Teaching design seems to require a focus on products. Not end-products, but the products of the process of design.
Students that are just starting out as designers do not –cannot– see what experts see. They do not see the complexity and lurking problems and hidden opportunities in their ideas. This must be brought in the open somehow, so that the student can be confronted with these unexpected features of their ideas.
Continue reading Production Is Required for Learning DesignI gave a lecture on different ways of modelling where I asked the students to discuss with neighbors which role each of 6 ways of modelling might play in the design process, what they show, and what they hide. The goal was to explain that each does in fact highlight and leave out different aspects, so you should use as many of them as possible, and keep using different modelling methods throughout the project.
But they were at a point in their design projects where it was hard for them to understand the relevance of this, I think, so weren’t curious to know.
But also, for these in-lecture discussions to work, perhaps there needs to be a right answer. It helps when they can try to get it right, and then find out whether they did.
So not “discuss what a good problem statement looks like”, but “each of these three problem statements is good in one way, and bad in another way’. Find what is good and bad about each statement”.
One follows from the view that teachers know something students do not and that students do not know what’s good for them. Both true. But people seem to draw as a conclusion from this that teachers need to tell students what to do and that students should simpy listen. This does not work.
Another view sees students as rational adults, who can and should decide for themselves what they want and how to achieve this. This also seems to me a solid assumption. But proponents of this view draw from it the conclusion that we should let students take the lead, that they should decide how to approach their projects and what learning activities to engage in. This does not work, I believe, because it conflicts with the above truth that students –in the subject of what’s being taught– do not know what’s good for them. Teachers do. Or should, in any case.
But students need some understanding of how what they’re being asked to do is useful or necessary.
Teachers must understand how naïve and mistaken models can be dislodged and developed into the ones the teacher wants to teach. This is diffucult. But one way this most surely cannot be done is to simply tell the student and expect them to take your word for it.