Designing the Future World: A Thinking with Things course
As a case study of thinking with things in the classroom, I want to tell you about the undergraduate general education course I created, Designing the Future World. Once I had really begun to understand that students think with their hands, their bodies, and their immediate environments, and once I had created a studio-style classroom in which we could all pursue that understanding, there was no going back. To continue to teach using the half-measures from the days when my students had chairs with wide arms but no tables to build and collaborate on, and when I had to hand carry the physical materials for each class into and out of the classroom, would be to shortchange these embodied learners. Without a fully re-imagined course, I would also miss my chance to further explore a thinking-with-things pedagogy and the fun and surprise that can accompany it. I wanted to embrace sociologist Richard Sennett’s maxim, “Making is Thinking.”[1]
Building on my experience teaching a social-science-based course on Sustainable Development that a colleague and I had begun in the late 1990s, I created a new course and called it “Designing the Future World.” Inspired by the student who had told me that the project I’d introduced in the Sustainable Development course didn’t just teach him about environmental challenges but taught him that “I could do something about” the problem, my primary goal for the course was to develop that sense of agency in my students, and give them some tools to aid them in addressing complex social, economic, and environmental problems.
One of the key skills I wanted to cultivate in my students was “design thinking,”[2] which, in its broadest form, is a problem-solving method well adapted to situations that are unique, highly complex, and never permanently solved. In the class, students learned a multi-step process: identify a problem, gather relevant information, describe the problem, brainstorm possible solutions, evaluate solutions, develop the best ideas, construct a prototype of the solution, evaluate and modify the prototype, and communicate their work to others. The process is not linear, and after practicing abbreviated versions of the approach in the first half of the semester, much of my work in the second half of the semester was coaching student teams through the process as they worked on a project of their choice. In this way, my students learned to tackle what the urban planning literature calls “wicked problems.”[3]
On the first day of class I give my students a handout of the “Five Myths About Learning in College.” I talk about how much more interactive the course will be compared to what most are used to, and I lead them through my introductory Lego exercise (“build a monument/garden/tower” and “build something that expresses how you learn/where you see yourself in five years/your favorite learning environment”). In so doing I give students a taste of how this course will be different, and I also discover a little about each student’s personality and their learning preferences. Occasionally a student drops the course after this first class, but more often I have a student ask whether their friend or roommate can also take the course because they think they would love it. One student, in his final course reflection, said, “the Lego [exercise] where we created our ‘ideal study environment’ allowed us to create something with our hands and share this creation with our peers. This technique of allowing students to teach each other by their experiences and creations is a great way to show that all students are different.”
Many of the things I do as a teacher are not original to me, nor do I claim to have done anything close to a perfect job of teaching my students. The course is always a work in progress as I try to find material that is topical and engaging, and replace topics and assignments that are not working well with material I think will work better. Here are a few elements of the course that I think work best:
Hands-on in-class exercises
Having used the Lego exercise the first day, in a subsequent class I introduce students to the principles of so-called Universal Design, a design approach that aims to accommodate users with the widest possible range of abilities. Universal Design began in the field of architecture, identifying physical barriers such as stairs and round doorknobs and advocating their replacement with, for example, ramps and lever door openers. Universal Design has now spread to other fields such as education. I challenge my students with a Universal Design Scavenger Hunt, in which students leave the classroom in small groups for 15 minutes and explore the building to find as many violations of the principles of universal design as they can. When they return to the classroom, each group chooses one of the violations they found and make a quick sketch poster of a redesign that would ameliorate the problem. All teams tape their posters to the wall and we mill around, looking at their designs and discussing them.
Early in the semester I do an exercise in which students used modeling clay. To respond to a reading I assign about empathy as a design skill, I ask each student to use the clay to model (even in a very abstract way, and in three minutes) something or someone they wish to empathize with. As with the Lego, after they build we go around the room and each student shows their clay sculpture and says what it represents. (I tell students before they begin that they will be showing their work to others, so that if something is too personal they can select a different focus). After the exercise is over and the students place their clay back in the plastic package it comes in, I explain that some people benefit from having a low cognitive load activity they can do with their hands while they are trying to pay attention (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of this). I invite the students to take the clay away with them if they want to, or to leave it in a plastic bin I keep near the door so they can retrieve the clay before each class. Every semester, somewhere between a quarter and a half of my class of 24 students take me up on this offer. The only rule I impose is that they not use the clay in a way that distracts them or others during class, because of course this would defeat the purpose.
