Teaching the Future of Design By Meghan Palmer
Design thinking doesn’t start the moment students step onto a college campus their freshman year.
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he Design Lab for K-12 Education, an institution of the College of Design, seeks to help students get a better understanding of the thought process involved in problem solving through design before entering the college environment. It accomplishes this through programs like Design Camp, Weekend Workshops, Teacher Professional Development Workshops, School Field Trips, and Open Studios.
design disciplines that typically use these lenses: architecture, landscape architecture, industrial design, art + design, graphic design, and design studies. “We start with building a broad understanding of design thinking and get more specific from there,” said Rice. “Students enjoy working on real-world problems, deciding what kind of interventions will fit best. They come up with some great multidisciplinary solutions.”
Giving pre-college students exposure to design thinking improves their skills across all disciplines. It gives students the stepping-stones to excel both academically and in their future careers. “As young people mature, the issues they encounter in the 21st century aren’t necessarily finite,” said Julia Rice, Director of the Design Lab. “Many of the problems students will face in their future careers will be abstract. Understanding design thinking is a great tool set for students to approach these kinds of problems.”
This summer the Design Lab held its annual Design Camp, a series of weeklong camps for middle and high school students that provides an in-depth and hands-on look at design. Each year, Design Camp uses a theme to give students a way to approach design using a topic with which they’re already familiar. “The theme really functions as a bridge that allows students to use what they know while learning a new way of thinking and creating – the design process,” Rice explained. Previous Design Camp themes have included “2050: the Future”– which had students pondering the problems people would encounter several decades from now – and “The Olympics”– which gave students the opportunity to tackle the issues a community faces when hosting this monumental event.
Programs in the Design Lab apply design thinking and the design process within the context of design problems or projects. Design Lab programs for younger students start with designing through a broader lens – exploration of the environment, the study of objects and applications, and the presentation of information through communication. High school students begin to investigate problems from within the practical and cultural context of the 22
This year’s theme was “Food and Sustainability.” Students have a lot of experience with food in their own lives, but many were not familiar with food deserts or the problems people living in those areas encounter in obtaining and sustaining