Category Archives: design

Time out for a brief rant about “blended learning”

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I am scanning Twitter and ran across an item with a link to a post that purports to explain what “blended learning” is and why it is important.

Arrrgh. I hate that term.

And I’d argue it’s done more harm than good in the quest to get learning & development professionals to think more creatively and broadly about learning.

ALL learning is blended. It’s social, it requires applied practice and tapping into all sorts of forms of content. Why can’t we just stop this silly labeling nonsense and just declare that the entire organizational workplace is our learning environment – and that includes all the ‘blend’ of rich activities, connections and technologies that make up the workplace?

I’m done now. Thanks.

Design for America – Fast Company (and the story behind the story)

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What Fast Company this week recognizes in its design issue – an educational innovation called Design for America  — is a compelling story not only for what it is today, but how it came to be in the first place.

Several of my MSLOC colleagues were/are deeply involved in the startup of the program at Northwestern University and its subsequent expansion. Jeanne Olson writes eloquently about that growth in Design for America: Co-Creating with Tomorrow’s Designers (an article also published this week) in Core77. Sami Nerenberg, a designer and currently graduate student at MSLOC, is currently Director of Operations at DFA and has a huge hand in spreading the program to other universities (Cornell’s DFA activities were profiled by Fast Company). Other colleagues have been coaches and advisors, or in the case of alumni Katy Mess, were there in the very beginning making the vision real.

Olson’s Core77 piece offers a great look at the back story of how the program co-creates the learning environment with its students. And the result is not only real know-how about design – but incredible impact on the communities in which the DFA students operate. Anyone who is drawn to the idea that education should start and end with actual practice (doing the work of real practitioners) should study the design and growth of DFA. When students get this excited about their education, we need to pay attention.

Innovation self-efficacy: Do you believe you can create change?

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Mazatlan Diver Sequence
I came across an intriguing and unique perspective on this question through the video of a talk given by Liz Gerber, a professor in the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University.

Liz’s talk covers her thinking on how we can use design processes as a way to change people’s belief in their ability to innovate and create change. And not just any innovation and change — but how we address some of the more difficult challenges facing society (for example, the obesity epidemic).

In the the video, Liz makes the comment that when discussing social change issues, you often hear non-designers say things like “I don’t know how to solve that problem,” or “I don’t know where to start.” But rarely do you hear something like that from a designer. Designers seem to have a fearlessness (Gerber’s word) when confronted with challenges that might require them to experiment and fail before finding a solution. So how do we teach people to have the fearlessness that ultimately leads to innovation?

Gerber’s answer is a mastery experience — actually doing design for social change. And in her case it takes the form of Design for America, a program for undergraduates at Northwestern where cross-disciplinary teams of students collaborate with local community groups and non-profits to solve real problems.

There is a great moment in the video during which one of the DfA students relates his experience and the impact it has had on his “innovation self-efficacy.” I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of these students as they work on their projects and his story and insights are common across them all. It is easy to be affected not only by the enthusiasm, but the real results that are coming out of their efforts.

For me, the challenge of learning from design process is first learning how to turn off your natural inclination to jump to a solution. There is a real payoff in dedicated empathic observation, and in combining observation with smart data gathering and analysis, before you begin to brainstorm potential solutions. Challenge #2 is in learning from prototype. Again, it’s a skill to detach your emotions from a prototype design and learn from how your target population actually engages with the prototype before moving forward. It’s good to fail. You learn. And you learn to become fearless.

Photo Mazaltan Diver Sequence By Jennifer Williams from Hayward, USA (Mazatlan Diver Sequence) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons