Signed up for the Design Education Summit out of curiosity toward design thinking and how it can be applied to the various aspects of teaching and learning. Had the opportunity to listen to many speakers from diverse backgrounds share about their experiences with design thinking, and offer practical tools to promote accessibility, inclusivity, and sustainability in and through design.
My key takeaways:
We teach kids, we don't teach subjects.
We don't serve content, we serve people.
Seek to understand students' lived experiences, and co-design learning experiences.
Meet them where they are, ask what they want to learn. Start with what is closer to heart.
Educators must prepare students to thrive in a world that doesn’t exist yet.
We fail our students, by not letting them fail.
Iteration, not perfection.
Mr Chan Chun Sing
Minister for Education, Singapore Speech
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing.
Design thinking is not just a module, but a part of life.
Common misconception: that design thinking is just to meet functional needs.
Good design does not just need functional needs (the '101'); good design engages, inspire and connect people.
"We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." - Winston Churchill
A building is more than just a structure; it is a place of trust and shapes all who enter it and engage with it → the need to be intentional with every product, process and policy we design
Designing process:
Important elements: user-centricity → achieved by first engaging stakeholders on their needs, perspectives and lived experiences. [e.g. social service offices, urban planning - transport, etc.]
Getting students to be good designers (21st CC: critical adaptive and inventive thinking): Pursuit of disciplined enquiry
Key: having a keen sense of the problem definition; asking sharp questions
The sharper your question, the better the AI will help you. But the AI cannot help you to ask a sharp question. That requires a very sharp understanding of the problem
" Good designers never fall in love with their solutions. Good designers fall in love with their problems and their problem statements."
(1) Help students develop a keen sense of problem definition
(2) Help students understand diversity of perspectives across stakeholders
(3) Help students develop the skill of appreciating diversity of problem-solving methods (instead of simply linear thinking); form teams from diverse backgrounds
Every age can, everyone can, everyone idea counts (regardless of background)
Hans Tan
Associate Professor | National University of Singapore
Paradigms of Creativity and Summit Big Picture
Artistic ≠ creative
Sir Ken Robinson:
Creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value; it is a process, and not an event, and it can be taught.
Imagination can be an entirely private process of internal consciousness. Private imaginings may have no outcomes on the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.
To call someone creative suggests they are actively producing something in a deliberate way. People are not creative in the abstract; they are creative in something: in mathematics, in writing, in music, etc,
Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. Creativity is applied imagination.
Roles of education: to awaken and develop the powers of creativity
How to help students move easier from imaginal thoughts to imaginative thoughts?
Aditya Batura
CEO | Rolljak
Revolutionising Innovation with Rolljak: A Gamified Design Thinking Experience
Problem statement: How can we unlock 21st century learning in all classrooms without requiring educators to overhaul their pedagogy?
Collaboration and iteration are the most important in determining success of any endeavour; "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."
Rolljak features and how they can be used to facilitate design sprints: (rapid prototyping: all done within short time frames - e.g. 2-3 minutes)[Thought: can this be done/done as effectively on SLS?]
(1) Sketching → brainstorming of problem/solution
(2) Automatically assigning peers' sketches to another → engaging with and building on peers' ideas
(3) Ranking sketches after it has gone through 2 rounds of iteration → consensus of which ideas are worth developing further
[Workshop] Revolutionising Design Thinking with Gamification and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist; more than 40% of global workforce will be obsolete by 2030. [What am I teaching? What do I want to achieve?]
Design innovation: a mindset
Human-centred; problem-solving approach
Empathy-driven understanding of user’s needs
Encourages ideation, prototyping, iteration
Develops critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills
Elements of gamification
(1) Action
(2) Social - collaborative game-based elements
(3) Mastery
(4) Achievement - leaderboards
(5) Immersion - role play
(6) Creativity
Discover | Define | Develop | Define |
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Rapid prototyping - maximise rate of learning by minimising the time to try new ideas
Rule 1: Recreate the UI/UX
Rule 2: Do, Don't Think
Rule 3: Iterate, Don't Fixate
Rule 4: Celebrate Failure
Laura McBain
Managing Director | Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)
Empowering Educators as Futurists: Shaping Tomorrow's World
Educators teach the past. We must also teach the future. Educators as futurists.
Educators must prepare students to thrive in a world that doesn’t exist yet.
What if we moved from “preparing” young people for the future as if we know how their lives would unfold, to cultivating learners who can shape their future?
