'Design Thinking' in Education: A Boondoggle?

This post is in response to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education—which is (sort of) the trade journal of college and university teachers in the USA—by author Lee Vinsel. The title of the article in the Chronicle (that's what it's called by education insiders) is almost the same: Design Thinking is a Boondoggle.

A boondoggle is something (i.e. some activity or idea) that looks a lot more useful than it is. To save you time, I must confess right now that I think I partially agree, and I will put in a few jokes at the end, just so you will keep coming back for more entertainment (since wisdom is not forthcoming). Unfortunately the Chronicle article is a "premium" article, which means that they try to keep it hidden from non-subscribers. You could Google the title, and find your way to the article; unfortunately I myself can't give you an accurate picture of the argument of the author, since I have been disallowed from reading it repeatedly. You can, however, follow most of the ideas there—from the perspective of a Design Thinking supporter—by going to this article instead. You will learn a lot about how susceptible you are to this sort of rhetoric, by examining your thoughts once you finish reading, and especially if you manage to read the Chronicle article too. 

[This is tricky. What we're dealing with is how our pre-conceptions influence our understanding of new information. Let's take the risk, and make some basic information available, so that at least our notions about Design Thinking is definite, because Design Thinking does look deceptively like something we should be able to understand, without further clarification. It is not.]

Design Thinking (as I understand it) was a name given to a way of thinking about design, or designing, as far back as the 1960s, and over the next several decades, codified into a five-phase routine, as described in the Interaction Design Foundation article (linked in the second paragraph). The five steps will give you an excellent idea about what it's all about:

Empathize – really understand what the design requirement is (or what the customer wants). I think this is probably one of the most valuable insights contained in this way of looking at design.

Define – (I misread this at first) Carefully state the task at hand.  While this is not an earth-shaking insight, it certainly is something important to do, because a lot of trouble can flow from everyone concerned not being on the same page as to what they're setting out to do.

Ideate – This is about finding ideas to solve the problem. Even outside this particular view of designing, there are strategies for discovering ideas that have been known to teachers for decades, but we tend to forget these strategies unless we constantly practise them.

Prototype – build a working model, thinking about designing in a sort of engineering way. This ought to be a step in designing anything.

Test – see whether your model does what it's supposed to.

Let's now turn our attention to Higher Education. The article in the Chronicle argues that the adoption of Design Thinking to solve the “problem” of education—more on that later; though who can deny that Education is possibly the biggest elephant in the problem room?—has resulted in educational innovations that look good on paper, on marketing copy put out by most schools in various magazines, but which many faculty, parents, and alumni look upon with deep dislike. Dislike not because it stinks of ad-speak and marketing-type jargon, to make simple, basic things sound sexy and glamorous, but because we feel that it might actually be bad for the students in numerous ways.

In one snippet I was able to obtain from the Chronicle article, it paraphrases a quote from an article called “Is Design Thinking the New Liberal Arts?”:

Design thinking, in other words, is just a fancy way of talking about consulting. What Miller (the author of the “Is Design Thinking ...” article), Kelly, and Hennessy are asking us to imagine is that design consulting is a model for retooling all of education. They believe that we should use design thinking to reform education by treating students as clients. And they assert that design thinking should be a central part of what students learn, a lens through which graduates come to approach social reality. In other words, we should view all of society as if we are in the design-consulting business.

Fawningly, Miller observes that the d.school’s courses are "popular" and often "oversubscribed." "These enrollment figures suggest that whatever it is the d.school is doing, it’s working." One social innovator Miller might look into is a guy named Jim Jones, who also had many enthusiastic followers.

Ignoring for a moment the crack about Jim Jones (a religious nut from the 80's; remember the poisoned Kool Aid?) we can get a lot of insight into both the problems with, and perhaps some potential in, the Design Thinking overlay on modern tertiary education (education after high school).

