Rethinking Design Thinking in Technology. Dr David Spendlove The University of Manchester, England.

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1 Rethinking Design Thinking in Technology Education Rethinking Design Thinking in Technology Education Dr David Spendlove The University of Manchester, England

2 A starting point Amongst the worlds biggest problems a device to hold your mobile phone, to store your CDs or making a single slipper do not rank highly. We are encouraging children not to think, not to question and to create superfluous, wasteful, unsustainable items that have little educational value that are difficult to justify.

3 Is intuition really okay. The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct. Examination board: understand that empirical problem solving, a systems approach and intuitive designing are all valid approaches to designing.

4 Challenging the status of the designer Not only is design education in a vocational and professional context disorientated but also in a school context where D&T/Technology education tries to reimage itself on an out of date and misguided concept. The real product of Design and Technology is often illusionary, coercive and collusion.

5 Distorting practice by measuring Teachers who are highly accountable, whose reputation and performance are measured through the perceived success of their students assessed performance will often, despite their best intentions, provide their students with a benign and impoverished creative experience. Such constraining of creative opportunities in learning experiences can lead to oppressive experiences where students are conditioned into a response necessary for meeting a notionally correct view of predetermined knowledge consumption. This modus operandi has increasingly dominated much of teachers pedagogic practice, when one of our core goals as educators should be to maximise the potential for students to be creative and successful learners. The act of design designing is fundamental to technology education. However, the processes for designing and the pedagogical strategies for developing design capability remain problematic when considered in an education setting. Central to this issue is the tension that exists between validity, progression, performativity, manageability and accountability. Leads to hypocrisy of the design and technology educator

6 The hypocrisy of the design and technology teacher When good intentions turn bad Willful blindness Unintended consequences Reconciling own needs and wants with others needs and wants Individual v corporate Avoiding cognitive load Avoiding cognitive dissonance Avoiding metacognition Avoiding - cognitive blisters (Christine Edwards-Leis) Reification fallacy (Nigel Goodwin) Sleeping dolphins

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8 Binary Design Thinking Non thinking design?

9 Rethinking Design Thinking in Technology Education A term with growing popularity In design education In general education In industry In business Ownership does not reside in Technology Education

10 Is it just a design process?

11 Reasons why Design thinking may not thrive in a Technology education context: Distorted by assessment Distorted by history, pedagogy and performativity Failure to recognize the thinking elements of Design Thinking Bound by rationalist notions and framed within a forward and positive projecting context. No uniform definition of design thinking (Moggridge, Rogers)

12 Design Thinking is increasingly considered as: Participatory co-creation activity Requiring engagement with problem owners With specific domain understanding Requires a particular form of thinking Application of specific process skills.

13 Too little emphasis on.. Thinking Empathy Emotion Irrationalities of designer/user Metacognition Heuristic flaws Cognitive bias

14 Don Norman Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design

15 Too great an emphasis on:

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19 Each model fails to acknowledge Designer constraints (cognitive or commercial). Heuristic flaws. Underlying assumptions relating to how social, political, theological, psychological, philosophical, pedagogical and cultural values all interact with decisions we each make. Ultimately our cognitive state is slow, messy, error-prone and unreliable, the product of 3 billion years of trial-anderror evolution that has led us to have cognitive limitations that lead to weak memories, unreliable decision making and to believe the improbable or impossible.

20 Rethinking Design Thinking in Technology Education An unfortunate consequence of such cognitive limitations is an overriding antidote of avoiding engagement with these limitations through over reliance upon intuition, gut feeling and simple rules of thumb often resulting in heuristic flaws. We operate quasi-automatically and with reasonable proficiency (Pigliucci, 2012) and believe an instinctive sense that something is right, a heuristic shortcut, but which is prone to errors when engaged in decision making particularly when operating under a cognitive load. A further way of overcoming our limitations is through the adoption of purely optimist strategies. Optimism bias is a key survival strategy as we mentally project forward and identify our future needs. However again this is prone to error which Sharot (2012) cites as the superiority illusion in that we tend to think we are better than we are.

21 So It would therefore appear that any form of education claiming to develop design thinking and capability in design should involve an insight into the limitations of designerly thought and the inherent cognitive limitations and heuristic traps. However an equally important dimension has to be a strong ethical and sustainable dimension, which relates to the exploitation of cognitive limitations and emotional manipulation of others. A sad reality is that designers as well as helping others also exploit others through the shaping of a future world that may not be achievable or desirable. As such a paradox exists that recognises that significant negative impact on the natural world comes from some of the most creative individuals.

22 Rethinking Design Thinking Metacognitive Debiasing and Reflection Tools in Design Thinking (MDRTDT)

23 Don t think about the solution think about your thinking about the solution

24 DT IDEAS Lesson Study 1 Don t Trust Illusions Decisions Emotions Anchoring Self-serving bias

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