Designing with Grade School Kids

On Tuesday I was fortunate to be invited by Mike Doell of Ross+Doell Design to kick off a design project that he has been running at his kids’ school for the past few years. Each year Mike guides a class through the design process to eventually create models and prototypes of all kinds of new products. In the past, Mike’s classes have created new toys, games, candy and clothing. This year Mike will be guiding the class to create entries for the Exploravision Awards, a design competition geared to K-12 students.

Mike asked me to join the class for a 1 hour kick off session as a “brainstorming expert”. Believe it or not, kids in the gifted program are already seeing the world in Gantt charts and project plans even at the age of 9 and need to be facilitated through lateral thinking exercises. While that’s a sad commentary on the education system, I’ll leave that for another blog post. Mike suggested that the biggest “problems” to overcome for the class were:

1. fixation on the first idea to pop into their heads
2. setting aside judgement of ideas.

So in the hour that I had between recess and lunch I decided to break out my old, reliable technique,  improvisation. As of right now, I feel that the principles behind improvisational acting are core to creativity and innovation.

Initially I introduced the group to the idea that “problem solving” is different from “design” by  asking them to shout out the answer to: 2+2. In 1 second everyone yelled out “4!”. I then asked them to shout out the answer to “What is the best video game?” There was a full 60 seconds of yelling out answers. Many people yelled out more than 1 answer. The point: Design processes have to let go of the idea of the “right/wrong” mindset because different designs might be better or worse depending on who you are designing for. The teachers pointed out at the end that this went against almost everything they’re used to. Startling at such a young age.

I then did a few rudimentary improv exercises that the group seemed to enjoy.

1. Association: While in one big circle, I told one student to say the name of an animal out loud and the person to her left had to say the first thing that popped into his mind based on what the previous person said. We went all the way around the circle. This exercise is meant to diminish the self-judgement that often occurs when brainstorming and to reinforce that there is no wrong answer. In the words of Bruce Mau, “the wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question.” We did this exercise twice, trying to improve our time around the circle, ie. be more spontaneous.
2. Malapropism: The kids walked around the room, pointed at an object and called it something that it wasn’t with conviction and enthusiasm. The kids seemed to find this easier than adults. Most adults find it difficult to walk up to a chair and call it a bowl of spaghetti. Our brains are so wired with patterns and taxonomy that we find it physically difficult to jump out of those well worn ruts. The mechanism that makes our brain so efficient at creating and recognizing patterns makes it difficult to force the illogical and nonsensical.
3. It’s Not A…: This game involves everyone sitting in a circle with a hat in the middle and people running to the middle of the circle, grabbing the hat and using the hat for anything other than cranial fashion. The point is to come up with as many possibilities for the hat as the group can. Lots of interesting, zany ideas emerged and there was definitely a “build” as we went on as the kids riffed on each other’s ideas. None of them were wrong.

Moving past the fun and games we talked about one of the jobs of designers being to identify problems in the world and to come up with creative solutions to those problems. To continue the theme of generative, lateral thinking we asked the kids to grab some Post-It Notes and write down a few things that were problems in their own life. The ideas ranged from “my brother is a dork” to “fossil fuels” to “internet is too slow at home” to “cottage cheese” and 50 others.

We sat on those for a bit. Next, I asked who in the class was an artist. Surprisingly only 6-8 people raised their hands. I thought it would have been higher. I explained the importance of being able to sketch out an idea, as words often can’t capture the essence of a design. As DeBono writes in Lateral Thinking, “it would be a pity to limit design by the ability to describe it.”

The task, in 60 seconds, was to sketch out a cup that wouldn’t tip. Awesome results. Even awesomer was that the kids attacked the problem from different angles. Some drew a cup with legs. Some drew a cup that suctioned to the table. One kid drew a hovercup that simply eliminated gravity from the tipping equation! Root cause analysis! I explained the importance of creating 40 possible solutions in 60 seconds and suspending the evaluative process of what was possible, affordable, etc.

Then I asked them to pick one of their “problems” from their list and to draw out the problem on a Post-It without using words. Lots of creativity here and one sad one. One student wrote “I Can’t Draw” on their Post-It.

And that’s where we ended after one hour. Lots of lateral thinking, free association, suspension of judgement and some drawing. All of the “problems” are stuck to the blackboard and next week they might go through an affinity exercise of some sort. Still TBD. The ultimate goal is that groups of 3-4 will form and create a product that will solve the problem of their choice.

To summarize:

1. Kids in grades 4-6 have trouble with notions of generative thinking and suspension of judgement.
2. The kids are being taught to map out their projects on Gantt charts.
3. Not many young’uns consider themselves artists.
4. Running things with kids shouldn’t be as seamless as with adults. Instead of handing out pens to everybody, they should go back to their desks to get their pens. They need to stretch their legs more often than adults. The one minute that it takes to get the pens from their desk will give you an extra five in attention span.