Continuous Curriculum vs. Flexible Curriculum

In the bad old days, everyone took the same subjects at the same time, as in elementary school. Then, as the number of courses taught in school increased, students were given some flexibility to select what they will study, and so students would split up, after a compulsory course like English composition, say, to go off to different classes. This is now the rule in College; one of the first things you do is make up your choices (towards the end of the previous semester, for upperclassmen, or over the summer during orientation, for freshpersons,) called making a schedule. You go to your advisor, and together you plan which courses you take.

Suppose you're a sophomore. By now (if yours is a smallish school), your advisor knows you moderately well, and he or she knows your major, if you have one, your minor(s), if you have any, and the sort of stuff you like to take, and the sort of stuff you have to take, given your major and your minors. Some of my most interesting advisees came in with cockamamie ideas for taking various courses, and it took a little longer to put together a schedule for them! But the school's policy has always been that ultimately the student is responsible for his or her schedule; the advisor signs off on it, but the signature only means that the student has been alerted to the courses that the advisor thought was good for them, even if the kid selected some other stuff.

There is absolutely no argument about really understanding what the student's preferences and objectives are. (There is certainly an obligation to at least listen to the parents' aspirations for their child, but that is of questionable value, because unfortunately parents sometimes do not know their kids very well—we can talk about that another time, but that is a major problem—and parents are not in a very good position to anticipate what the future will bring—and neither are faculty, but we have some experience guessing, and learning how good our guesses were—and parents' thinking is often colored by their own college experience—or lack of it—which confuses the issues.) But kids simply have no clue about -what they're going to be doing in the future, -what they're good at, objectively, -how one course can seriously influence the success the kid will have in a subsequent course. Kids don't even have as much wisdom as their parents have, though the two kinds of people (kids and parents) have two sorts of tunnel vision that are problematic: kids want things that look good from their limited experience of life, and what they see on TV, while ignoring possibly equally glamorous, occupations in which they can truly excel. Even if a kid has a fantastic education for who he or she is, and her innate abilities, there is no guarantee that he or she will be snapped up by some employer who will give the kid the employment that the kid deserves. (Take that with the understanding that I believe businesses are too powerful in our society, and that I also believe that the profit motive sometimes—or often—works against the good of the employees.)

Interestingly enough, one of my favorite fantasy authors, Terry Pratchett, had created a character called Granny Weatherwax, who taught another character, the delightful Tiffany Aching, to open her eyes, and open them again. This is what I feel is the essence of the empathize idea. Really listen. It is painful to address what a student wants (or needs) in opposition to what it is convenient for the institution to give the student.

Ultimately, advising is about selecting the set of courses for a student from among the courses that each academic department has made available for a semester, given the time-availability of the courses. It is impractical to deliver the courses the student and his/her parents want, when they want it, without a great deal of additional expense.

Design Thinking as an Academic Subject

Design Thinking can be an actual subject a student can be allowed to take. I don't think this is a terrible idea, though it does seem to me that it can be taught within another academic course that has to do with problem-solving. The less of a conventional course it becomes, the more effective it is likely to be.

Thinking about a student as a client, we have another large problem—about which I have hinted already—namely: is an 18-year-old kid experienced enough that we can discover what s/he wants/needs by working hard? A major obstacle to modern education is that above all what is likely to be most helpful to a graduate is flexibility in his or her skill set, flexibility in his or her mindset, and flexibility in his or her knowledge base. It is common to hear college faculty deplore the fact that it appeared the High School taught their students nothing, and they had to teach them everything from scratch. Parents from the managerial class are likely to say, well, it's too late to worry about that now; if that's what my darling child needs, well, that's what you have to deliver. So the burden on the instructor is to deliver the high-school curriculum as efficiently as possible—and in such a way that, at least this time, junior will absorb the information—as well as add on a small fraction of the college-level material that the instructor had delivered to previous generations of students.

Design Thinking used as a Marketing Strategy

Author Lee Vinsel really hates most things about Design Thinking. Most faculty are liable to get worked-up about any sort of fad that claims to revolutionize college education, because most such fads have, over the years, been revealed to be mere marketing ploys. He compares some of the ideas in the Ideate phase as giving rise to the sort of thing that happens to Iphones over the summer: essentially repackaging the product to look and feel sexy. He calls it iCrap.