In the Fall of 2019 I took advantage of an exciting opportunity. The university was opening a research facility called the Fabric Discovery Center, part of a national network to support research and development on advanced technical textiles and their manufacturing. A local organization, the Fashion Makerspace, moved into the building in order to collaborate with the FDC. I was already interested in how textiles and fashion could be a vehicle for engaging students and teaching concepts in science, technology, engineering, and math. To take advantage of this new opportunity, I invited the Fashion Makerspace founding director Diana Coluntino to partner with me in teaching a revised version of Designing the Future World. For half of every week’s three hour class, we were in a seminar room discussing readings, watching presentations from me and from students, and in general doing the things that required us to work as a group. For the second half of the class we went to the Fashion Makerspace, where students learned to thread a sewing needle, do basic hand sewing, and use a sewing machine. The students embraced the opportunity; although almost none of them had done any sewing before, they threw themselves into it and even brought work home with them when not required to do so. Teaching students to sew in college, except in a fashion design program, is wildly unorthodox, but the students loved it. At the end of the semester they said things like: “I loved the sewing aspect. I now have a skill that makes me a more effective adult, which is rare in college. I was able to make a tie!” and “[using the sewing machine], I felt it was like I had a hidden talent because I was very good at using it. I am not the best when it comes to quizzes. A lot of people are book smart but don’t know how to use their hands when it comes to work.”
As a warm-up for the project that would occupy them for the second half of the semester, Diana created an assignment she called “Frankenstein clothing.” We asked every student to bring in three pieces of clothing they did not mind cutting up (a recent assignment involved a trip to a thrift store, where they could purchase clothing to cut up if they didn’t already have what was needed). The task we gave them, which they worked on during class time over the course of three weeks or so, was to create a new garment from pieces of the three garments they brought in. The results were wonderfully inventive, and the task was achievable even by students who had never sewed before. While creating a new garment from scratch would have required skills we did not have the time to teach them, creating a “mashup” from existing garments was a great way of scaffolding the skill of creating a new piece of clothing, and good preparation for the large project to come. On the final day of class some students displayed, or even wore, their Frankenstein clothes, making evident their pride in what they had accomplished. “I am ecstatic that I can mend clothing when required and make old clothing new by ‘Frankensteining’ multiple piece of clothing together,” commented one student.
Just in case they were getting overconfident, though, they also had an in-class assignment in which they were divided into four groups. Each group had a single piece of clothing I brought to class—a pair of jeans, a man’s dress shirt, a karate jacket, and a short coat—and each student was asked to examine the piece of clothing in front of them carefully and make a drawing. If this garment were taken apart at the seams and each piece laid flat, what would the pieces look like? Once the drawings were completed I collected them and showed them to the class using the document camera in the seminar room. The drawings varied wildly. The lesson was that, while we take clothing for granted, it can really be quite complex, and that it can take very careful observation to understand how a garment is constructed and from what elements.
Learning Exercises
Instead of asking my students to write short papers, I give them near-weekly homework called learning exercises, which ask them to do something, then write a reflective essay of one to two pages about what they have done. These are generally very popular with students, who make comments like, “giving small individual assignments over the weeks that have us look at something and bring up our own thoughts on it rather than worrying about tests or quizzes made the class a lot less stressful allowing me to actually focus on what we were learning more.” The active learning component, which often involved going someplace in the community, was very popular: “ [I liked] how the learning exercises sent us out in the community. This started a discourse within my family and friend group where we can all talk about the environment and what we can do….we were encouraged to speak to each other and be active in our community to find out answers.
When we learn about environmental sustainability and the dynamics of complex natural systems, for example, the learning exercise asks each student to spend four days during the coming week recycling absolutely as much of their waste as they possibly can. I instruct them to keep a journal of what they recycle, where, and how, and ask them to think about what makes recycling easy and what makes it difficult in any given situation. I warn them that they will not always be successful, and that the point of the assignment is to notice what goes wrong, not to achieve perfection. At first I expected some resistance because I was asking for some sustained effort and attention from my students, but I found over the years that this was one of the most popular learning exercises I assigned. Most students already recycle, but even diligent recyclers are taken aback by how challenging recycling can be (Is this candy wrapper recyclable? Why aren’t there more recycling bins? Why can’t I recycle a pizza box?) Their observations lead easily into a class discussion about the ways in which waste handling is a system with many moving parts, and reflections on what it would take to make change. “The learning exercises were fun and eye-opening and allowed for the class discussions to really ‘hit home.’ I especially liked going over what everyone did…and seeing what we all got out of it. I saw the learning exercises actually mattered,” said one student.