Navigating ambiguity; holding space for not knowing
Educators are ancestors too. Remembered for the choices we made (and didn’t make).
Focus on possibilities, not predictions. (not pigeonholing students)
What do you want to ̶b̶e̶ ? What do you want to do?
Asking the right questions = opening new possibilities
We teach kids, we don't teach subjects.
We don't serve content, we serve people.
Seek to understand students' lived experiences, and co-design learning experiences.
Meet them where they are, ask what they want to learn.
Co-construct the future.
Future Thinking X Design Asks
How might the world change and why?
What might people need in those futures? (i.e. empathy for the future)
Activity: Imagine your descendants → create portraits: Who is this person? What do they love/care about? What skills does this person need to live in this world? (humility, creativity, agility, care and other human skills)
How might we create equitable futures? (value, perspective, call to action)
Clement Zheng
Assistant Professor | Division of Industrial Design | National University of Singapore
Unravelling the Magic: Empowering Designers with DIY Electronics in STEM* Slides
Creativity comes from assembling electronic components in new ways
Learning about designing with electronics by constructing everything from ground up
Anchor project: Controller for Snake
Making it work
Making it clear: people know how to use the product you’ve created intuitively (essentially UI/UX: arrows, symbols, colour coding)
Making it fun
Making enabled learners to connect their passion to their learning (e.g. guitar hero)
Making enabled learners to critically question technology, even as novices.
E.g. using citrus fruits as button (student passionate about sustainability, e-waste reduction)
Ms Liew Wei Li
Director-General of Education, Singapore | Ministry of Education (MOE)
Embrace the Power of Design
Design is not just about aesthetics. It’s not just about art. Rather, design thinking skills facilitate problem-solving around users’ needs, driven by a specific intention or for a purpose.
Design is... a specific concept, object, process, system, intentionally created with a purpose.
Donn Koh
Co-Founder | STUCK
The Synergy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Innovation Link
Playing with/using AI:
AI as an entity with no self-conscious filter to bounce ideas with; could promote appetite for unusual ideas, and the confidence to entertain uncertain solutions
Does AI level the playing field?
Life is harder with AI — what took 5 years now takes 5 minutes
Baseline lifted; thing about creativity is, the more you try to replace it, the more it levels up
(1) Assume it is bad
Seeing it as poor/incomplete is actually good
Uncompetitive usage can lead to harmful reliance
(2) Either a trap or a new asset
See AI output as end product (trap) vs using AI for prototyping (asset)
Get used to seeing AI output as an editable 'sketch' with no preciousness → it's a superb, new kind of sketch that allows us to feel and evaluate loose initial ideas with more realism (e.g. straws in a bundle)
Entertain AI's bad ideas! → "collab with AI"; best ideas often hide amongst bad ideas
(3) It creates choice paralysis or it trains judgment
The 'distance' and quantity allows you to judge more objectively — like the audience, an end-user, client, or curator (instead of a designer who may be enamoured by own idea, trapped by the vested efforted and confirmation bias).
(4) It makes you powerfully ignorant, or ignorantly powerful.
We can unlock the multidisciplinary, or we can become presumptuous.
Design Thinking in Schools
Peicai Secondary School and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
Design as a Force for Change
Students as co-creators of design journey
Starting with what is closer to heart
Easing into innovation with guided pilot
Prioritise iteration over correcting them to perfection.
Prioritise the opportunity to just allow our students to share their ideas, then get feedback from the audience to iterate on their projects.
Diana Mihaela Baranga-Mazhar
Co-Founder & Executive Director | UpstartED
Mobilising Young Innovators: A Holistic Approach to Fostering Changemaking
How might we enable youths to become entrepreneurial, digitally-empowered workforce-ready and civically-engaged individuals?
Factors affecting youth engagement:
From consultation with a few key individuals to co-design with youth, educators, experts
Build identity, belonging, agency through design process
[Workshop] Transformative Learning: Build Your Changemaker Program
[placeholder for resource link]
Felix Tan
Co-Founder & CEO | Skilio
Embracing Failure: A Stepping Stone for a Multidimensional Success
Experiences with failure help us learn how to deal with bigger failures
Employers look for failures and how you react to it as a bright spot
We fail our students, by not letting them fail
How can we design schools to be more failure friendly?
Software - environment and mindset
Environment:
(1) Belief: language used by teachers in school,
(2) Designing "failure" moments: encouraging experimentation and failures
(3) Vulnerability
(4) Psychological safety
Mindset: e.g. growth mindset
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