What can teenage classrooms learn from design thinking?
I remember when Silicon Valley companies first started being profiled for their office spaces and flexible work day models in the early 2000s – it shook my definition of “work.”
Growing up in NYC, my father ran his textile sales agency business from home, so I was aware that work didn’t need to look like the rat race that was all around if you diverted from the standard model. With the startup boom of the late 90s came a shift – if you worked at corporate tech environment like Google, you could play sport as a meeting, lounge while you work, be stocked with delicious healthy snacks all day and choose your own work schedule!
Silicon Valley found a way to get the most out of their bright and innovative employees – let them play. In the 2008 TED Talk by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, he breaks down some of the reasons why they support play and how they encourage it.
Creativity relies on trust.
Throughout interactive presentation elements such as sketch your neighbour, shoot finger blasters to be playful, and draw in 30 circles in under a minute, Tim conveys that humans must feel safe to take the risks required to be truly innovative.
As kids we don’t worry whether someone else will like our creations, we hold them up with pride by having made the effort. Into adulthood though, we learn to categorise and judge everything. Great skills to have evolutionarily speaking if we’re to survive dangerous situations – but counter-productive to thinking outside of the box.
In order to help people feel safe in sharing ideas, IDEO founder set out to make everyone he worked with his friends. To encourage creative thinking, he and many others in the industry, incorporate “think symbols” into the workspace. I understand these to be large “out of place” objects or games that remind employees that this isn’t your typical corporate space where you need to fall in line and keep your head down. It’s a space where you’re welcome to be bold and share the weird and wacky ideas as they come to mind.
So if we trust, we play. If we play, we come up with better creative solutions, we do our jobs better and feel better doing it. Which in turn means you do more and better work!
They spend stacks of money and time reteaching adults how to seriously be playful… but what if we never lost our innate play patterns from when we were kids? If it’s meaningful practice for Silicon Valley who design the present and future of the world, can we as teachers support young people to build upon play skills, rather that structure it out of them?
Design play trifecta in the teenage classroom: exploration, construction and role play
Explorative play
As adults we continuously self-edit…this strategy encourages us to create quantity over quality. Who cares if it’s no good. Just go for it! Besides, who are you to judge your own ideas before they even make way into the world. It just might be the winner the group needs.
Why do kids lose this? We spend time in our adolescence defining who we are by our peer groups and identifying what we are not. A common thread is that we all want to feel supported and loved. If we can build into the classroom, opportunities for students to practice encouraging each other and celebrating failures, perhaps we can hold onto our explorative nature into adulthood.
Construction play
This think-with-your-hands approach is another one we likely left behind in childhood. My favourite way to learn is by doing. Applying the learning to an experience integrates it into my whole self. Getting stuck thinking about thinking about stuff? Jump up and change your perspective. Try it on and try it out, grab a friend while you’re at it to build something together.
While kids are in high school, they still use props – construction paper, gluesticks, scissors, markers etc. in high school – but it wanes as the years drag on…they turn into post-it notes, index cards and pens. How can we keep the creative use of objects in the classroom? Can we bring back clay / play dough? Using technology like stop-motion animation apps can help make this construction play come to life.
So what if design makes us feel good?
I remember feeling back then that it’s obvious that design makes people feel better, but it costs money to have good design, so people who run the world don’t care. They’d rather build a cheap and boring office space than take the human effort needed for pleasant aesthetics and inspiring spaces.
I though that even if some corporations are making an effort to connect to what makes people tick…you’d have to be in tech to have design valued around you. Now I’m not so sure! It’s 20 years on and design is appreciated in many industries. Nearly everyone has a favourite TED talk regardless of their job..you know..Technology, Entertainment, Design.
Design thinking isn’t just for Silicon Valley anymore, it’s for everyone, and it’s more fun than the homonegous mode of working we learned to accept. As a teacher, I take Tim’s messages and am looking forward to implementing design thinking into my classes.
