Design Thinking: Its Value, Use and Need in Undergraduate Education
1. Compare where Undergraduate Design Education is now with where it has been.
2. The purpose of Design Education and Design Thinking in the 20th century.
3. What Design Education will be in the future and why?
4. Why there is a growing need for Design Thinking now?
Notes:
• The History of Design Education
• The Influence of Bauhaus on Design Education
• The State of Design Education today
• Compare different Undergraduate Design Programs
• The Commoditization of Formal Design
• The Future of Design Education
• The role of Design Thinking in Undergraduate Education
• John Maeda's views on Design Education
Monday, October 27, 2008
Design Education
The following links exemplify what design education is and what it can be:
http://www.dcontinuum.com/content/designeducation.php
http://www.educatorresourcecenter.org/res_videos.aspx?v=5
http://web.utk.edu/~art/faculty/kennedy/bauhaus/bauhaus.html#communication
http://www.dcontinuum.com/content/designeducation.php
http://www.educatorresourcecenter.org/res_videos.aspx?v=5
http://web.utk.edu/~art/faculty/kennedy/bauhaus/bauhaus.html#communication
Monday, October 20, 2008
Thesis Titles & Hypothetical Statement
• The Emergence of Right-Brain Thinking: A Study of imaginative and empathetic logic as it applies to Design Education
• The Dawn of Abductive Reasoning: The New Role of the Design Thinker in an Ever Changing Business Market
• The Point of Design Thinking: Its Value, Use and Need in both the Classroom and the Boardroom
• Design A New Logic: Developing a Creative Mind for Business and the Consumer Experience.
• The Global Implications of Design Thinking on Pedagogy, Business and Society
• An Analysis of Abductive Reasoning in Design and Actual Translation of its Power on the Business World
• A Comparative study of Imaginative Right-Brain-Centric Models vs. Analytical Left-Brain-Centric Approaches
• Towards the Conceptual Age: How Innovative Right-Brain Thinking Builds Better Businesses and Environments
In order to keep up with the world’s changing business landscape and innovative achievements, corporate companies are looking to hire people with t-shaped skills — those who are comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and can connect with the customer culture of their employers. This thesis examines how design thinking and the schools that teach it, are influencing a new generation of creative thinkers, managers and designers. In contrast to the traditional inductive left-brain way of thinking, schools and corporations are finally embracing the abductive right-brain approach to problem solving employed by designers and and design firms.
• The Dawn of Abductive Reasoning: The New Role of the Design Thinker in an Ever Changing Business Market
• The Point of Design Thinking: Its Value, Use and Need in both the Classroom and the Boardroom
• Design A New Logic: Developing a Creative Mind for Business and the Consumer Experience.
• The Global Implications of Design Thinking on Pedagogy, Business and Society
• An Analysis of Abductive Reasoning in Design and Actual Translation of its Power on the Business World
• A Comparative study of Imaginative Right-Brain-Centric Models vs. Analytical Left-Brain-Centric Approaches
• Towards the Conceptual Age: How Innovative Right-Brain Thinking Builds Better Businesses and Environments
In order to keep up with the world’s changing business landscape and innovative achievements, corporate companies are looking to hire people with t-shaped skills — those who are comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and can connect with the customer culture of their employers. This thesis examines how design thinking and the schools that teach it, are influencing a new generation of creative thinkers, managers and designers. In contrast to the traditional inductive left-brain way of thinking, schools and corporations are finally embracing the abductive right-brain approach to problem solving employed by designers and and design firms.
The Birth of Google
Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.
By John Battelle
It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.
It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."
"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.
When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.
Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.
Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.
Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.
Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.
Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.
Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.
He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."
At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."
The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.
Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.
Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.
Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?
Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.
This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.
As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."
Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.
Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.
Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.
The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.
"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."
A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.
One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.
Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)
On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.
Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"
From The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, copyright � by John Battelle, to be published in September by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Battelle (battellemedia.com) was one of the founders of Wired.
By John Battelle
It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.
It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."
"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.
When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.
Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.
Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.
Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.
Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.
Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.
Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.
He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."
At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."
The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.
Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.
Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.
Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?
Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.
This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.
As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."
Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.
Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.
Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.
The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.
"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."
A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.
One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.
Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)
On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.
Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"
From The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, copyright � by John Battelle, to be published in September by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Battelle (battellemedia.com) was one of the founders of Wired.
Ten things Google has found to be true
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site:
* The interface is clear and simple.
* Pages load instantly.
* Placement in search results is never sold to anyone.
* Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.
By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another.