Physical Space: The Forgotten Factor

I happened to stumble upon some notes that I had in an old notebook  about a project that I had some involvement with while working at Bell Canada. It was about the development of Bell’s “campus” that was being built in the suburbs of Toronto. The idea was to collapse all of the smaller offices in and around the city into one big campus for the purposes of increased collaboration amongst employees. The assumption was that if everyone was located in a few buildings on the campus the company would be able to move more quickly, be more proactive, nimble and all of those other good things that companies strive for.

Our group became involved in the real estate discussions because as professional collaborators we thought we could contribute to the discussion based on our experience in designing for human interaction (albeit on an “intervention” basis) and in designing physical space to support those human interactions. In conversing with the architects, we learned some interesting things.

1. Research suggests that workers in large office environments tend to interact with people who are only within 150 feet (50 metres) of their own desk.
2. Up to 87% of knowledge creation is gained informally, through such means as social learning (water cooler wisdom), learning in the moment, communities of practice and other techniques. Information transfer occurs formally, through lectures, workshops and seminars.

* Farrow Partnership Architects

The conclusion I drew from this was that simple co-location does not even come close to guaranteeing increased collaboration amongst employees.

The conceptual solution that I had envisioned was threefold:

1. Apply architectural design principles that are used to build dedicated collaborative spaces to an entire office complex. It’s no secret that traditional cubicle farms don’t exactly lend themselves to lots of interesting conversations among inmates. While the initial dot-com boom accelerated the notion of a more “social” office space as a way of being more creative and productive, there are some deeper principles at play that go beyond free chocolate bars and a pool table. Innovation Labs has a whitepaper on the topic of designing collaborative spaces.
2. Train a network of specialized workers/facilitators/information synthesizers to be responsible for certain physical areas of each office floor. They would help to “design” the work that the employees are doing, facilitate small and large meetings, perform graphic recording, information visualization and other specialized tasks designed to tease out the collective intelligence of the organization. These types of workers would be part of a network of practitioners within the organization who are more in tune with the concept of social business design, the concept of which is now being put into play by the folks at Dachis Corporation. As a network of practitioners they would be in communication with each other and act as a “biological overlay” for the otherwise mechanistic organization. It is a lot to ask for a corporation to switch its mindset to being “social” but if there were networks of people within the organization acting behind the scenes to make this happen, wholesale revolution might not be necessary.
3. Implement the necessary Enterprise 2.0 software to enable knowledge sharing, insight generation, weak signal monitoring and other techniques that will allow the network of practitioners to bring the work from the rest of the organization into their areas of responsibility. They are acting as the eyes and ears to the rest of the organization (and the world at large) for the group to which they’ve been assigned. A further benefit of training these types of workers is that it adds a level of governance and risk mitigation for executives who see social media as being a risky endeavour.

I did my best to sketch out what this might look like at Bell Canada but it’s quite generic and could be applied anywhere. The idea is that with tens of thousands of employees it’s impossible to be co-located. With good design principles, implementation of a soft infrastructure based on principles of collaboration and a hard infrastructure of the right social tools it’s possible to realize a significant shift in how legacy organizations transition to becoming social businesses.

Let’s Not Fight

A new coffee shop, called The Common, opened up in my neighbourhood recently. It’s a very small place with just a few tables so they set up some chairs on the sidewalk. Those fill up pretty quickly so there is nowhere to sit in their shop. This happened to me the other day but I didn’t want to get my coffee to go so I wandered outside of the coffee shop and sat on the ledge of the storefront next to the coffee shop. The store next to the shop is a day spa. Hair cuts, nails, pedicures, etc.

Within a few minutes someone from the store came out and asked me to move and pointed out a sign that I had truly missed, which was asking people to not sit on the ledge, not block the signage, not smoke in front of the store, etc. On one hand, I can appreciate the owners of the business not wanting people hanging out in front of the store. But on the other hand I’m wondering if they’re missing an opportunity on how to be creative with the extra traffic that they’re getting.

For example, they have lots more foot traffic now that a place like a coffee shop has opened up. Maybe setting up a small table giving away free samples in the mornings would be one idea. Maybe setting up chairs in front of their own store, providing seating for the overflow customers in exchange for free coffee for all of the spa employees might be another. Perhaps setting up a “Morning Jolt” program where you get make-up done and an espresso for a bundled price.

Frankly, I don’t know if any of these ideas make sense but the point is that the spa’s “environment” had changed and rather than seek out opportunity in this change they had taken a more adversarial approach with its new neighbour and its neighbour’s customers.