Often the first learning exercise is “Bad Designs,” inspired by the web site BadDesigns.com, created by human factors designer Michael J. Darnell between 1996 and 2010. Darnell describes many badly designed artifacts, from insulin bottles to traffic intersections to baffling glass doors. On each page of the web site is a poorly designed item with a photograph and a description of the problem (Do I push or pull this door? Which type of insulin is in this bottle? How do you turn this on?) Then he proposes a redesign that would reduce or eliminate the problem. I want my students to recognize that most of their surroundings are designed by people, and that some of the frustrations of daily life come from bad design decisions, not individual stupidity. The learning exercise asks them to observe things around them, select something that is badly designed, and create a page similar to the pages on the Bad Designs web site, with an image, a description of the problem, and a proposed solution.
The ability to observe problems and contemplate improvements is a skill I am eager to develop in my students; I view it as foundational to learning to Design the Future World. Learning exercises are deliberately both active and reflective, and they can be tailored to particular versions of the course. When the class met in the Fashion Makerspace, one of the learning exercises, inspired by the anti-sweatshop, anti-fast fashion campaign Fashion Revolution, was “Who Made My Clothes?” We asked students to select one of the actions advocated by the campaign, take that action, and report on it. Some students chose to write to their favorite clothing brands and ask “who made my clothes?” in the hope of learning where their clothes were manufactured and by whom, under what labor conditions. The goals of the learning exercise were to make students think about how their clothing comes into being, and to increase their sense of agency in seeking information about social justice issues, and then taking action. At the end of the semester, one student still remembered this learning exercise and commented, “I did not expect encouragement for being an advocate such as contacting corporations over how their clothes are made.”
Project
Beginning at mid-semester, once we have a lot of design exercises and study of a variety of complex problems under our belts, students select a topic, a “wicked problem,” that will be the focus of their project for the second half of the semester. Their objective for the project is to propose a product or other intervention that could potentially have a positive impact on the complex problem they have selected. The students have already learned that it is misleading to speak of “solving” highly complex social or environmental problems; instead I urge them to think about how to nudge things in a preferable direction, which is often the goal of design.
The project has three deliverables, which must be completed by the final class of the semester. The first is a poster, on which they explain, using images and text, what the problem is they are addressing, what they propose to do about this problem, and why their proposal is worthwhile. These are made on freestanding tri-fold boards of the sort typically used in high school science fairs, so that projects can be arranged around the room on tables at the open house.
The second deliverable is a three-dimensional physical artifact, which may be a rough prototype if they are proposing a device of some sort, or it can be a construction which illustrates or dramatizes the problem. I call them “concept prototypes,” which, like concept cars at auto industry shows, express a design intention but are not ready for full scale production. For example, a team focused on reforestation built a small robotic device with Lego and a microprocessor. Their design story was that the robotic rover could travel through the forest, test moisture in the soil with a probe, and drop a seed at suitable locations. At the open house, their prototype struggled a bit even with the carpeting on the floor, but they did have a moisture sensor onboard, and a little robot that could move around. Another team, interested in geothermal heating and cooling of homes, built a small dollhouse and programmed a microcontroller to act as a thermostat. A pair of music majors concerned with plastic waste accumulating in the nearby river collected plastic bottles from the riverbank and made them into improvised musical instruments. In the Fabric Discovery Center, a team concerned with campus safety created a glove that could trigger an alarm and act as a moderate defensive weapon (a scratchy surface on the glove’s back) if the wearer were attacked.
The third deliverable is an elevator pitch, a sixty-second speech that summarizes the problem the team is addressing and the design they created (as if they were briefly in an elevator with their boss and wanted to tell her about their bright idea, which is the origin of the term). By drafting and then practicing the pitch, students learn to boil their project down to a succinct verbal presentation to use with visitors at the end of the semester.