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
Google does search. With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service already considered the best on the web at making finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of users. Our dedication to improving search has also allowed us to apply what we've learned to new products, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Maps. As we continue to build new products* while making search better, our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help users access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
Google believes in instant gratification. You want answers and you want them right now. Who are we to argue? Google may be the only company in the world whose stated goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible. By fanatically obsessing on shaving every excess bit and byte from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, Google has broken its own speed records time and again. Others assumed large servers were the fastest way to handle massive amounts of data. Google found networked PCs to be faster. Where others accepted apparent speed limits imposed by search algorithms, Google wrote new algorithms that proved there were no limits. And Google continues to work on making it all go even faster.
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value. Instead of relying on a group of editors or solely on the frequency with which certain terms appear, Google ranks every web page using a breakthrough technique called PageRank™. PageRank evaluates all of the sites linking to a web page and assigns them a value, based in part on the sites linking to them. By analyzing the full structure of the web, Google is able to determine which sites have been "voted" the best sources of information by those most interested in the information they offer. This technique actually improves as the web gets bigger, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it's through their PDAs, their wireless phones or even their automobiles, people want information to come to them. Google's innovations in this area include Google Number Search, which reduces the number of keypad strokes required to find data from a web-enabled cellular phone and an on-the-fly translation system that converts pages written in HTML to a format that can be read by phone browsers. This system opens up billions of pages for viewing from devices that would otherwise not be able to display them, including Palm PDAs and Japanese i-mode, J-Sky, and EZWeb devices. Wherever search is likely to help users obtain the information they seek, Google is pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may have never seen an ad on Google. That's because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they're relevant to the results page on which they're shown. So, only certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.
Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads (AdWords) that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Google's maximization group works with advertisers to improve clickthrough rates over the life of a campaign, because high clickthrough rates are an indication that ads are relevant to a user's interests. Any advertiser, no matter how small or how large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium, whether through our self-service advertising program that puts ads online within minutes, or with the assistance of a Google advertising representative.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link." It is a core value for Google that there be no compromising of the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products; we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.
7. There's always more information out there.
Once Google had indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search billions of images and a way to view pages that were originally created as PDF files. The popularity of PDF results led us to expand the list of file types searched to include documents produced in a dozen formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For wireless users, Google developed a unique way to translate HTML formatted files into a format that could be read by mobile devices. The list is not likely to end there as Google's researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to users seeking answers.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Though Google is headquartered in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. To that end we maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of our results to users living outside the United States. Google search results can be restricted to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user's preference. We also offer a translation feature to make content available to users regardless of their native tongue and for those who prefer not to search in English, Google's interface can be customized into more than 100 languages. To accelerate the addition of new languages, Google offers volunteers the opportunity to help in the translation through an automated tool available on the Google.com website. This process has greatly improved both the variety and quality of service we're able to offer users in even the most far flung corners of the globe.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
Always deliver more than expected. Google does not accept being the best as an endpoint, but a starting point. Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways. Search works well for properly spelled words, but what about typos? One engineer saw a need and created a spell checker that seems to read a user's mind. It takes too long to search from a WAP phone? Our wireless group developed Google Number Search to reduce entries from three keystrokes per letter to one. With a user base in the millions, Google is able to identify points of friction quickly and smooth them out. Google's point of distinction however, is anticipating needs not yet articulated by our global audience, then meeting them with products and services that set new standards. This constant dissatisfaction with the way things are is ultimately the driving force behind the world's best search engine.
From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site:
* The interface is clear and simple.
* Pages load instantly.
* Placement in search results is never sold to anyone.
* Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.
By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another.
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
Google does search. With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service already considered the best on the web at making finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of users. Our dedication to improving search has also allowed us to apply what we've learned to new products, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Maps. As we continue to build new products* while making search better, our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help users access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
Google believes in instant gratification. You want answers and you want them right now. Who are we to argue? Google may be the only company in the world whose stated goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible. By fanatically obsessing on shaving every excess bit and byte from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, Google has broken its own speed records time and again. Others assumed large servers were the fastest way to handle massive amounts of data. Google found networked PCs to be faster. Where others accepted apparent speed limits imposed by search algorithms, Google wrote new algorithms that proved there were no limits. And Google continues to work on making it all go even faster.
