Continued: "Interview with Ashley Pinakiewicz: Part One" 

Ashley Pinakiewicz, a self-described "MEd student at HGSE. galanizer. dancer. traveler. aspiring writer. student of the world. teacher. ardent eater" returns to our blog to discuss design thinking with Mouse Executive Director Daniel Rabuzzi.

Daniel: Assuming that design thinking in fact holds promise for K-12 education, how do we measure its success? Do we even have usable, education-specific principles, along the lines of The Bauhaus Manifesto, or the design guidelines stipulated by Paul Rand, say, or Dieter Rams, or Don Norman?

Ashley: I wish I had the answer to this question, because I fear design thinking won't gain credibility until we find a way to measure it. This was a question often asked of me at IDEO, when I was pitching projects to potential clients and needed to explain or quantify the value of the work we were proposing. A good designer does enough up-front research to understand what problem a client is trying to solve, and can measure accordingly. For example, if a client is trying to acquire a new kind of target customer, we can look at a metric of sales within that demographic. The design thinking work, however, may be far upstream from sales; if we're creating a new product to sell to that customer, sales will also depend on how that product is built, marketed, distributed, etc. - and as a designer, you can't control all of that.

I don't think that we can measure the success of design thinking in K-12 with one metric. To do so would be to echo the mistakes of the education sector by sacrificing quality of content in the name of a quantifiable something. I do think, however, that we can assess the impact of design thinking in K-12 project by project, or challenge by challenge. I was recently introduced to an organization called Leadership + Design, which teaches design thinking to educational leaders so they can solve their school-based challenges. For some of those leaders, success might be using design thinking to create a more successful back to school night, measured by positive survey data from parents, increased attendance, and teachers more satisfied with the process. For others, it might be using design thinking to create a new system of teacher assessment, measured by increased teacher retention, improved teacher satisfaction, and reduced administrative time for principals. Both are valid approaches to measuring success, despite the fact that they are not universally applicable.

I'm a fan of design guidelines, but they should be just that: guidelines. I prefer to stay away from any sector-wide solution, because I think the search for one is based on a false premise and has prevented the education sector from significant improvement. Sure, we may have some principles that we think are important to consider within education (for example, that students should always be considered key stakeholders), but they should be considered provocations, not rules to live by. Just as every company is different, so is every school. Further, the act of crafting principles is part of the process that engages stakeholders - those who deliver education to students, in our case - and grants them ownership of the work. This is a crucial part of the process I would not skip in the name of a sweeping solution.

Daniel: Design thinking-- and the making it propels-- is messy, ambiguous, divergent. I love this comment by Denise Scott Brown: "Working with a client is a voyage of discovery. It’s subtle. We must sit eye-to-eye and I must ask myself “Do their words and their eyes agree?” As we venture further, there will be horrible and strange ideas that you and your client will discard. But some – although incredibly ugly ­ you will ponder over together and keep returning to, and perhaps you will come to love them, because they solve the problem. That’s a growth process. You and your client learn to accept an “ugly” solution that makes the building work. And that process changes aesthetics and architectural sensibilities."

How prepared are we collectively to unleash messiness, strangeness... even ugliness into the K-12 classroom? How do we translate this deliberate lack of conformity, this "let's throw paint on the walls" approach, into the daily reality of teachers and students?

Ashley: This gets tricky, and I think it all boils down to one problem: education is a high-stakes business. The lives and futures of children are at risk, and so appetite for experimentation and failure diminishes. I'm not sure I've come to a resolution on this point. On the one hand, I think it's crucial that we try new ideas so that we can improve a broken system. On the other hand, every single child deserves our best efforts, and none should be treated as a guinea pig for experimentation. So, how do we reconcile this tension? I'm not sure we can, at least not without risk.

What I think we can do is prototype. It's disheartening to see a concept makes it way around policymakers, get pulled apart and refined, and then implemented on a massive scale while people cross their fingers and hope it works. Where is the prototyping in this process? How can we better engage individual schools or classrooms in the act of testing ideas, while making sure that students are active and aware participants in these explorations of their education? I think this can be done while considering the responsibility we have to provide every single student with an excellent education, but it requires care, patience, time, and appetite for risk, many of which are missing in education's tendency towards urgency, politicized decision-making, and unwillingness to think differently.

Daniel: What book, article, essay would you recommend to our readers? What song, what movie, what game?

Ashley: I love this question! I'm always looking for inspiring content. IDEO helped me realize that what I thought was simply a tendency to get distracted by shiny object was really a desire to make connections among really disparate things. As such, I've tried to think of some resources that you might not find on a typical design thinking search, but that have been instrumental to my thinking (and are influenced by HGSE and IDEO, of course):

• The Universal Traveler, by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall. This is a beautiful book with some excellent suggestions for undertaking the design process The writings of Seymour Papert - any of them - especially "A Word for Learning"
• Creative Confidence, by Tom and David Kelley of IDEO. This is a critical element to design thinking, and one I think gaining some ground in education Ken Robinson has some excellent talks on creativity in education, many of which can be found here
• Universal Methods of Design, Bruce Hanington - a great collection of methods and resources to use in design
• IDEO's Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit - as always, clear, practical, and inspiring content from IDEO
• www.medium.com : I love this site. I am a big believer in the power of storytelling, and there are some beautiful posts on design and education. But I'd recommend perusing content in other genres

Daniel Rabuzzi is Executive Director at Mouse.