David Kelley Talks Design Thinking In Education

The following are excerpts from an interview conducted by Public School Insights blog with IDEO founder David Kelley...

Public School Insights: Let's start with a big question. What is "design thinking?"

Kelley: To me, design thinking is basically a methodology that allows people to have confidence in their creative ability. Normally many people don't think of themselves as creative, or they think that creativity comes from somewhere that they don't know—like an angel appears and tells them the answer or gives them a new idea.

So design thinking is hopefully a framework that people can hang their creative confidence on. We give people a step-by-step method on how to more routinely be creative or more routinely innovate.

Public School Insights: Can you say a bit more about the difference between design thinking, in the 21st-century context, and analytical thinking?

Kelley: Sure. Analytical thinking is great. It’s the way you learned to be step-by-step—to collect data, analyze it and come up with a conclusion, like you did in science class. It is really useful, and I hope people keep doing it. It's very important.

Design thinking is more experimental and less step-by-step. It's fuzzier. It's intuitive. It's empathic. We often say that it’s integrative thinking, where you put together ideas from different sources—it’s synthesis. This is a way of thinking that is not quite so linear, but you can build confidence in it if you do it over and over again.

Read the rest of the Public School Insights interview here

Comments

[Andrew B. Watt]

The link to the rest of the article appears to be broken. Which is a pity, because I'd like to see what David Kelley has to say.

One of the pieces of the article talks about how design thinking is synthesis — it's taking many pieces of data and combining them into a new whole, an integrative process.

Yet what I think is missing from this is a recognition that a lot of middle school teaching is about providing the data. There's a tremendous amount of core information that has to be woven into a student's understanding of the world — like the fact that BC dates are older, the higher the number is (compared with AD dates, where the higher the number, the more recent it is, or the more futuristic if it's higher than 2010).

Synthesis means to take two contradictory ideas — the thesis and the antithesis — and weave them together into a third position that combines the best of two opposing points. Integration implies assembling a lot of incoherent data into a new image of reality.

Kids rarely know how to do this automatically. David Kelley was taught how to do this, by being exposed to a lot of different teachers over a long period of time. And as a result he has this idea which he calls "design thinking" that he thinks can be taught to teachers, to teach to kids.

But the process he describes is in fact what teachers ARE doing. It just takes twenty years to teach it to a kid, AND there's no guarantee that it will appear in every kid it's taught to. It's like Doonsbury said when they were transplanting the heart of a liberal into the body of a conservative. There is an easier way — gene splicing — but then you have to wait eighteen years to see how they'll vote.

[Rob Jacobs]

Andrew. I had some the same thoughts myself. Roger Martin calls it having an Opposable Mind. I use the term Ambidextrous. Others might call it integrated thinking.

Though teachers are doing their best to teach this type of thinking, it is the education system itself that is being managed and built around only analytical thinking, and thus missing much creativity, insight, and innovation.

P.S. I have fixed the link.

[Andrea Hildreth]

Would PBL (Problem-Based Learning) be an example of design thinking?

[Rob Jacobs]

Andrea, I think in strictly learning terms, it might be very similar. In terms of thinking about learning as an experience that includes not only the problem of PBL, but the sight, sounds, emotions, location, etc. that are maximized to make learning an experience.

In terms of applying it to the entire education organization, PBL does not apply, while Design Thinking does.

[Theo]

Thanks for sharing this article, it has became more clear what you mean in your last post. I'm not sure that i've ever hear about it here in Brazil. However, I'd like to know if these ideas are connected to the theory of multiple intelligences.