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value. Instead of relying on a group of editors or solely on the frequency with which certain terms appear, Google ranks every web page using a breakthrough technique called PageRank™. PageRank evaluates all of the sites linking to a web page and assigns them a value, based in part on the sites linking to them. By analyzing the full structure of the web, Google is able to determine which sites have been "voted" the best sources of information by those most interested in the information they offer. This technique actually improves as the web gets bigger, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it's through their PDAs, their wireless phones or even their automobiles, people want information to come to them. Google's innovations in this area include Google Number Search, which reduces the number of keypad strokes required to find data from a web-enabled cellular phone and an on-the-fly translation system that converts pages written in HTML to a format that can be read by phone browsers. This system opens up billions of pages for viewing from devices that would otherwise not be able to display them, including Palm PDAs and Japanese i-mode, J-Sky, and EZWeb devices. Wherever search is likely to help users obtain the information they seek, Google is pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may have never seen an ad on Google. That's because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they're relevant to the results page on which they're shown. So, only certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.
Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads (AdWords) that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Google's maximization group works with advertisers to improve clickthrough rates over the life of a campaign, because high clickthrough rates are an indication that ads are relevant to a user's interests. Any advertiser, no matter how small or how large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium, whether through our self-service advertising program that puts ads online within minutes, or with the assistance of a Google advertising representative.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link." It is a core value for Google that there be no compromising of the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products; we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.
7. There's always more information out there.
Once Google had indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search billions of images and a way to view pages that were originally created as PDF files. The popularity of PDF results led us to expand the list of file types searched to include documents produced in a dozen formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For wireless users, Google developed a unique way to translate HTML formatted files into a format that could be read by mobile devices. The list is not likely to end there as Google's researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to users seeking answers.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Though Google is headquartered in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. To that end we maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of our results to users living outside the United States. Google search results can be restricted to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user's preference. We also offer a translation feature to make content available to users regardless of their native tongue and for those who prefer not to search in English, Google's interface can be customized into more than 100 languages. To accelerate the addition of new languages, Google offers volunteers the opportunity to help in the translation through an automated tool available on the Google.com website. This process has greatly improved both the variety and quality of service we're able to offer users in even the most far flung corners of the globe.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
Always deliver more than expected. Google does not accept being the best as an endpoint, but a starting point. Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways. Search works well for properly spelled words, but what about typos? One engineer saw a need and created a spell checker that seems to read a user's mind. It takes too long to search from a WAP phone? Our wireless group developed Google Number Search to reduce entries from three keystrokes per letter to one. With a user base in the millions, Google is able to identify points of friction quickly and smooth them out. Google's point of distinction however, is anticipating needs not yet articulated by our global audience, then meeting them with products and services that set new standards. This constant dissatisfaction with the way things are is ultimately the driving force behind the world's best search engine.
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Talent Hunt
Design programs are shaping a new generation of creative managers
by Elizabeth Woyke and Maha Atal
On the campus of the University of Cincinnati, Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) employees are brainstorming with design students to create a fictional green-leaning family of three that lives in an energy-efficient solar-powered home. "We imagined a prototypical family that might live in a house like this and want to live sustainably," says Bob Schwartz, associate director at P&G's Global Design Organization. "What products might support that lifestyle 24/7?"
P&G already employs lots of innovative minds. So why is its global design unit looking to a troop of University of Cincinnati students for ideas? "Students bring naive innovation and alien eyes," says Schwartz. "They can inspire in a fashion that is more difficult to do in big companies. That's probably why a lot of big companies engage in relationships with design schools."
The Second Annual BusinessWeek survey of the best design schools highlights the growing role they play in supplying creative managers to corporate and nonprofit organizations. Our list includes joint programs among business, engineering, and design schools as well as revamped curricula within traditional design programs. The driving forces of innovation and globalization are pushing companies to revamp their managerial ranks and hire people with new skills. Surprised by the rise of consumer power, companies are seeking people who can connect with customer cultures online and overseas. And in an era of constant change, they want people who are comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. Schools that teach design thinking, with its emphasis on maximizing possibilities rather than managing for efficiency, are in high demand.
Once again, BusinessWeek turned to a panel of innovation consultants, design academics, and corporate executives to select programs that have curricula they respect and whose graduates they hire. Then we conducted interviews with professors, students, and alumni to narrow down their recommendations to a list of the top global 60. Finally, in making our choices, we asked them to look for programs that combined design with business, engineering, or marketing, and we treated this mixture as essential to their teaching.
Who made the cut? Programs that enabled students to engage with the real world through sponsored projects and internships; that were tuned in to contemporary business issues, such as sustainability; and those whose graduates have proven themselves to be creative designers, strategists, and leaders.
