Tag: design thinking

A Year of Wonder

Posted on | by Sam | 11 Comments on A Year of Wonder

I admit: I’m the type of person who sees every New Year as a chance to reboot, revisit and refresh.

And this year, 2016, I want to try and sustain a yearlong exploration of wonder.

Part of the reason for that is pretty straightforward: on January 1, I officially became a partner in a global design studio that helps communities reimagine learning at the intersection of space, culture and story.

Our name? WONDER, By Design.

But part of it is also a desire to wrestle with some questions my colleagues and I want to understand more deeply:

  • If wonder is to learning as carbon is to life, then what are the neurochemical underpinnings of wonder itself?
  • In what ways does our capacity for wonder help explain what is most essential to what shapes and drives us as human beings?
  • What blocks our ability to wonder widely about the world? What gets us unblocked?

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I saw that the Renwick Gallery, a century-old museum in Washington, D.C. once described as the “American Louvre,” had recently undergone its own reboot – a literal, massive, two-year renovation – and was reintroducing itself to the public by having its first new exhibit transform the entire building into an immersive, multisensory work of art.

The inaugural exhibit’s name? WONDER.

So, last week, just before a massive blizzard ground the nation’s capital to a halt, I decided to visit on a random weekday morning.

A mixture of locals and tourists, old and young, prepared to move their way through the different exhibits and rooms with a hushed reverence. A sign on the wall, however, reminded us not to let any initial silence be mistaken for any required sense of formality: “Photography encouraged,” it read.

I walked into the first room, where I found a termite mound of index cards – a landscape of detritus, reconstituted into something both foreign and recognizable.

I squinted to see through a diaphanous indoor rainbow, made entirely of string.

Strangers and I peered at one another though a round opening in a human-sized bird’s nest – two sides of the same mirror.

And I walked alongside a Plaster Paris cast of a massive tree laying on its side, its bark recreated by the careful stitching together of small wooden rectangles, its empty center providing a portal through which to view . . . what exactly? The other end? The eternal? The unnameable?

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What drives us as human beings to spend thousands of hours making a plaster cast of a living tree? What is sparked in us when we experience it here, in this distinctly man-made space? And when I tell you that in two years the cast will be laid at the base of the actual tree it was based on so that it can gradually decompose and become part of the forest floor, what does that information make you feel?

Then I walked to the second floor of the exhibit. Other museumgoers were scattered on their backs underneath a giant, colorful, undulating map of the energy explosion that caused the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. I wandered into a magenta-hued room whose walls were covered by constellations of actual insect bodies, impossibly large. And in each room I jotted down framed quotations from people across the past 1,000 years who have wondered about wonder.

“Wonder – is not precisely Knowing And not precisely Knowing not – A beautiful but bleak condition He has not lived who has not felt.”

“Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.”

And my personal favorite – “It is not understanding that destroys wonder; it is familiarity.”

I thought about that one as I returned to the hollow tree, and stared again through its open center. All along the outside, the tree’s branches jutted out like natural antennae, thin wires suspending it at eye-level.

This, I realized, was what this exhibit had led me to wonder about: What suspends us? What do we suspend?

Over 800 years ago, St. Albertus Magnus offered his own take on those questions. “Wonder,” he said, “is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”

It’s not an answer, just another layer to peel off and examine. I hope you’ll join me in the search, and add your own thoughts, in the months ahead.

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In Reimagining School, What Must We Hold Onto – & What Must We Let Go Of?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on In Reimagining School, What Must We Hold Onto – & What Must We Let Go Of?

Think about all the ways in which our brains are already hard-wired to think about “school.”

Desks. Chairs. Tests. Lectures. Lunchrooms. Hall Passes. Freshman (or Sophomore or Junior) years. AP (or Geometry or Spanish) classes. The list is endless.

All of these things came about in the creation of a model of education that was designed for the Industrial Age, when we were trying to answer a different set of questions: How can we batch and queue unprecedented numbers of young people through a system and into an economy that will be largely fixed and known? How can we acculturate waves of immigrant children into the core values of American society? And how can we do all of this in the most efficient, orderly manner?

Say what you will — but at the time when they were being asked, those were probably the right questions to organize a system of schools around. And clearly, they are no longer the right questions today.

Not all of the symbols and structures of our Industrial-era model of schooling need to be jettisoned. The question is, which ones are no longer serving their purpose?

We now live at a moment in history in which the world young people will be entering is both fluid and unknown; when the time between asking a question and finding the answer is almost instantaneous; and when the mark of a successful school is less about the knowledge you put into your students, and more about the wisdom you are able to pull out.

What would it need to look like if a system of schools was truly aligned around a different set of organizing questions — where the goal is not to standardize, but to individualize; where the objective is not uniformity, but uniqueness; and where the feelings “school” arouses in the majority of us are not endless shades of grey, but wild and inspiring spectrums of color?

If these were our objectives, how would the structures and aims of our schools need to shift? And once they shifted, what would we need to hold onto from our past ideas about school, and what would we need to let go of — so something new and improved could have the space to come into being?

The first step towards that sort of paradigm shift is simply to think about all of the current symbols and structures of schooling — and to decide if it’s something we will need to hold onto and carry forward, or let go of and redesign.

For example, age-based cohorts: hold on, or let go?

Hall passes and cultures of permission between adults and young people: hold on, or let go?

Grading: hold on, or let go?

Subjects: hold on, or let go?

The act of choosing is its own form of clarity.

What, then, would you choose?

A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

Last week, I spent three days at a remarkable independent school in Atlanta. It’s on the verge of designing a new building for its upper school, and I’m part of the team that is lucky enough to help them think about what such a space should look like — and what ultimate purpose(s) it should serve.

The current building is a rather traditional space — wide hallways, classrooms, a gym, a library that is slowly losing its raison d’être. But the vision of the school is something else entirely — a fusion of aspirational habits, cultural norms, and principles about teaching and learning that are designed to unleash the full potential and interest of every student.

Which leads to a really interesting question: If we begin to reimagine the spaces in which learning occurs, how could we construct those spaces so that the movement and flow of human bodies is closer to the improvisatory choreography of a murmuration of starlings in summertime– instead of, say, the tightly orchestrated machinery of an army of soldiers in wartime?

What would a murmuration of student interest and passion look like in practice? What would it engender?

Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

The founder of Intrinsic School and her architects certainly think so. What do YOU think?

Personally, I see some cool stuff, and yet overall something doesn’t sit right. Why, for example, is a school that is pushing the envelope on personalized learning still organizing its students by grade level? Shouldn’t mass groupings by age be the first thing to go?

And is it a good thing to have kids spending 50% of their day on a computer? I suppose the right way to think of it is that a kid is spending half of his or her day doing research, but for a new model of personalization, it feels awfully . . . well . . . depersonalized.

And why is that coastline place set up to have kids literally facing a brick wall? Who thought that was a good idea?

I don’t know — I think this feels more like something that was designed for kitsch, not kids. It’s angular, when learning is round.

What am I missing here? What do you see?