I have a colleague named Adam who can pull out the most interesting resources as we consider ideas. This past summer we were talking about design. We were sitting in our town, outside of a deli drinking coffee and talking about the design of field schools that could be coming up after the pandemic conditions seem safely at bay.
We were considering our town and the infrastructure around us and how it did not seem to be designed in a way necessarily to meet the needs of our community in the current day. The challenge of trying to design infrastructure for future conditions that could be difficult to imagine and how designing for learning can likely be adjusted more easily and built on, adjusted and changed.
He mentioned this interview from CBC the current with Canadian designer Bruce Mau which I have listened to multiple times. I find it helps open me up when I am hoping for creatively designed solutions. I also like how Bruce considers his relationship with clients who may be problematic and not aligned with his values and how he approaches his work.
An addition to this post as right after writing I read Dron’s Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change. When Adam and I are talking about how the design of our town infrastructure was created without our time period being considered? That’s like hard technology. Like an LMS. The buildings, the lights, the size of the sidewalk and the location of the buildings. It’s all hard tech design. Designed in a time period but now fixed and difficult to build change from. So those folks who created our town they weren’t thinking of our increasing population or the requirement to become more energy efficient or the ways commercial interactions become less about brick and mortar and more about inviting to an experience if you want to get people physically in a place. It makes sense buildings are fixed, roads are fixed. Those choices are fixed and not easily built upon and changed. Just the connections between design and technologies and how to make choices to invite continued innovation from what has already been created? This stuff is gold. It makes me curious about whether you can have hard technology choices and maybe this is some behaviourism built into a course and then you can have some social constructivist also in there and how you get that mix correctly from a design point of view and how that ties with learning outcomes and context and subject matter etc.
Dron, J. (2014) Chapter 9: Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change. In Zawacki-Richter, O. & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda. https://doi.org/10.1002/piq.21349
November 12, 2021 at 1:46 pm
Thank you for sharing the Bruce Mau CBC interview – I especially liked how we were left to consider that “We solved the transportation problem. We designed the car,” he said, giving an example. “We didn’t design the ecosystem that the car would produce. And that’s what we have to do now.”, this is powerful and I agree that it generates curiosity about the complexities of trying to “get that mix correctly from a design point of view and how that ties with learning outcomes and context and subject matter”
November 12, 2021 at 1:46 pm
Thank you for sharing the Bruce Mau CBC interview – I especially liked how we were left to consider that “We solved the transportation problem. We designed the car,” he said, giving an example. “We didn’t design the ecosystem that the car would produce. And that’s what we have to do now.”, this is powerful and I agree that it generates curiosity about the complexities of trying to “get that mix correctly from a design point of view and how that ties with learning outcomes and context and subject matter”