I was a head of our department for a few years, and there was desperate hope in the Dean of our school, that we could create newer, more sexy majors.

A mathematics major is plenty sexy enough for me, ever since I realized that contained within a mathematics major were interesting aspects of numerous subjects such as quantum mechanics, relativity, classical dynamics, projective geometry, group theory, and so on. Physics departments, in comparison, have not turned a hair at these requests, but created sub-majors such as Astrophysics, and other departments put in place Neurobiology, Environmental Studies, and so on. (The Mathematics department did establish a major called Actuarial Science, which is ostensibly the discipline using which Insurance companies create insurance products. To my great confusion, it appears that our—quite challenging—Actuarial major is not only doing well, but the graduates are well employed and making big money. In case that gets some parents salivating: it is a very challenging major, requiring most of a mathematics major, on top of which you need courses in Economics, Finance, and Accountancy, which not a lot of undergraduates are willing to put up with.)

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Butterflies, Warming, and Politics

Some years ago I could write a long blog post, and know that people could take the whole thing in, long sentences, long paragraphs and all.  But today, most people expect to get the gist of a post from the top few lines, and so it's safe to think that no one gets much from my blog at all.

Without doubt, this trend towards impatience with any sort of sophisticated idea has resulted both in Climate Change, and President Trump.  Read on, if you dare.

Let's start off with Cholesterol. It has been most of a century since Cholesterol has been identified as an accessory to heart attacks.  When the raw information hit the news, the public made a quite forgivable leap to the conclusion that eating Cholesterol-containing foods would lead to heart-attacks.  Soon there were numerous witch-hunts to identify these foods, and the following were discovered as the worse culprits:

Eggs. Bacon. Butter. Milk-fat. Shrimp. Oysters. Red meat. Organ Meat*. Meat Fat**.

People stopped eating these things, and kept worrying about them for years.  [*E.g. liver  **E.g. bacon and lard].

The reaction was extreme.  People began to stop eating butter (which was a good thing, if a little extreme), and fell back on a butter-substitute that had been used during WW2, namely Margarine.  Margarine was not only cheaper, now we 'knew' that it was better for us.  Consumption of all these Cholesterol Culprits fell off dramatically.  Some folks, however, regarded all this with deep resentment.  Some bacon-lovers viewed the 'ban' on bacon as a personal attack, and defiantly began eating it more extensively than ever before, sneering at those who cut down on it, and the beginning of Hostility to Science, I believe, can be traced to these individuals.  This falls under the generalized category of killing the messenger.  "Uncle Bill scorned the idea of Cholesterol! He thought it was an invention of the Communists, to make life miserable for us, you know. He died young, but he lived well, God bless him."

Some in the medical education business were delighted, and others nervous, because, of course, the Press was not reporting the ifs, ands and buts that had a lot to do with this information.

The first major issue to be dealt with was that the human body itself was able to manufacture Cholesterol. (The only reason I capitalize Cholesterol is to make it easier to pick out the word if by some amazing miracle one of my readers want to go back and re-read some useful bit of information I have provided here.) Now there was a rush to dismiss the Cholesterol scare as hopeless anyway; evidently the body creates its own --poison, if you will-- so we may as well eat all the butter we want, while we're alive to do it!  No.  The truth is somewhere in-between. Read carefully.

Cholesterol does have something to do with the plaque that is deposited in places in the arteries where the blood goes a little more slowly, or changes direction, and gradually this plaque (with the help of certain strains of bacteria) begins to slowly block the artery, which can cause a stroke, or a heart-attack.  But by being careful with your food, you can make sure your system does not have extra cholesterol that it tries to dump in your arteries.  Get it?

(Cholesterol is not all bad for us; in small amounts it helps with healing.  Don't try to manage the use of Cholesterol in healing yourself; I don't understand enough of it to be able to advise you; leave that to experts, one of whom I certainly am not.)

How does the body make Cholesterol, and out of what?  Most people (who still believe in science!) know by now, that it is out of certain sorts of saturated fats that we eat.