I use a process with near-weekly milestones that guides students through the stages of developing a project, from initial ideas to the final products they will present at a public open house. The process begins with students, in two-person teams, selecting their topic of focus and doing some background research on the problem. In a short meeting with me, we discuss their topic and the approach they are considering taking. Some topics are not well suited to a project for this class—I have had students who are interested in making nuclear reactors safer, or in sophisticated novel technologies for carbon capture. I tell them that, while these are worthy efforts, I do not have the scientific expertise to guide them (nor do they have the expertise to make a meaningful contribution, it turns out when I question them). So what can they do in seven weeks, with the expertise they have or can acquire quickly, that could be a meaningful intervention in a complex problem? I help them to frame the problem in a way that is most likely to be productive and allow them to converge on a satisfactory result by their deadline. Usually I need to urge them to narrow their thinking (from global warming in general, for example, to the reduction of greenhouse gasses generated by students at the university, or from solving homelessness to supporting the homeless in a specific, local way, in consultation with the city’s homeless shelter.) Occasionally a team needs to broaden their thinking. They may be hyper-focused on the pet project of one team member, without thinking about whether it is a good match for the course, the assignment, or the other partner’s interest. In that case, I push them to open up and consider alternatives that are still consistent with their interests and capabilities.
The first major deliverable for each team is a two-minute slideshow they prepare and present to the class. In the show they name the complex problem they are addressing, give some facts about the problem, and discuss how they might approach designing an intervention or device that addresses the problem. After each team presents, we have a brief question-and-answer period in which I also give the team feedback. This is the first time that other students get to see what their peers are working on, and they learn by seeing the other projects, and by hearing the feedback given, which often has implications for their own project. In my feedback I model design thinking and ask “what if” questions. I also reinforce the notion that this is a process that can have dead ends, and that as long as you recover quickly from trying something that doesn’t pan out, you can learn a lot. In a video that shows an industrial design firm’s sometimes chaotic-looking process the students learn that it can be good to fail early and often in order to succeed. I emphasize that any proposal they put forward at this point is provisional and that they should continue to explore and try out ideas.
The next deliverable is a learning exercise with the proposed text for the students’ poster, and a description of the artifact they plan to create. Again I meet with the teams individually for discussion of their plans, giving them feedback and suggestions that can help them over the inevitable hurdles. The last deliverable before the open house is a text of the 60-second elevator pitch they will use to tell guests about their project. During the next to last class, students present their project in class to their fellow students and practice their pitches. All of these milestones give students a sense of progress and sustains their motivation. As one student remarked, “having the Open House gave us a goal for the project just beyond receiving a grade for it and never thinking about it again. I found this motivating and put serious effort into my project as a result.”
The final class meeting is devoted to the open house. Students set up their posters and artifacts around the room and visitors drop in to see their projects. Guests wander around the room, stopping at the students’ posters to discuss their projects. While other students, staff, faculty, and even occasionally parents come to the open house, among the most loyal visitors over the past five years have been the staff of the student entrepreneurship program. Their discussions with students are often more substantive, and they also take the opportunity to encourage students to further develop their project as part of the entrepreneurship program. This adds an extra layer of meaning to the Designing the Future World course experience because it charts a trajectory beyond the end of the semester and offers support for students who like their project enough to take it further. One student commented, “I was nervous at first, but after warming up to it all, I enjoyed getting to present our project. One of the guys who visited was intrigued by what we had done, and handed me a business card (which I still need to follow up on).”
The open house is the climax of the course—part celebration, part performance, and a powerful learning experience that students will not quickly forget. It is not unusual for students to gain a significantly deeper appreciation of what they have done when they see the response of visitors. Projects do vary in quality, but even the weaker projects often come alive at the open house, and I can see the results in my students faces and in the way they talk about the open house in the debrief afterward.
The artifacts students create are especially important as a way to engage visitors and communicate the nature and significance of the project. While some students embrace the creation of an artifact, others resist, but I insist because I have seen the power of having objects to show during what would otherwise be a poster session. The university often has poster sessions of student work across the disciplines, but when I go to one of these I am quickly overwhelmed. Students who have a model or prototype to show get the lion’s share of the attention, and my students learn at the open house how valuable it is to present guests with a “thing to think with” and discuss. Students with good artifacts get especially good and detailed feedback. As one of the students in Figure E.5 said, “I found it very valuable to display our project at the Open House. The reason being is because we had a very good idea. I felt that each person that came to our display gave us really good feedback and certain advice and things that we should do to make a product better.” Another student said, “I found it valuable to display my project because I was able to receive feedback from people that weren’t involved in the course. I have a lot of ideas for improvement and I look forward to continuing development on [our] design.”