TEAMWORK WORLDWIDE
Many schools are beginning to go global. To share resources, ideas, best practices, and academic talent, European, American, and Asian universities are setting up joint programs. Among the schools on our list, many are offering dual degrees from two or more programs or schools.
These programs zero in on one of business' major problems—the difficulty managers and creative types have working together. Innovation may now be as important as efficiency, yet people responsible for each function rarely understand one another and work poorly together on teams.
One obvious solution is to throw them together and teach them design thinking jointly. The Royal College of Art, for example, has a new program with the Tanaka Business School and the Imperial College London engineering school. Carnegie Mellon University puts design, engineering, and business students into teams to work on projects. And the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management pairs MBAs with design students in product development classes.
Another program that focuses on collaboration is Adcenter, the Virginia Commonwealth University graduate advertising program run by Richard Boyko. In his 30-year career at ad shops Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett Worldwide, and TBWA\Chiat\Day, Boyko found that "advertising creatives and account managers never spoke to one another." He says that "the businesspeople are the ones who pay the checks, but they aren't trained to look at creative content." Worst of all, "they aren't trained to collaborate, to rub elbows with those unlike themselves."
At Virginia Commonwealth, Boyko launched a new master's degree in creative brand management, which is an alternative MBA for those interested in careers as chief marketing officers or advertising account managers.
Sometimes managers need to get two kinds of training—technical and design—from two institutions to do their jobs. In France, Eloi Baudoux was on the fast track in 1998, when as a student in Paris' prestigious engineering school Ecole des Mines, he took a summer internship at Renault (RENA.PA). But once inside the automotive giant, Baudoux found that his science background wasn't enough. "I realized that engineering activities would not allow me to get as close to the product, to the human and customer processes, as I needed to be." In fact, says Baudoux, "I found I could not be taken seriously within Renault without a design background."
Luckily, Ecole des Mines had a partnership with Strate Collège, a design academy in a Paris suburb (and a new addition to our list). When Baudoux finished his formal engineering training in 1999, he was able to move directly into a two-year Master's program in design.
Baudoux kept in touch with Renault, and in 2001 he met with a manager who was interested in recruiting a team to craft a vision for the company's research and development arm. Baudoux, two other design-engineers, and a sociologist were hired. His role at Renault is to offer strategic ideas for both designers and engineers. He explains to car designers how new technologies will affect the user experience. He also translates what experiences customers want to engineers, in order to help them build better cars.
"Sustainability" is on the lips of nearly all chief executives as they attempt to go carbon neutral in making and distributing their products and services. That means revamping materials, manufacturing, distribution, and their energy use.
True, there appears to be a lot of "greenwashing" going on, with companies buying dubious carbon emission offset credits to establish credentials that allow companies to call themselves green while flying executives on private jets to conferences and paying people not to chop down trees.
Yet companies are feeling real pressure from Wall Street to reduce environmental liabilities, from European customers demanding planet-friendly products and from younger new hires who take green issues seriously. Increasingly, CEOs themselves see sustainability as fitting well with strategies for market expansion and growth. So they are racing about looking for designers, managers, and strategists who are knowledgeable about building sustainable products and implementing processes.
"Companies are turning to design schools and programs for this kind of talent. The business-design degree program at the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design offers a class on sustainable design. This executive education program focuses on getting managers talking about the environment "in the early phases and in the corner office," says Jean-Paul Kusz, a business school professor teaching in the IIT design program."
Next spring, Northwestern University's Kellogg Business School's program in social enterprise is adding a class on sustainable manufacturing, bringing engineers and business students together to cooperate on product development with sustainability in mind. "It's top-down driven; CEOs are into it, so we believe we have to teach it to the students," says professor Walter Herbst.
European design schools have long been leaders in sustainability because of government regulations, consumer demands, and market opportunities. Design school KaosPilot International takes a hands-on approach to designing in a global context. Not only does the school have headquarters in four Scandinavian countries, but students spend about half their degree traveling the world on team projects called Outposts, where they work on designs for businesses and nonprofits in the local community. On their Outpost in Dublin, students plan to "green" the city of Dublin with roof gardens that would absorb CO2.
Whether it's in Cincinnati or Rio de Janeiro, some of the best ideas often come from students. At the Design Incubator at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio, students devised a way to turn resin from discarded palm trees, which are harvested for their heart of palm fruits, into a material that is firm enough to be used as a replacement for wood. The class project has led to new products, from skateboards to furniture, while helping to recycle waste. And last spring, Parsons The New School for Design senior Rishi Desai organized a university-wide competition of sustainable design projects. In his senior thesis, Desai is turning insights from the competition into models for sustainable business.