Once again, hordes of people (generally those whose scientific backgrounds were a little on the weak side, and who did not think to learn the whole story, because surely there were important details that had not been revealed yet) started to shun saturated fats with a vengeance, but not other fats.  (In case you're thinking of stopping here, let me give you a quick remark for those who think of reading as an unwelcome aerobic activity:

Fats in moderation are needed for general health.  As far as I know, avoiding only saturated fats (and so-called Trans Fats) and eating all other fats without other restrictions will probably lead to obesity.  Which is bad, because it makes the heart work harder, doing unhealthy work. Sure, the heart needs to regularly work hard doing so-called aerobic activity, brisk walking, aerobics, running, climbing, etc, briefly. Not doing regular aerobics so many times a week is bad for your heart, but making your heart simply labor--lugging your weight around, if you're overweight--is also bad.   (BTW, conventional margarine contained saturated fats. Modern butter-substitutes are not so bad, but read the labels.)

This is typical: "Tell me, are fats good or bad?" This is the kind of answer those who dislike and don't understand science are seeking.  Well, I ask them, are slum landlords good or bad? Well, they would probably waffle: It depends. Okay, think it over, and write me an essay for Monday.

Salt

Most of our salt comes from salt mines; or at least, it did, until recently.  But, over the years, sea salt, initially a sort of exotic thing, acquired a cachet; so much so that various processed food manufacturers began advertising that their product contains sea salt.  After a while, salt manufacturers were able to charge more for sea salt than they did for regular salt.  (It tastes exactly the same.) But wait: It has recently been reported that little bits of plastic have been found in many samples of sea salt.  Plastic in food is bad, isn't it.  Guess what's going to happen.  As millions of consumers line up to trade in their sea salt for non-sea salt, regular salt prices will snake up again.

Tell me what to do!

There is a reason why a simple answer cannot be given for almost any practical question.  (1) We still don't know everything about everything; (2) The quantitative consequences of any policy decision is still not available, so that we still can't precisely calculate how bad eating sea salt really is. (3) It depends on how the prices are set, how methods of extracting sea-salt are changed over the next few years, and what we discover about the long-term effects of plastic particles in our bodies.

That's the sort of situation that the Science-phobes who constitute the Alt-Right hate. This is the worst sort of pseudo-science, as far as they're concerned, and they're all set to cut funding for any sort of science, e.g. cancer research, genetic research, ocean research, because they do not want to hear any more bad news, and they want to lower taxes for themselves.

Light a Little Candle

I want to now head in a slightly different direction.  So far I have focused on the sad consequences of how food marketing, and how news about scientific findings result in mass movements which change people's perception of food items, and how people's eating habits sometimes result in major changes in health, often not for the better. (Furthermore, public discourse about people's self-images, especially those of kids--initially led by Liberals, admittedly--have resulted in curtailment of any public discourse about healthy weight in children, as Mrs. Obama discovered to her cost.  Nobody likes anyone saying that their kids are obese, even if they are.  Looking around you, you have to agree that the US population is getting distinctly portly, which has resulted in cars getting bigger, because some of our prosperous Baby Boomers would not even fit into a older model family sedan.  You watch: we're going to see some very large Chinese very soon, if eating habits in China progress as they have done here, and some of our least responsible fast-food chains are permitted to open up stores over there.  The logic here is that mankind was intended to be obese, and we did not achieve our perfect shape in years gone by, because food was scarce, or we could not afford it.

Have you noticed how untidy and full of trash streets and highways are becoming? No, they're not desperately trashy, because the municipalities have steadily deployed trash cans in convenient locations, restaurants are making it easier to put trash in receptacles, and little school-aged kids are enthusiastic about recycling, bless them, so that the tendency to be irresponsible about littering is partially offset by moderating forces.

