This past semester, my colleague and I, along with six graduate student instructors, took on our school’s signature foundations course. In this course, students work in groups to interview and observe clients struggling with some aspect of information (e.g., data, communication) flow. After sorting and visualizing their findings, the students come up with recommendations that would help that particular group of people with their particular problem.
Context matters.
We talked a lot about the importance of outsiders seeing what those in the midst of a process might have lost sight of and about the importance of contextually-relevant solutions.
Context matters.
In one case, for example, the group started by considering technology solutions but then remembered that, in interviews, their client continually talked about the importance of their bookshelf of three-ring binders. So instead of imposing a tech solution, they figured out one that would be compatible with the binders.
Context matters.
So I was excited to find an article in the New York Times talking about Stanford’s D.School, in which co-founder David Kelley spoke about the importance of people and context in good design.
From the article:
At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people …
Love this idea of an “empathy muscle.” When I work with students in our children’s and YA materials course on developing reviewing skills, we talk specifically about librarians needing to learn to “read beyond themselves” and “read with others in mind.” And while this semester’s course had a different focus, the need for an “empathy muscle,” or the ability to envision what works for another beyond yourself, is exactly the same. It’s one of the ways in which today’s iSchools build on the library science ethics and ethos that often preceded them.
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Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.
While our course focused more on analysis of content than on design, this idea of mindset-changing practice was important in our course planning. Moving from our own hunches and initial instincts — which we’ve relied on for years and which got us enough success to get into graduate school — to a reliance on users is tough. We use data to help with that in a more formal way than it sounds like the D.School does; then again, we’re an information school and not a design school. (However, both methodologies use a copious quantity of Post-It notes.)
One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.
Context matters.
That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.
The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.
Here, again, we diverge. They spend a lot more time on prototyping solutions than we did. (We have other courses that focus on prototyping.)
An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems.
This statement intrigued me because one of the ongoing debates is where our course should fall in a student’s two-year residency with us (part-timers take longer but comprise a small minority of the student body, so most curriculum decisions focus on the great majority of full-time students). Should it come at the very beginning, when students are just beginning to acclimate to a new lifestyle and grad school culture, or should it be more of a capstone project?
An alum I spoke with at the end of the term something to the effect of, “I couldn’t believe they were unleashing us brand-new grad students on a real client.” And I remember thinking, when I felt the same way as a once-upon-a-time student in this course, “And they’re listening to us!” Without naming it, I think both of us were experiencing this surge of Kelley’s creative confidence.
As the class is over, and it will be several months before we teach it again, we can now look back and reflect on what went well and what didn’t. (Anytime you have 210 diverse students going out into the field, you’ll have a lot to reflect on!) But this article reminded me of what we were going for as we tweaked a long-standing course design. Our school’s founding motto was, “Connecting people, information, and technology in more valuable ways.” And people come first.
Context matters.
Image: “Brainstorms at INDEX: Views” by Jacob Botter on Flickr. CC-BY.