Design is a way of viewing the world differently

EXPLAIN by Design Minds 

New perspectives create new opportunities, new solutions and gradually a better world.

Design Minds utilises design thinking to develop the capabilities of successful and creative 21st century citizens within existing education and learning benchmarks.

Design Minds achieves this by explaining design, inspiring through resources and empowering through design thinking toolkits. Design is presented as a process in its simplest form: inquire, ideate, implement and at each stage evaluate.

Design Minds is not about getting rid of what you’re already doing as a teacher, but is rather a way to augment and enhance what already happens in the classroom by accessing and sharing resources and partnering with real world designers, businesses and the broader community.

Explain

You don’t need to be a designer to harness design thinking. Anyone with the right tools and practice can use design thinking to explore a problem. Design Minds provides these tools to educators.  Click to view our explain video.

Inspire (resources)

Empower (Toolkits)

Design Phases

Capabilities

Benchmarks

Considering Pimpama’s new and rapidly expanding master planned housing developments, ‘My School Space ’ can act as an agent of social change and community capacity building for the new residents and kids searching for a sense of authorship and ownership of their ‘place’.

The 2013-14 Designer-in-Residence Program, formally known as the Artist-in-Residence Project (AIR), having received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland , has finished residency for the year with great success. Thirteen weeks of working through inquiry, ideation and implementation design thinking phases with a selection of year eight students at Pimpama State Secondary College has delivered a clear outcome in the form of a project scenario booklet . The booklet proposal defines an innovative set of scenarios that could enable a strong relationship between the school and the new Woolworths being built down the road, due to be completed in 2014.

The ‘My School Space’ scenario will connect the two institutes by a schools program that sees a permanent space (say 6m x 4m) inside the new Woolworths supermarket, facilitated by Pimpama students with the help of parents, teachers and Woolworths staff. The social enterprise space will become a platform for various activities run by the school, such as the schools fruit and veg garden market, up-cycling market from local waste construction material, repair bookings such as push bikes, clothing, toys, appliances and crockery repair, hand skilling workshops and community maintenance scheduling. Gardening, re-designing, repairing and social enterprise entrepreneuring activities integrate into the schools curriculum, utilising the schools equipment and grounds. From there, foods and goods are transported to the Woolworths ‘My School Space’ which acts as both the place of exchange and a free and open place for people to meet and discuss local community events.

Importantly, this proposal was not discussed and investigated until the later stages of the residence program. Head of Department for the Creative Industries,Adam Jefford and myself , spent weeks in a process of unlearning and learning inquiry exercises with the students, unpacking various faces of structural unsustainability. The aim was to begin ideation of an increased repoitore of ‘options’ for defining and solving wicked problems, options that otherwise seem unrealistic in the dominant modern industrial narrative.

Exercises included round table discussions, cognitive mapping and mapping relationality using brown craft paper and pens. Students were taught methods of constructing nodes and clustering ideas using visual hierarchy tools such as line weight, colour and icons. They practiced inquiry into wicked problems such as the destruction of nature, equality, transport, destruction of place, lack of acceptance for cultural diversity, waste, desire for newness in consumption, de-skilling and monopolised markets. Students worked on cognitive causality maps, placing some of these problems into narratives of the past, present and future. Then, they were encouraged to build alternative narratives, i.e. fictions, around how they might redirect the problem. Only through this process were students then prepared to make informed decisions about why and how they might like to construct an alternative vision for their own community. A relationship between Woolworths and the school was then the chosen mediator by which the students’ voices can be heard.

By theoretically framing in this way, students were able to use a new set of rhetorical tools to explain to each other, their student peers, teachers and parents what it is they’re working on. We noticed conversations where students now had words to articulate their concern for current global circumstances.Moreover, they could see how this theory they were now equipped with relates to practice in creating the scenario of the ‘My School Space’.

Throughout the residency we have focussed on nurturing an interdisciplinary approach. Students were encouraged to understand design from a much wider perspective than mainstream discourse would have it appear. For example, when working on the booklet, students were treated as a design team in an interdisciplinary design agency, where roles included script writer, theory writer, graphic designer, project phase planner, photographer, illustrator, 3d designer, sound, lighting and play director. It became very clear to the students at the outset that if one of these team members lagged behind it would have a negative domino effect throughout the project line. This generated a self-learning environment where students felt responsible to support their weakest link.

Next year, we plan to bring the “My School Space’ into the prototyping stage and begin working with Woolworths on the space. This socially and environmentally responsible design thinking proposal is the students voice formulated, articulated and seeking to be heard and we believe in its benefits for the community. Amongst others, those benefits being; reduction of de-skilling in society through learning craftsmanship skills, promoting a culture of re-using goods rather than desiring the new, extending product lifecycles, eating and growing healthy fresh local produce with no transportation footprint and developing community capacity to maintain local social enterprise economies.

It is anticipated that the ‘My School Space’ tripod School/ Supermarket/ Community partnership model can be appropriated in various other localities too, which we would highly encourage. At this early stage in the development of the project we also would appreciate feedback.

Source: Design Minds (http://goo.gl/RVE6K0)