Written by: Jean-Claude Aura
It’s a Descriptive Entity Specifically Intended to Generate Niceness. Dad, what is design?
Design A potential customer is window shopping when a T-shirt draws their attention. You think they’ll buy it because it looks nice, right? Wrong! They realize they still need to check the material to make sure it feels soft. They try it on and find out that it’s a perfect fit, so they get ready to pay, right? Well, not quite right … The seller’s just warned them that it has to be washed alone as the color may come off and ruin other clothing items. So, what’s their call? There’s more to design than meets the eye. As a designer, you may think that appearance is everything. As true as this may sound, looks form only one part of an object’s appeal. Looks belong to a set of characteristics that, when combined, render an item well designed. Let’s consider the example of the T-shirt above. As a designer, you first need to decide who’s going to wear it; that’s the audience. With this in mind, you select the material to use: cotton, polyester, or a combination of both; that’s the form. Will you give it a cartoonish look or a serious one? That’s the idiom. Will it be long or short? Loose or tight? Round neck or V neck? Will you stick letters and badges? That’s the structure. Will it feel soft or rough? Will the color come off easily? Will it need ironing? Now you’re crafting your T-shirt. Finally, you’ll need to give it a
final touch, like an enmeshed frill, a shiny texture, glittering specks, anything that makes it different from the rest of the T-shirts; you’re handling the surface. And before mass producing it, don’t forget to have people wear it and get their feedback. After all, you don’t want to end up with thousands of unsellable T-shirts. That’s what we call user testing. Lucky the star!
audience
form
Lucky the star!
craft and surface
idiom
structure
Lucky the star!
user testing
Design is a set of combined actions with a specific purpose. Design goes beyond catering for beauty. It takes into consideration the user’s needs. In other words, the user has to find the item useful or else the entire design would be a waste, no matter how nice. Regardless of the subject, the design should render an object both accessible and user-friendly, which brings us to the next crucial point: QUALITY.
From a practical point of view, this teapot can’t be considered good design; it’s impossible to pour tea without burning oneself. Unlike from an artistic standpoint, the design of the teapot clearly has to satisfy more than the eye; it has to be user-friendly. Being aesthetic is not enough.
From an artistic point of view, this teapot can be said to be well designed; it stands out from the rest of the teapots we’re used to seeing. Since the user has no intention of using it, its sole purpose is to please the eye.
It’s all about purpose.
If you can define me, you can defy me!
Quality Quality is a direct product of design. When we say that an object is well or badly designed, we mean it’s good or bad quality. So, what exactly is quality? Many attempts have been made at defining quality, and all have failed due to its ubiquity. The fact that quality is spoken of in every single subject and aspect of life makes it so complex for pinning down. Is quality related to what something looks like? Or what purpose it serves? Or maybe how easy it is to handle? Or probably how useful it is? And how about all of these characteristics combined together? Quality is also ambivalent. It can be excellent to some while lacking substance to others. Practically any object in the world can be perceived with two contradictory opinions. Consider the steering wheel below introduced by the BMW car manufacturer.
For a novice driver, this steering wheel may be distracting and highly risky. There are too many buttons to remember, and handling all the commands by hand leaves little room for concentrating on the road. However, a fairly good driver will realize immediately the usefulness and user-friendliness of such a design. There’s no need to bend forward or take your eyes off the
road to execute any of these commands. With a bit of patience at first, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble later on. It’s just a matter of getting used to. Clearly, no single design can satisfy every end user. While quality differs from one person to another, it is highly appreciated and sought after, both consciously and subconsciously. Quality is such an intrinsic human characteristic that people fight for it incontestably. They may not be aware that it’s quality they’re looking for, but if they ask for something appealing that can successfully perform a set of expected tasks while being easily manageable, they’re indirectly asking for a quality product, whether they know it or not. One thing is worth mentioning though: quality comes with a price. In most cases, the price takes the form of money, but it can also be equated to time and effort, two factors at par with money. For an artist, adding quality to a painting or sculpture implies a higher selling price. For an engineer, adding quality to a piece of construction renders the work more costly. In almost any work-related instance, added quality incurs extra cost… except in education, where improved quality takes its toll on the educator’s time and effort, and that’s what makes education special. The question that remains is: How does design affect teaching and learning? Said differently, what role does design play in education?
