10/19/12 The Importance of Right-brain Thinking in Education | Design on GOOD

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LEARN in Design, Education and Good Blog January 29, 2010 at 8:30 AM
The Importance of Right-brain Thinking
in Education
How teaching design to middle schoolers clarified one teacher's definition of the
discipline.
Here is what I can say about my first semester teaching design to 6th and 7th graders: It was
not a train wreck. I knew a lot about design, and I knew a lot about leading a group of people
through a design process. But I knew next to nothing about inner-city middle school students, or
teaching them. Mistakes were inevitable.The idea that design education could and should start
earlier is not mine; designers love to talk about this idea. I had been talking about it for years, but
I had been talking to designers-not to teachers or students. To find out what this concept might
actually take to achieve, I needed to stop talking and do something. I needed to build some
empathy in context, and I needed to build a prototype.I like to think of a prototype as any action
that helps you answer your questions or test an idea. Teaching the class was that for me. A
prototype isn't really research (which can also answer questions) and it isn't a discussion
(which sometimes helps you ask questions); it is an action. It's out there. A lot of people hate
prototyping because this kind of experimentation can make you vulnerable: They often fail or at
the very least have the potential to fail, and knowing you're going to fail is not really in anyone's
comfort zone. But how often and how much do you learn from the safety of your comfort zone?I
signed up to teach through a remarkable organization called Citizen Schools. Citizen Schools is
a national organization that provides figurative scaffolding for people like me who want to teach
(in the form of helping with lesson plans, sourcing materials and, thank heavens, classroom
behavior management). Professionals and hobbyists can literally teach anything they know
using the tools provided by Citizen Schools. In other classrooms across the middle school
where I was teaching design, other Citizen teachers were instructing kids in gardening,
claymation filmmaking, mock trial law, and robotics. It was really something.So how do you
introduce design thinking to 6th and 7th graders who have never heard of design? I should have
seen this as a poetic kind of challenge-a what-is-the-meaning-of-your-work kind of moment.
Instead, as I built a loose lesson plan, I just felt ticked-off that I hadn't chosen to teach knitting. I
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10/19/12 The Importance of Right-brain Thinking in Education | Design on GOOD
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love knitting, and demonstrating it would have been easy and honest. With design I wasn't even
sure what I was selling. A process? A philosophy? I had to remind myself when you prototype,
you often have to learn by doing. So I went for it.I decided to take my students through one
design challenge over the course of the semester. My constraint was that it had to be a problem
that was happening in the school, not something like world peace or hunger. Each week would
build on the week before and would rely on skills (which I presumed they had) such as writing,
drawing, building, and verbal communication.A lot of it went well. The kids chose a great design
challenge: The lockers at their school were off limits to students because a few bad eggs had
been using them to stash drugs and weapons. Students had to carry all of their books and
belongings all of the time. Our challenge was to make that schlepping easier. We researched
the problem, interviewed experts, and walked the school making observations, and taking
pictures of ways students were working around the problem. The final prototypes were of a
backpack that was also a filing system, and a website where you could design your own
backpack with special features like hidden pockets to stash phones and cash to prevent
theft.The kids were great. They were earnest and curious. And to say they captured my heart
would be an understatement.However, teaching them revealed a stark illustration of the situation
we're facing in education, at least from my point of view as a designer. The skills or intuition I
assumed they had for drawing, observation, and building were alarmingly underdeveloped. In
short, any in-born human willingness to experiment, cut, glue, break, build, or paint, had
atrophied.I had set out to teach design as a problem solving process (which it is!) but along the
way I had forgotten that it is also a frame of mind-and I mean that almost literally. In design,
thinking "differently" is paramount. Often, that is achieved through expressions like building,
drawing, tinkering. Using your hands to build, draw, and tinker takes the problem out of your
head, or as some science might indicate, from one side of your head to the other. The education
system, for myriad reasons valid and otherwise, has abandoned "right-brained" skills. Our
culture of education has never put a lot of emphasis on these things, but as budgets for the arts,
physical education, and drama dwindle, it seems to be getting worse. This is not just affecting
students' ability to make a drawing or perform a play, it is affecting their ability to solve problems
of all kinds because it limits the practice they get at engaging these other parts of their brains.
That engagement is what leads to new thinking. That engagement is creativity.So, this coming
semester I'm taking a different approach. I'm going to focus on building a little confidence in
those right-brained activities. The working title for the class is, "Thinking with your Hands." I
haven't finalized the curriculum yet (if you have suggestions I am eagerly taking them), but
we're going to build things, draw things, break things and act things out. We aren't going to
worry about solving some big problem over the course of 10 weeks, other than the problem
facing so many school kids and most of the adults I know: Thinking differently gets hard when
you don't practice.Kate Canales is a principal designer at Frog Design and an enthusiastic
volunteer at Citizen Schools.Illustration by Will Etling.
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