When the Center for Innovation & Design opens its doors in 2019, it will provide a physical space for students and teachers to experiment, collaborate, create, and learn. But the studios, tools, and technology are only part of the picture. This year, teachers at MBS are starting a conversation about the approach to learning and problem-solving that inspired the Center in the first place: Design Thinking.
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By Dr. Owen Boynton
Director of The Center for Innovation & Design English Department
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In other respects, however, it is novel. Design Thinking can inspire teachers and students to set out in unexpected directions and to make connections that they might have otherwise neglected. Most radically, Design Thinking differs from other design processes and from many inquiry-driven teaching methods in its focus on empathy: on observing how people live, on telling Since it took off in the 1990s, Design Thinking has found a warm welcome stories about what they need, want, and believe, and in getting inside of the in business schools, design firms, corporations, and, in recent years, the experience of problems before solving them. Empathy deserves and receives world of education. Whereas the design process was special place among the core values at MBS; Design the purview of engineers and artists, Design Thinking Thinking points at how it might be foundational for Design Thinking is a conceptual promises to help nearly anyone, pretty much anywhere the most rigorously analytical problem-solving tasks. structure that enables break through entrenched habits of thought in order creativity…and that’s what Especially valuable and novel in Design Thinking is to innovate. That’s a tall order to fill, and Design the Center for Innovation and the common focus and shared vocabulary it provides Thinking has its share of skeptics. As with any method, teachers and students alike. Within its framework, Design is all about. A lot of technique, or approach, its success depends largely on it becomes possible for teachers and students teaching is about inventing how it is applied. across disciplines and classrooms to more easily structures for thinking and In its theoretical form, Design Thinking encourages exchange ideas, refine techniques, and collaborate problem-solving, for observing deep observation, dynamic collaboration, rapid in order to improve—which is what the Center is and questioning, and for helping prototyping of ideas, and frequent testing of constraints. all about. Design Thinking can make conscious and students gain new insights. As opposed to a linear process of ideation followed communicable the wealth of implicit know-how Design Thinking doesn’t by refinement, Design Thinking demands a recursive already possessed by the MBS community. radically alter what teachers at loop, through phases of inspiration, ideation, and MBS are doing; it extends and Design Thinking is sometimes criticized for peddling implementation, with learning and refinement deepens it. It offers a chance an easy solution to intractable problems. That criticism happening along the way. The world provides inspiration is fundamentally misplaced. Design Thinking starts for teachers and students alike for ideas, which are implemented and critiqued and from the view that, whether the situation is perennial to create more meaningfully assessed for what their failures can teach. or uniquely exacerbated in the 21st century, the and thoughtfully. In practice, the process needs to be carefully managed, world we live in teems with insoluble complexities, and participants need to be willing to tolerate ambiguities, and uncertainty. Design Thinking gives uncertainty, failure, criticism, and frustration. The rhythms and quirks teachers and students alike a set of tools for navigating through that messiness of Design Thinking will differ from organization to organization, from with heightened self-awareness, more supportive collaboration, and greater situation to situation. confidence. Far from avoiding the messiness of real world problem-solving, Design Thinking serves as a vehicle for meeting it head-on. When teachers at MBS have thought about Design Thinking in the context of their classroom experiences and learning objectives, many were struck by The four questions that buttress Design Thinking are not easy to remember to ask; even harder is doing what it takes to answer them well, not least its similarity to what they already wanted to accomplish. For the purposes when facing a deadline or grappling with a puzzle. When people see Design of education, the key aspects of Design Thinking can be translated into a Thinking in action at the world’s top design firms, they notice how intense sort of checklist for learners and teachers: the process is, and how much it demands from everyone involved: how 1) Have I tried to understand the challenge or problem from within, rapidly the ideas pour out, how quickly they are rejected, how creatively and defined it for myself ? they are revived, how fearlessly they are modeled, tested and refined, and how much energy the process absorbs and generates. Teachers see that 2) Have I elicited feedback, genuine criticism, and have I modified what and what stands out are the emotional and social skills that support it all. I’m doing to incorporate it? Have I borrowed the best ideas available? Design Thinking reminds us that, whatever the analytical tools we provide students, whatever the knowledge and know-how they possess, we need 3) Have I made multiple attempts, failed, and learned from each failure? to help learners develop the qualities of character and spirit it takes to put their knowledge and tools to the best use they can. 4) Have I tested the situation’s constraints to know whether they are valid or real?
At MBS, where project and inquiry based learning has a dominant role in classrooms from the sciences to the humanities, teachers spend a lot of their time encouraging students to reflect on all of these questions. In some of its key elements, Design Thinking is hardly new to the School; if 40 Crimson Fall 2018
anything, it is a vindication of much that we already do.
In addition to earning his Ph.D. at Cornell University, Dr. Boynton has also earned degrees at Oxford University (Masters of Studies in 19th-Century British Literature) and Brown University (A.B. in Comparative Literature). Prior to coming to MBS, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross and as a Lecturer in English at Cornell. Crimson Fall 2018
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