Explicitly Displayed Unique Course of Actions To Insure Ongoing Nutrition (of the brain, naturally)
Education By definition, education entails the professional preparation of an individual for a specific skill, trade, or profession. (Webster’s) And aren’t we far from it. The disconnect among the different subjects taught at school makes it hard, if not impossible, to prepare citizens for the working world. Students leave school with piles and piles of information they don’t know what to do with. They gobble books about history and geography, yet they have no idea what political role their country assumes or what shape their country is. They see countless geometrical figures and solve unbelievably complex equations, yet they don’t know how to calculate the size of simple everyday objects or use the equations they studied to solve everyday problems. Obviously, there’s something wrong with the way education takes place. If students skip class, doze off, get low marks and get busy with other stuff when we think they should be doing the exact opposite, that’s because they don’t see things the way we (educators) do. They don’t understand what the whole business of education is all about. We scold, punish, penalize, and even expel them when all we need to do is change our perspective of education and look at it from their point of view. In other words, why don’t we redesign teaching so it makes sense to students?
Proposed new teaching design
First and foremost, students need to know the reason behind getting out of bed so early, being shoved onto the bus and dragged to class on a day when they’d rather stay at home and play their favorite game. Who would blame them? They have no clue whatsoever what they’re doing in an enclosed room with creatures the same age in a uniform they probably hate more than the teacher’s sight. Students’ wonderment is, in fact, justified. Ask anyone to learn something new and they’d ask you the old age question: What’s the point? At a time when people can be easily distracted and tempted into nonchalance, the only motivation that can pull them back towards reality is purpose. And a good one too, for a dull purpose may as well keep them in a state of carelessness. When introducing a major war, try to relate it to its impact on their country, what changes occurred as a result, and where its outcomes may lead in the future. When exposing students to a math concept, link it to a practical problem they may encounter in real life. For my Kahuna project, I decided to teach students how to write a biographical essay. This may sound dullish, but it can turn into an interesting activity with a bit of creativity. Just as students enjoy compiling photos into an album, they may be encouraged to write a short text next to each picture to describe the event taking place. Since these will be photos of loved ones, students may be pleased to write something about these people and why they’re special. Bit by bit, these pieces of writing can be used as the basis for a biography. Sooner than they know, students’ writing fragments will have formed a nice biography. Now that the purpose is set, it’s time to move on to the structure.
Just as it’s easier for students to understand the correlations between the different events in a war if they are properly linked, or between an equation and its application in real life, going over the structure of an essay simplifies the whole writing process. If the structure makes sense, chances are students will stick with it. They’ll understand that the introduction, along with the thesis statement, is necessary so readers know quickly what they’re about to read. The same applies to the topic sentence, followed by supportive statements and some examples, to provide as much evidence as possible. The information will be organized into paragraphs for easy tracking, and the conclusion will simply wrap up the entire story signaling the end. With a clear purpose and a well-organized structure, students’ next need is a couple of good models. For students to really understand the impact of a war on their country, they’ll need similar or close enough models. One way is to show them the impact of a similar war on another country, or a partial impact of the war on a certain part of their country and its citizens. We can use that math equation with two variables to explain how to calculate the time it’ll take them to be half their fathers’ age, for example, or the time it takes for a car to run a certain distance - anything as long as it’s fun and can be connected to the real world. In the same way, students can read their favorite personality’s biography and see how an organized structure aids comprehension. However convinced, students may have some lingering doubts, and the best way to wipe them off is by engaging them in critical arguments. What does argument do? The need to argue is innate in people. This could have a deep link with knowledge and understanding, because arguing makes people more aware of their surrounding and better critical thinkers (any educator’s dream goal). That history lesson wouldn’t be complete without the need to see who was right and who was wrong, and how the war may have affected their country had it taken a different course. And that bugging equation wouldn’t be
completely engraved in one’s mind without playing around with the variables and changing values to see different (and sometimes illogical) results (like a negative age!). Nothing less can be said about writing a biographical essay. Students will want to contest a certain truth, or object to a writer’s bias especially in the case of a thematic biography. There’s plenty of room for argument which, when properly geared, can prove crucial to students’ understanding of biographical essays. We’ve seen how a clear purpose, an organized structure, a good model, and thoughtful argument can improve teaching and learning. The purpose motivates students, the structure shapes their thinking, the model widens their knowledge, and the argument strengthens their conviction. Such a teaching design fends off weariness, disinterest, ambiguity, and promotes attentiveness, eagerness, and clarity with regard to learning.
Conclusion Teaching by design draws upon common sense. If anything, it gives education a meaning; it brings back this long lost desire to grow intellectually, not just for extrinsic reasons, rather for genuine intrinsic reasons, and school is the best place to start such an initiative. Teaching by design requires methodology and discipline, perspicacity and efficiency, patience and confidence. It drills persistently into the realm of the conscious and subconscious worlds respectively. It turns learning into a meaningful activity, one that connects the seemingly unrelated pieces of knowledge together to form a whole. Through teaching by design, students relate to the real world by comprehending the ‘how’ and ‘why’, and not just the ‘what’. Teaching by design emphasizes accessibility, aesthetic, usefulness, and user-friendliness, all of which contribute to a better and more enjoyable learning experience.