In the past, a lot of the litter was paper litter; now it is almost exclusively plastic litter, some of which flows down the rivers into the sea, messing up the lungs and gills of whales and fish, and slipping into our Sea Salt. You might have blamed the litter on blacks, minorities and immigrants, and doubtless they are partly to blame, and you can easily arrive at excuses for them. Little kids rarely litter, in my experience; they're usually very indignant when they see littering. It is kids in their teens and twenties who are probably the culprits, especially those whose parents do not have much of a positive influence on them. I, for one, pick up a quarter to one half of the litter I see on the sidewalk, and drop it (sometimes illegally) in a trashcan. A FaceBook friend of mine supports a meme that says: New Rule: Every time you visit the beach, pick up at least 3 pieces of plastic!

Trying to find a nice graphic to accompany this section of the post, I stumbled on this page from the National Geographic.  Since National Geographic magazine was bought by Rupert Murdoch I have not supported it, nor depended on it for important information, but by all means read it; there is some information that you might like to see. But there seems to be a lot of we can't do anything until we know more, but it's impossible to really know rhetoric in there. Until some business discovers an angle to this problem that they can exploit, we're likely to remain in a state where acting on Ocean Plastic is considered premature.

Well. Business interests do tend to slow response to any environmental problem; consider, for instance, climate change. Exxon has known for years that use of gasoline is heating up the planet, but they hid behind the We need to know more excuse, just as the cigarette manufacturers did. (Until we do know more, let's give everybody cancer. That would be great.)

Unlike shunning saturated fats, picking up beach debris is unlikely to become an instant mass movement, but it is important to give young people a clear signal, by your actions, that de-littering the environment is not just a concern for mean teachers, but for the other adults in their lives as well.  I just do this, not worrying about whether I would be a significant influence on anyone, but now I have noticed that some of my friends are doing it too!  Yay for friends, but, well . . . Let it go, as Disney would say.  (Apropos of that, you might have noticed a lot of litter in the Star Wars movies.  Is that intentional?  Is it just a subtle way of making the protagonists and their environment more human?  It is sad to think that litter is a characteristic human concomitant.)  (Not sure whether 'concomitant' is the word I want.)
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Is it time to write an Obituary for American Education?

I recently saw this on fB:

There is a lot of truth to this sentiment; in many ways it is a--certain sort of--educational failure that has brought us to this to this pass.  It is a bit preposterous to claim that those of us who deplore Trump's philosophy were educated the right way, and that we need everyone to be educated that way.  But--despite what those in our bubble tell us--the right education should be politically neutral.  People should be able to choose the decisions that will imply moral consequences.  Quite honestly, I think the education system has done a remarkably good job of leaving moral issues up to the citizens.

I was not sure how to respond to this meme, signed by a fellow whose heart is (as far as I know) in the right place.  In any case, I responded as follows:

You can't fix the education system. The constitution guarantees that. Rich families always get the education they want, which is not always good for them (and not at all good for the rest of us).  Poor families get what the rich families want us to get, and that's not good for us, either. I don't want to say that we're screwed, but ... it certainly looks that way.  Our only hope is people who were educated well in some other country, and it looks as if they don't want to come here any more, to teach our kids, now that idiots are in charge.  (It's easy to destroy something that works.)

I didn't have time to think out my response carefully, but a large part of what I said seems to hold up to scrutiny so far.  I have to think about this.

Education and Our Society

Suppose we have a young person, say Andy, who lives in a town, call it Hometown.  Hometown is a placeholder for any community.

Andy is a bright fellow.  Hometown needs lots of help.  Whatever help Hometown can get out of Andy can come from two places: Things that Hometown can persuade Andy to do for it, and Things that Andy decides to try to do, just because he wants to.

This is where education comes in.

Our early education focuses on the sorts of things Andy needs to know to be able to go about living in Hometown.  It's a combination of things that Hometown needs Andy to be able to do, not to be a nuisance, and things that Andy needs to be able to do for himself, e.g. buy stuff at the store, get a driver's license, borrow a book from the library, keep a bank account, pay his taxes.

In Middle School, Andy learns various skills he may never need, but which, if postponed, might be too late for Andy to conveniently learn.  These include skills that Andy needs to have fun: computer skills, reading skills, which are also skills in which it would be useful for a Hometown business or employer to have Andy be proficient in.  There certainly are some occupations that Andy could get into that do not require proficiency in reading or writing at the Middle School level (which are, even at this late date, better than the skills that Donald Trump has, for instance; but it doesn't take a lot to be quite a successful businessman).

