“Ideas are scary, they come into this world ugly and messy…”
“They are the natural born enemy of the way things are…”
I’ve become convinced that the design process generally fails to achieve as much as possible when applied to educational initiatives. The reason? A missing and critical component.
As a designer, you begin any design effort by trying to understand the people, organization, and situation you are working with. That’s called discovery. If you are unfamiliar with design, this part of the process requires engaging people with an empathic lens to understand their needs, the context and conditions of the design challenge, and the climate and culture of the organization they are a part of.
As a designer, your goal is to develop solutions that address the client's needs and move them forward. The larger question is this: move them forward to what and in what way? What is the pathway, and what is the destination? Those questions are partly answered by addressing them with the client during discovery.
That gets you so far. There’s another part, and it’s critical.
Within the design framework, I believe that designers must work hard at expanding the capability of individuals and organizations to think divergently about their future. Helping people do this would enable them to process novel ideas, paths, and alternatives for their value and potential contribution to a design solution. That’s good design and a reason for hiring designers.
My background and experience in education tell me that schools can achieve success by employing traditional methodologies to address their challenges. Numerous examples exist. However, while these conventional approaches provide a solid foundation for progress, these same organizations struggle to apply more innovative and creative strategies that could propel them to even greater achievements.
It is my belief that education generally tends to resist new and unfamiliar concepts, often stifling the launch of fresh and inventive approaches that could result in new and exciting approaches to improving schools.
The question arises: Why is this the case? The apparent reason is that most educational institutions favor a traditional approach due to its familiarity and ease of implementation. However, there's a subtler issue at play: these institutions often exhibit discomfort with the unfamiliar, particularly innovative ideas that challenge conventional norms and expand the scope of possibilities. Such potentially groundbreaking concepts, which could redefine educational systems, are frequently overlooked or dismissed in favor of more traditional thinking.
So, back to what’s missing in design. Designers must devote time within the design engagement to develop the organization's ability to process ideas. Prior to proposing any solutions, designers must help reshape the organizational mindset, cultivating an awareness of the potential inherent in diverse ideas and fostering a readiness to think more broadly. They must work towards making the organization's mindset more pliable and capable of processing and evaluating new ideas. That should occur after discovery (or perhaps concurrently), before presenting possible solutions, and even before presenting a point of view or design drivers (which generally follow after discovery).
My advice: don’t expect the typical educational institution to be that ready for innovative ideas. Counter this by getting them ready. By doing this, designers can give innovative solutions a realistic chance of contributing to the design process and being a part of an eventual solution. A designer's role should be to initiate and sustain a dialogue that honors but challenges conventional norms, fosters intellectual curiosity, and, in the process, lays a solid groundwork for the acceptance and execution of creative strategies that lead to a new future.