Attracting top-of-class talent is getting more competitive, and some companies are already offering sweeteners. Just as they have long been willing to underwrite MBAs for executives, they are now supporting students in design programs. At Stanford University's design school, where MBAs and engineers increasingly collaborate, consultants and companies line up for the best students.
So when Stanford MBA student Sarah Stein Greenberg asked to defer a job offer at business consultant Monitor Group to continue her Stanford D-school project designing irrigation schemes for rural farmers in Southeast Asia, the consulting firm agreed. They even let Greenberg spend another year at the D-school as a teaching fellow. She will start her job as a business consultant with Monitor this fall.
Bansi Nagji, chief executive of Monitor Innovation, says Greenberg's experience will make her a stronger asset. "[It] was compelling to us as we were starting to see the world in similar ways," says Nagji. Greenberg says she has learned "why some organizations can innovate and others can't." Students who can answer that question are just the talent that companies want.
Woyke is a staff editor at BusinessWeek. Maha Atal is an intern at BusinessWeek.
by Elizabeth Woyke and Maha Atal
On the campus of the University of Cincinnati, Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) employees are brainstorming with design students to create a fictional green-leaning family of three that lives in an energy-efficient solar-powered home. "We imagined a prototypical family that might live in a house like this and want to live sustainably," says Bob Schwartz, associate director at P&G's Global Design Organization. "What products might support that lifestyle 24/7?"
P&G already employs lots of innovative minds. So why is its global design unit looking to a troop of University of Cincinnati students for ideas? "Students bring naive innovation and alien eyes," says Schwartz. "They can inspire in a fashion that is more difficult to do in big companies. That's probably why a lot of big companies engage in relationships with design schools."
The Second Annual BusinessWeek survey of the best design schools highlights the growing role they play in supplying creative managers to corporate and nonprofit organizations. Our list includes joint programs among business, engineering, and design schools as well as revamped curricula within traditional design programs. The driving forces of innovation and globalization are pushing companies to revamp their managerial ranks and hire people with new skills. Surprised by the rise of consumer power, companies are seeking people who can connect with customer cultures online and overseas. And in an era of constant change, they want people who are comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. Schools that teach design thinking, with its emphasis on maximizing possibilities rather than managing for efficiency, are in high demand.
Once again, BusinessWeek turned to a panel of innovation consultants, design academics, and corporate executives to select programs that have curricula they respect and whose graduates they hire. Then we conducted interviews with professors, students, and alumni to narrow down their recommendations to a list of the top global 60. Finally, in making our choices, we asked them to look for programs that combined design with business, engineering, or marketing, and we treated this mixture as essential to their teaching.
Who made the cut? Programs that enabled students to engage with the real world through sponsored projects and internships; that were tuned in to contemporary business issues, such as sustainability; and those whose graduates have proven themselves to be creative designers, strategists, and leaders.
TEAMWORK WORLDWIDE
Many schools are beginning to go global. To share resources, ideas, best practices, and academic talent, European, American, and Asian universities are setting up joint programs. Among the schools on our list, many are offering dual degrees from two or more programs or schools.
These programs zero in on one of business' major problems—the difficulty managers and creative types have working together. Innovation may now be as important as efficiency, yet people responsible for each function rarely understand one another and work poorly together on teams.
One obvious solution is to throw them together and teach them design thinking jointly. The Royal College of Art, for example, has a new program with the Tanaka Business School and the Imperial College London engineering school. Carnegie Mellon University puts design, engineering, and business students into teams to work on projects. And the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management pairs MBAs with design students in product development classes.
Another program that focuses on collaboration is Adcenter, the Virginia Commonwealth University graduate advertising program run by Richard Boyko. In his 30-year career at ad shops Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett Worldwide, and TBWA\Chiat\Day, Boyko found that "advertising creatives and account managers never spoke to one another." He says that "the businesspeople are the ones who pay the checks, but they aren't trained to look at creative content." Worst of all, "they aren't trained to collaborate, to rub elbows with those unlike themselves."
At Virginia Commonwealth, Boyko launched a new master's degree in creative brand management, which is an alternative MBA for those interested in careers as chief marketing officers or advertising account managers.
