 |
| At the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by architect Frank Gehry |
As
a former graphic artist (from the long ago days of press-on type and hand-cut masking
film overlays), I have made it a point to include the design of the world
around us and the careers thus represented in my teaching, but I welcome the
increasing focus in art education on design and design thinking.
This
is evidenced, in part, by The Art of Design: Form, Function, and the Future of
Visual Arts Education, the theme of the upcoming National Art Education
Association (NAEA) convention in New Orleans March 26-28, 2015. Another
indicator is the development and recent publication of National Media Arts
Standards that parallel and correlate with the new Visual Arts Standards.
The April issue of SchoolArts is our second (August/September 2007) in our history to focus on
design and design thinking, and has been developed with the invaluable assistance
of two individuals who each wear many hats: Joe Schwartz, Trustee, DESIGN-ED
Coalition; and Martin Rayala, Chief Academic Officer for
Design-Lab Schools, Philadelphia, to
identify and share significant design-related programs and projects.
Design
thinking, given broad, popular exposure by Daniel Pink’s
engaging 2005 book,
A Whole New Mind, is a process that
facilitates the design of objects, information, environments, and experiences.
Design thinking can help students become successful adults with the 21st
century skills of creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem
solving, and communication and elaboration.
In
preparation for this issue, I participated in DESIGN-ED 2014, an engaging national
conference on design education, held in Philadelphia last summer. This coming
summer, you will have the opportunity to present at or attend LEARNxDESIGN, the 3rd
international conference for design education researchers and PreK-16 design
educators that will be held in Chicago,
June 28-30, 2015. You can learn more about this conference here. I highly recommend it.
Why
Should Art Teachers Teach Design Thinking?
- · It is engaging to students.
- · It promotes visual literacy.
- · It provides meaningful opportunities to collaborate with others.
- · It is another valuation of the importance of the arts.
- · It can lead to careers in the arts.
- · Who can teach this better than art teachers?
I'm elated to be a part of this issue and thank Nancy, Marty, and Joe for their work in bringing this issue to fruition. I'd like to not here that the reason for teaching Design thinking extend beyond what it does cognitively to what it can do personally. In a sense, one may use design as the foundation for changing how students view themselves and what they are capable of doing. Further, it's influence will extend to what you, as a teacher are doing, and can change our pedagogy. In that change, a strong correlate might be found in a look at a company that shifted it's focus in just this way, Apple:
ReplyDeleteBy our very nature, human beings are makers. Indeed, what lured Jobs, and Woz, and all the other "heros of the computer revolution" to work in the Silicon Valley was the fact that they could get their hands on something and fiddle with it, tinker it, make it do something. What most students wind up doing in our public schools is listening (if that), regurgitating, and then forgetting. It's no secret that real-world use of knowledge is the best way to make learning a lasting proposition.
Numerous initiatives to help bring design-based learning into schools have recently taken off. Most notable, perhaps, is the K-12 initiative by Stanford's "d.school" (Hasso-Plattner Institute for Design) championed by IDEO's (yes, the company that designed Apple's first mouse) David Kelley.
But I do not forget that the true goal of American Public Education is a liberal one and in that, I offer a few observations and recommendations.
First, I offer that reading as much as one can about Design Thinking will lead you into the same fields Steve Jobs explored in his own life-long education. I've done a deep dive into design and design-based learning for the last 7 years as a result of reading the very book Nancy mentions in this post, Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. It changed my classroom and has lead me to even deeper involvement in the movement itself. But Nancy has already bridged that connection.
Second I offer this quotation from Richard Buchanan's "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking"" ”All men and women require a liberal art of design to live well in the complexity of the framework based in signs, things, actions, and thoughts."
It may be, then, that we need to rethink the liberal arts again, or better yet, to not define them as discrete bodies of knowledge, but rather as ways of being. Even for Steve Jobs this was the case. In so far as Jobs' observations about Apple being at the crossroads of Technology and the Liberal Arts goes, much of what he was talking about was expressed through the design of his products, not only the electrical and computer engineering, but the user interface, the rounded corners of the original Mac, and so much else both functional and aesthetic. And while he admired the way of thinking that typifies the best of liberal arts grads, he was still going to look first at the computer science grad for hiring. What he found, though, in his friend, the designer David Kelley, is a man who's wide-ranging mind (as of a liberally educated person) was couched next to the can do, productive mind of the industrial designer.
In my first foray into the world of design over a decade ago, I stumbled across a quotation from a designer whose name I've long since forgotten. In a publication by Sappi Papers for their "Ideas that Matter" contest, he said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "There are really two main questions through which designers approach the world: 'Why are things the way they are?' and 'How can I make them better?'"
In my classroom, these have become our driving questions. But then, I think they always were, for are they really any different than what our Liberal Educations have taught us: to approach the world with inquisitive minds and to leave it a better place than how we found it.
Thanks so much for your eloquent comments.
ReplyDelete