'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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