Participatory design for innovating on the right questions

Translating forces into forms, Alejandro Aravena shares three incredible case studies in design thinking. The forces include the voices of the users. The forms are the solutions that were collectively created by community and architect, working together through design.

Alejandro Aravena: I don’t know if you were able to read the subtitles, but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let’s-all-drink-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. It is actually — (Applause) It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question.

Identifying the right question — that is the value added of design thinking…”participatory design,” as Aravena calls it.

There are three great portraits of innovation in Alejandro Aravena’s “My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process.” And the lessons apply to so much more than just architecture? How are you bringing your community into your process?

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Schools that work for kids – @E_Sheninger

“No longer should we have school and real life as separate entities.” So concludes Eric Sheninger’s TEDxBurnsvilleED talk: “Schools that work for kids.” Thanks to @Kat_A_Jones, a sophomore member of the Innovation Diploma Disney Cohort for sharing this talk with our team.

For whom is school really designed?

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Assessments that overvalue and undervalue – what are we doing about them?

I’ve changed my routine for watching TED talks. Because I have pivoted from viewing one a day, I watch a few on the weekends. As I was “catching up” this morning, Susan Etlinger’s talk, “What do we do with all this big data?,” stopped me in my tracks.

He was teaching himself to communicate, but we were looking in the wrong place, and this is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric — in this case, verbal communication — and undervalue others, such as creative problem-solving. Communication was hard for Isaac, and so he found a workaround to find out what he needed to know. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box.

I am thinking a lot recently about assessment, progress reports, and how we communicate about what we most deeply value in schools. Etlinger poses such a powerful challenge: “This is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric and undervalue others.”

What are we overvaluing and undervaluing on our school progress reports? If we look at our students’ report cards, do they express what we most deeply value? Across the city, state, country, and world, we should be deeply involved in resolving such a question.