughtful.
It must consider, anticipate, and analyze as never before, taking into account multiple viewpoints and human needs. It must factor in all the variables that can influence how a design will perform (or fail to do so) once it is exposed to real-world pressures — social, environmental, political, and economic — that are likely to come to bear now and down the road.
We are now beginning to expect good design to know the unknown, and understand what we need, though we may not realize we need it yet. We want design to do all this and, oh, by the way, make it all affordable, functional, scalable, sustainable, and of course, aesthetically beautiful.
A designer must be an interdisciplinary thinker, one who considers not just artistry, but technology, social changes, interaction, and consequences, both of the past and future.
Today, designers are instrumental in increasingly diverse industries. Given the scope of design’s impact there is a demand for designers who are highly skilled and able to balance a multitude of perspectives and needs.
So where do we find these designers — the ones who will design for the needs of the soon-to-be retiring Baby Boomers and Y-gens alike, who will anticipate ecological challenges, who will solve medical mysteries and save lives? They are right in the classroom. Their mothers and fathers may still be packing their lunches and taking them to [fill-in-the-blank] practices, lessons, rehearsals, or big games.
In designing for tomorrow, we also have to design a system that cultivates the rising generation of millennial children so that they can be these thoughtful, curious, interdisciplinary, problem-anticipating designers and thinkers.
These kids are our future and we have a responsibility to embrace change in order to set them up for success.
This brings me to the importance of design education in the primary and intermediate level. The current core curriculum focuses on learning facts about many classic subjects, but it does not teach how to solve problems.
Typical history classes will speak of the past, good ones will speak of current world problems, but what about history’s implications in the future?
As someone who has been working with children (ages 5-17) for nearly seven years, I’ve come to recognize new ways to implement psychology, logical processes, and sophisticated design approaches in and out of traditional classroom settings.
One approach influential to me in my early teens was the Design Thinking approach. I first utilized it in an internship where we collaborated in developing a mobile makerspace for students, and subsequently studied it more extensively in a Coursera course hosted by the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Though Design Thinking has gained wider recognition over the last five years in the Silicon Valley and entrepreneurial space, almost to a point of being considered an industry buzzword (oh no!), I firmly believe its lessons and processes can be translated to a child-friendly application.
Design Thinking is a growing method of approach that should be essential to the core of modern education. At a rudimentary level it entails a five-step cyclical process: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
One may feel at first that this process is limited to consumer design projects or architectural studies, but it is really about how people interact with objects, spaces, processes, and each other.
In this way, it can be applied to nearly all human interactions and should be taught at a simplified level to even the youngest of children.
Much funding goes towards teaching young children how to respond to hurt feelings or how to respectfully attain an end goal — all of these can be solved with the application of the Design Thinking process.
Over the last three years I have taught a class called ‘Game Design for iPhone & iPad’ with Digital Media Academy at Stanford University. The first few days of the five day (40 hour) class are structured around a ‘show and do’ method where I demonstrate and lead the construction of four simple games.
These games serve to introduce the interface of the software we’ll be using, some programming and math fundamentals (attributes, loops, functions, conditionals, timers, variables, and cartesian graphs with coordinates), my ‘How to Think Like a Programmer’ method, and some basic discussions about storytelling and designing for our users.
On the last two days I take off the kids’ training wheels and they are set free to design and pitch their own game idea.
I place a lot of emphasis on their pitch, and require them to revert back to the old-fashioned pen and paper method before rushing to their computers. I have four prompts for their pitch:
Though the kids don’t realize it, there is a good amount of Design Thinking being applied to these prompts, and we’ve been practicing the process which each preceding demo project.
By describing their ‘user’ and assessing the purpose and goals of their game, they are beginning to practice Empathy.
By listing all of their mechanics before starting to build on the computer, they are anticipating what their users may need - instructions, touch buttons, restart, pause, stop, play, etc. These are all part of the Define step, and the kids are reminded to look at what their user needs in order to have a positive experience with the game.
By drawing their scenes in simple shapes they are wireframing and applying the fundamentals of the Prototype step.
And by pitching the game to myself and a TA, and then asking classmates to try their game iteratively over the construction period, they are Testing their game with users in mind and using that feedback to refine their game further.
Though they don’t realize it yet, these kids are applying a sophisticated approach to problem-solving with each step.
For most of these kids, this is just one class, in one summer, and they will likely go years before encountering the Design Thinking approach again.
As an Instructor at a forward-thinking summer educational organization, I have the freedom to implement these methods in my curricula. However, many of the teachers these students will have when they go back to school in the fall will either not have that same freedom, not be aware of Design Thinking, or not know how to apply it to their subject or grade-level.
But why can’t we change that? Can we redesign how teachers teach on a broader level? What if students were experiencing the Design Thinking approach in different applications, across their classes in social studies, science, math, english, and beyond?
The new generation, if armed with this reactive and responsive thought process would be better prepared for everything from negotiating peace, designing for people, solving geopolitical conflicts, reconsidering urban planning, and even just getting along on the playground.
