Teaching the next generation of creative thinkers

Challenge

Solving the complex problem's of today's world requires a diversity of cultures, backgrounds and personalities. Although it is impossible to know how the future will unfold, it is implicit that we’ll need the abilities, methods and creative thinking of designers (and like minded people) to help solve them. Despite the need for design thinking across industries, these skills are rarely taught to young people nor are they given the opportunity to explore careers in design.

Inspired by Kim Goodwin, a well-known interaction design practitioner, me and SVA classmate, Katie Koch embarked on project to understand how we could introduce design methodologies and practices to high school students and to create a program that would succeed at teaching the next generation of creative thinkers.

Understand high school education

carmenteaching In order to develop the right type of program, we interviewed teachers and students to develop an understanding of what high school life was like, what constraints exist for educators, and how high school students learn. Upon synthesizing our field research, we realized that our solution must reflect high school curriculum requirements, empower students with an ownership of their ideas and provide tangible learning experiences. Through our analysis, we realized that there was a significant value proposition for high schools to welcome a program that teaches design thinking. Many in the education field, are calling for more emphasis on skills like creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and leadership. The program that we developed, fulfills this unmet need while teaching students about design.


Curriculum & Focus
carmenteaching One key learning in our research was that students must relate to the content in order to understand it. We decided to structure our design teachings around New York City. New York City is ripe with examples of interaction design in practice - from the MTA Transit System to the Highline to Times Square. It was important to us to use real examples to illustrate concepts that were taught in class. Read the entire curriculum here.

Designing an After-School Program
Project: Interaction is New York City's only interaction design after school program. The 10-week after school program teaches students how to use design tools and methodologies to change their communities. With an emphasis on creative problem solving, storytelling, research, observation, and collaboration, Project: Interaction aims to complement the high school design curriculum with the 21st century skills that the new economy demands. We were fortunate enough to partner with the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in the Fall 2009 to teach our inaugural class.

Prototyping & Iteration
carmenteaching Each week we focused on a different design methodology complete with a short lecture, in-class project and presentation/reflection. In order to design the best learning experience for our students, the class was refined based on feedback we received and our own observations. Read weekly class posts here.

Our model for education
Through our teaching we established a framework for understanding how students can learn the best. Our belief is that learning is not a one-off experience, but a continuing spiral of engagement. The spiral has three main points of interaction. The first is exposure and learning. Students need tactile exposure to new concepts to reinforce the learning curriculum which includes exposure to real people and real settings. The second is self-reflection and awareness- giving students the time to absorb and immerse themselves in new knowledge. The last phase is risk taking and mastery, giving students multiple opportunities to test their learnings in an environment where risk taking is encouraged and failure is welcomed. carmenteaching

Currently, we are working with the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum to develop design workshops for their teen design program. We will also continue to work with high schools in Fall 2011.



More information about Project: Interaction


Although Project: Interaction was conceived while attending the School of Visual Arts, this is a self-initiated independent project created by Katie Koch and myself. We were not given credit or grades for our work on this.