Now things become interesting.  If Andy were of more than average intelligence (or even if he wasn't), he might not actually be familiar with certain pieces of information or areas of knowledge that he might be interested in.  There's just so far that you can depend on Television to supply this information, or high school, or other sources of information, given that young people don't read much these days.  Furthermore, there are additional skills in whose acquisition Andy might not be interested in, but in which he might be interested later on.  If he holds off on these, by the time he does get interested in them, it might require more effort on his part than he is willing to put in.

Unfortunately, since society has chosen to put Andy with a host of other kids in the same school, and they might all have wildly different interests, the school is forced to teach them all the same skills.  The more affluent the society, the less tolerant the kids are going to be, so that the school is obliged to sweeten the deal by making the skills training as entertaining as possible.

It used to be the case that parents would explore other avenues to encourage their kids to acquire skills that might deliver rewards later in time: deferred gratification.  There used to be special-interest clubs that kids could join: Astronomy Clubs, Business Clubs, Horticulture Clubs, Art Clubs, and so on.  But the hardworking parents of Hometown may not be aware of such things, and the overworked club leaders are getting tired of putting in a lot of work into these clubs, so Andy's intellectual needs are no longer being provided in ideal ways.

So education is a combination of things, some of which are intended to make Andy a functioning member of Hometown society, and a useful citizen at a low level, and employable at a moderate level.  Some aspects of education are intended to awaken Andy's interest in more sophisticated things, which, if Andy picks up on them, will lead to more useful work that Hometown (and Hometown businessmen) can obtain from Andy, which, ideally, would be more rewarding to Andy.  (Of course, a compromise has to be found between what Andy thinks his labor is worth, and what his employers think it is worth, and of course this is a struggle, and usually the employer wins!)

The higher in the education world Andy goes, the more tenuous the line between what he learns, and how useful it makes him.  Those who are new to the education concept tend to believe that no matter what Andy learns, regardless of how much entertainment value his teachers have inserted into their lessons, that it will lead directly to a skill useful for the line of work Andy chooses.  This is not true.  This brings us to the last of the things education has to offer.

Education can also expand Andy's interests.  The more he knows, the wider his circle or interests will be; indeed, as we said, there may be areas of study, areas of knowledge, of whose existence Andy is totally unaware, which could grab him.  It may be an entire field, or a subfield, or a small backwater within a subfield, which may seize Andy's imagination.

And Andy begins to appreciate the interest of his fellow students in these other things, which is an important skill.  Education at this level increases Andy's awareness in ways that are far from being mechanical.  I mean mechanical in the sense that the skill leads directly to its use in Andy's employment.  He could also find, in books, information that even his teachers have not been aware of.  Finally, if he gets to know his teachers well, he could also learn from them unique and interesting approaches to various problems: of understanding problems, and solving them.

So, the connection between Andy's educational experience and the skill-set that he brings away from school is very vague and tenuous, and likely to be different for Andy from what his friend Bill brings away.  You would think that this is an argument for making highly individualized educational plans for each student.  But no parent can afford such an individualized plan; it is only affordable if it is carried out for an entire group of students together.  And whether it is even possible is a matter of luck and accident.  Andy's parents could help luck along in many ways, but they are usually too exhausted to give much thought to such things.

This is the problem of education: how to reconcile the sophisticated training that modern society needs to pass on to its children, with financial constraints of the Business-driven economy within which we have to function.  Excellence is available, but society demands that the better it is, the more expensive it is going to be.  And it requires an enormous amount of flexibility from Andy, his parents, his school and teachers, and his friends.

Hometown citizens of the managerial class would normally say: this is a problem for the teachers.  Give them a small raise, and ask them to come up with a fantastic new education plan by next Tuesday.  And some teachers will jump at the chance, and neglect their present work on the way.  Nobody realizes that the subtle needs of students can only be successfully addressed by those who have the leisure to do it, and the inclination, and the imagination.

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