Rediscovering Creativity by Building It

Winter 2008 Interaction

It took a bunch of kids to come up with the perfect desk, which was pretty much how it was planned. The kids, who attend the Nueva School in Hillsborough, are junior partners in an exciting collaboration with a group of designers and educators at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, better known as the d.school.

It all began when d.school director David Kelley, the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering, asked alumni of his Product Design program for ideas for projects beyond engineering. There was a consensus that sustainability, health and elementary education were priorities that could benefit from “design thinking,” the problem-solving approach championed by Kelley and his pathbreaking team.

Thus the K–12 Lab was born. The roughly 20 members are doctoral students at the School of Education’s Learning Sciences and Technology Design (LSTD) program or master’s students in its Learning Design and Technology (LDT) program, master’s students in the School of Engineering’s Product Design program or fellows at the d.school.

Devising the project was similar to the process used when designing an object. In order to figure out where the problems and needs lie and what solutions might look like, one simply starts by watching.

“Essentially, we’re prototyping,” said lab member Scott Doorley, a graduate of the LDT program and a current d.school fellow. “The problem statement comes at the end. At the front end, we don’t presuppose we know what the problems are. Our responsibility is to observe without knowing what we’re looking for. That way we’ll find it. It’s human-centered.”

Innovation Lab

After meeting among themselves for conceptual prototyping, lab members spent last July working with the teachers and pupils at Nueva, a private school for gifted children. At the same time as they were meeting, construction workers at the school were building a 3,500-square-foot Innovation Lab, a place described as more of a movement than a space, a home where design thinking could be put into practice.

The director of the K–12 Lab is Susie Wise, a doctoral student in LSTD and longtime d.school collaborator.

“What we’re interested in is, how is creativity killed?” she said in the early stages of the project. “In kindergarten all kids love to draw; by fourth grade only a few do, and by the time they get to Stanford everyone thinks they can’t draw. How does that happen? It’s not just because there aren’t enough art classes. That doesn’t address the fundamental issues.”

To get at the fundamental issues, a learner-centered, human-centered approach is crucial, she said.

“Calling it ‘K–12’ makes it seem like it’s about schools. But schools are just a part of our lives, just a part of how kids learn. If you look just at schools, you come up with an endless stream of new models, but you don’t get at the core issues.”

One of the exercises last summer called upon seven children from grades five through eight to “redesign the long car-ride experience.” They divided into two groups, with the leader of each group (the oldest) wielding colored markers at the stand-up portable whiteboards. After long conversations, they each settled on two designs probably not ready for Detroit: one with a small swimming pool, retractable chairs and a sheath of memory metal enabling passengers to swim, eat and watch TV while the car was moving; the other a “drill car,” able to burrow underground at high speeds by shooting dirt out of its way, thus bypassing traffic.

After fabricating a rough model of the contraptions and presenting their ideas, they were told by the adults—K–12 Lab members and a few Nueva teachers, as well as the director of the Innovation Lab—that there was one serious design flaw in each car they had to fix. Disappointed but up to the challenge, they leaped up and ran back to the whiteboards to work out the glitches.

The future of those cars may be questionable, but the value of learning how to consider possibilities, push the limits, come up with fixes and match human needs to human inventions is not. Indeed, it was that session that indirectly led to the development of the perfect desk. In their debriefing session afterward, the pupils agreed that they didn’t like having one of their cohort standing at the board with markers; they all wanted markers.

So the desks at the Innovation Lab, which roll around on casters like everything else that emanates from the d.school, have tops that lift up to become whiteboards, enabling small groups of kids to huddle, markers in hand, and come up with great collective ideas.

They’ll do that in the section of the Innovation Lab where sit-down (and stand-up) instruction takes place. The other section is the “immersion lab,” a potential adventure space where ideas are developed before they are taken into the classroom space. The space is literally a lab, with a panoply of building materials, giant foam blocks, electric cords everywhere, a grid hanging from the ceiling equipped for curtains, lights or whatever feels right, shiny new Macs, and everything on casters, including portable performance stages.

“Design thinking is embodied so well in this room, it happens naturally,” said Adam Royalty, who has a master’s from the LDT program and works part time at the d.school, spending most of it on the Nueva project. “I don’t have to explain to the kids why we’re working as a group; the space does that for me.”

The idea is to gradually incorporate existing and new classes into the Innovation Lab. Members of the K–12 Lab are meeting with teachers to see how that can happen.

At one such meeting late last fall, teacher Tracie Mastronicola met with Innovation Lab director Andrew Salverda and other members of the K–12 Lab team, including Wise. They discussed her sixth-grade physics class, which ends the term with teams of kids building roller coasters embodying the principles of speed, velocity, acceleration and momentum. How could she integrate the class into the Innovation Lab? she asked. One problem with the exercise, she said, was that, because all the projects were required to start off with a 3-foot drop at 60 degrees, they all ended up looking more or less the same. The students were hesitant to experiment.

Make it more human-centered, Wise suggested. As with the development of all design projects, let the kids, working collaboratively, wonder about the roller-coaster experience broadly (as they had with the long car trip). “Build to think, don’t think to build,” she said, repeating an oft-repeated d.school mantra. By making the roller-coaster experience user-centered and story-centered, more possibilities come into view: a roller coaster with more turns, fewer turns, suitable for children, for your grandmother, for maniacs.

Less privileged kids

Working out the mechanics of applying design thinking to elementary classrooms is one thing at Nueva, a well-endowed school for gifted children. How would it work in a classroom where the children have had fewer opportunities in life?

Wise and her colleagues are about to find out. They have been funded by Stanford’s K–12 Initiative to establish a six-week design workshop with sixth graders and another with seventh graders at East Palo Alto Academy Elementary School.

The pilot program, sponsored by the School of Education and the d.school, aims to understand how design processes help students learn, discover which content areas are best suited for design projects and develop tools to bring what is now a custom curriculum development process to a wider range of schools.

Farther away, the design team is working with the Henry Ford Learning Institute, in Dearborn, Mich., to create a ninth-grade version of the d.school’s “bootcamp class,” where the basics of design thinking are set forth, and to develop a curriculum. That project is funded by the Ford Motor Co. through the School of Engineering.

So between Ford, East Palo Alto and Nueva, “the d.school will have created design-thinking curriculum for every grade within K–12,” Wise said.

Back to that perfect desk: It’s not a new conundrum. Many years ago, educational reformer John Dewey told the story of how someone was shopping around trying to find the right desk for his schoolchildren. He just couldn’t find what he wanted. Finally someone identified the problem: “You want something at which the children may work. But these,” he said, pointing to what was available, “are all for listening.”