One of the most memorable moments for me was the team that wanted to address the opioid epidemic, and insisted on creating a brochure to educate people about opioids. I pushed them hard—aren’t there already a lot of brochures? What value are you adding? I saw that they were trying to attack the problem in its entirety, which is not a recipe for success, and suggested they narrow their focus to an issue such as how to get Naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug, into as many hands as possible. Still they resisted. Then they astonished me by coming to class the week before the open house with a proposal to put doses of Naloxone into the boxes that hold fire hydrants in public and multi-family buildings. Brilliant and eminently feasible. A year later, I heard a radio report that the Veterans Administration was starting to put Naloxone kits in the same cabinets that house Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) for treating heart attacks.[4] AEDs are already widespread in the VA system, and adding opioid-reversal kits is relatively simple and potentially life-saving. I hope my students, who had since graduated, heard the same report.
In students’ end-of-semester written reflections on the course, it generally gets very high marks.[5] Most comment on how different the course is from their other courses, saying things like:
“As a Civil Engineering student, I’m used to 50 to 75-minute blocks of grinding through a brand new set of examples each and every class. This course was a nice breather.”
“While signing up for this course I thought it was going to be boring and something I would not enjoy. It turns out I was completely wrong in every way possible.”
“This course helped me learn a lot about me and how I can improve my skills mentally and physically… What I mean by that is that it really helps you to think outside the box and be creative and view all the different ways you can you use to solve a problem.”
“Honestly, I had a blast. This is my favorite course at UML and I got way more out of it than I would in a regular boring gen-ed. I made some good friends and got some great life skills and insight. This was a great bang for your buck course at UML.”
“When I signed up for this class it was an elective that was just picked out for me. In all honestly before I started on that very 1st Monday, I was about to drop the class and my boyfriend told me to go. Because he felt it would be a class that I would really enjoy and couldn't explain why…After that 1st day I didn't wanna leave. I actually showed up to every class because I really wanted to.”
“This is one of my favorite courses I’ve ever taken. It was a course about how to learn things and how to think creatively, which is something that college traditionally lacks. I will remember this course.”
“This course was one of my favorite courses at UMass Lowell. In Computer Science, almost every answer to a question is either correct or incorrect. This course came at a point in my day where I was exhausted from taking 3 classes earlier in the day, and I could finally relax and contribute my own thoughts to the course, rather than reciting facts.”
“This class and project was amazing. It was my favorite class I have ever taken in my whole life.”
“This course has been a great experience, one which I will remember probably for the rest of my life. Not only did we get to look into very real, “wicked” problems affecting our communities and our world, we also got to learn hands-on technical skills like sewing. Taking this class really opened my eyes and inspired me to finding new life for my clothing rather than disposing of it, which I have learned now is a big problem in the world today.”
“It is a very refreshing and memorable course. The course also reminds me to be keenly aware of my impact on this world. Overall a fantastic course.”
Because my aim is to have an enduring impact on my students, and have them remember the course in the years ahead, I particularly cherish comments like, “One thing I liked about this course is that it instilled some new, better habits when it comes to recycling or being more sustainable.” And then this comment: “This course helped give me a perspective for how the technology I will hopefully go on to develop might affect people all over the world,” said a Robotics student. “Automation and machine learning are fields that have the potential for large social changes, so if I want to be on the good side of robotics I will need to consider the social and ethical consequences of my work on a global scale.”
[1] Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[2] See for example Kelley, T. A., & Littman, J. (2001). The art of innovation: Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America's leading design firm. New York, NY: Doubleday.
[3] Rittel, H., & Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155-169.
[4] Bebinger, M. (2018, September 27). VA adding Opioid antidote to defibrillator cabinets or quicker overdose response [Radio broadcast]. WBUR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/27/650639122/va-adding-opioid-antidote-to-defibrillator-cabinets-for-quicker-overdose-respons
[5] I selected these comments, but they were all from the same semester, demonstrating how frequently students give high praise to the class.
[Adapted from Interlude E of my book, Transforming Learning through Tangible Instruction: The Case for Thinking with Things.]