think we’ll ever get it by designing down. We’ll only get it by trying up.
So I would say let’s get the focus off of manipulating teachers. Give them autonomy.
It seems we’re talking about a system of education. Are we stepping back? How can we scale this? People like Bill Gates, Bono, and Warren Buffett have leveraged their networks, NGOs, a whole array of organizations to deliver services such as health care and education. From a systems vantage point, do you think that’s viable? Is it too much of a top-down approach? Too oligarchic? Or is there room for that?
NS: I like the fact that Gates, for instance, asks questions and is at least purported to work in a way that’s evidence-based. In theory at least, that should result in paying more attention, doing more sense-making, and trying different approaches. But I sometimes wonder if that’s really happening. I think participatory processes can make a real difference. The kinds of systems we’re talking about offer opportunities for conversations and boundarycrossing through exercises and experimentation. For example, the Red Cross Climate Center and students and faculty of Parsons designed a game about climate change that was played in Senegal. The idea was to kick-start a conversation between scientists, meteorologists, and Red Cross disaster managers so that scientific data could be used to help determine when evacuation is necessary or where resources should go. Even better, the conversations that are engendered through tools such as these can be translated to the communities that are affected by the massive floods and surges and extreme weather events caused by climate change, and they can participate and discuss what these occurrences mean to them. Clearly, there’s much to be gained by stimulating those conversations, by doing things differently, by learning outside of the school system. These aspects of play can be used to teach not just what’s expected, but what’s unexpected and, potentially, change-making.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
New communities are being built that enable that sharing of designs and concepts. Many of these ideas won’t be useful, but how can we use the ones that are useful to make a difference, to change?
The prevailing idea in education is that making stuff doesn’t matter; it can’t get you into a good university. But getting out of the classroom to a place where you’re unscripted, where you’re not told what to do, where you can ask all sorts of questions is a legitimate and powerful form of education. Everybody is manipulating the education system and developing metrics and ways to measure and initiate the forms of education that seem appropriate. But too often teachers are constrained in this complex system; their capacity to utilize their good sense is compromised. As young designers, it’s very hard to work within the school system to achieve any measurable change. At our clinic, we codevelop prescriptions, protocols and experiments with many teachers, and several schools have signed up to construct solar chimneys.2 But on the whole, it’s an incredibly constrained system. I don’t think the focus of many philanthropic organizations has made the job of teaching easier. NJ:
60 www.newschool.edu/parsons/sds
2 A solar or thermal chimney is a passive building ventilation system that works by pulling air through a vertical shaft using convection of air heated by the sun.