Sometimes managers need to get two kinds of training—technical and design—from two institutions to do their jobs. In France, Eloi Baudoux was on the fast track in 1998, when as a student in Paris' prestigious engineering school Ecole des Mines, he took a summer internship at Renault (RENA.PA). But once inside the automotive giant, Baudoux found that his science background wasn't enough. "I realized that engineering activities would not allow me to get as close to the product, to the human and customer processes, as I needed to be." In fact, says Baudoux, "I found I could not be taken seriously within Renault without a design background."
Luckily, Ecole des Mines had a partnership with Strate Collège, a design academy in a Paris suburb (and a new addition to our list). When Baudoux finished his formal engineering training in 1999, he was able to move directly into a two-year Master's program in design.
Baudoux kept in touch with Renault, and in 2001 he met with a manager who was interested in recruiting a team to craft a vision for the company's research and development arm. Baudoux, two other design-engineers, and a sociologist were hired. His role at Renault is to offer strategic ideas for both designers and engineers. He explains to car designers how new technologies will affect the user experience. He also translates what experiences customers want to engineers, in order to help them build better cars.
"Sustainability" is on the lips of nearly all chief executives as they attempt to go carbon neutral in making and distributing their products and services. That means revamping materials, manufacturing, distribution, and their energy use.
True, there appears to be a lot of "greenwashing" going on, with companies buying dubious carbon emission offset credits to establish credentials that allow companies to call themselves green while flying executives on private jets to conferences and paying people not to chop down trees.
Yet companies are feeling real pressure from Wall Street to reduce environmental liabilities, from European customers demanding planet-friendly products and from younger new hires who take green issues seriously. Increasingly, CEOs themselves see sustainability as fitting well with strategies for market expansion and growth. So they are racing about looking for designers, managers, and strategists who are knowledgeable about building sustainable products and implementing processes.
"Companies are turning to design schools and programs for this kind of talent. The business-design degree program at the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design offers a class on sustainable design. This executive education program focuses on getting managers talking about the environment "in the early phases and in the corner office," says Jean-Paul Kusz, a business school professor teaching in the IIT design program."
Next spring, Northwestern University's Kellogg Business School's program in social enterprise is adding a class on sustainable manufacturing, bringing engineers and business students together to cooperate on product development with sustainability in mind. "It's top-down driven; CEOs are into it, so we believe we have to teach it to the students," says professor Walter Herbst.
European design schools have long been leaders in sustainability because of government regulations, consumer demands, and market opportunities. Design school KaosPilot International takes a hands-on approach to designing in a global context. Not only does the school have headquarters in four Scandinavian countries, but students spend about half their degree traveling the world on team projects called Outposts, where they work on designs for businesses and nonprofits in the local community. On their Outpost in Dublin, students plan to "green" the city of Dublin with roof gardens that would absorb CO2.
Whether it's in Cincinnati or Rio de Janeiro, some of the best ideas often come from students. At the Design Incubator at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio, students devised a way to turn resin from discarded palm trees, which are harvested for their heart of palm fruits, into a material that is firm enough to be used as a replacement for wood. The class project has led to new products, from skateboards to furniture, while helping to recycle waste. And last spring, Parsons The New School for Design senior Rishi Desai organized a university-wide competition of sustainable design projects. In his senior thesis, Desai is turning insights from the competition into models for sustainable business.
Attracting top-of-class talent is getting more competitive, and some companies are already offering sweeteners. Just as they have long been willing to underwrite MBAs for executives, they are now supporting students in design programs. At Stanford University's design school, where MBAs and engineers increasingly collaborate, consultants and companies line up for the best students.
So when Stanford MBA student Sarah Stein Greenberg asked to defer a job offer at business consultant Monitor Group to continue her Stanford D-school project designing irrigation schemes for rural farmers in Southeast Asia, the consulting firm agreed. They even let Greenberg spend another year at the D-school as a teaching fellow. She will start her job as a business consultant with Monitor this fall.
Bansi Nagji, chief executive of Monitor Innovation, says Greenberg's experience will make her a stronger asset. "[It] was compelling to us as we were starting to see the world in similar ways," says Nagji. Greenberg says she has learned "why some organizations can innovate and others can't." Students who can answer that question are just the talent that companies want.
Woyke is a staff editor at BusinessWeek. Maha Atal is an intern at BusinessWeek.
Defining Design Thinking
Follow Your Heart, Daniel Pink
“Well, one, of course, is Design. The others are Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. Mastery of them—I call them the "six senses"—will increasingly mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. Fortunately, design is one profession that relies on all six of these abilities.”
Creativity that Goes Deep, Roger Martin
“Designers induce patterns through the close study of users and deduce answers through the application of design theories. However, designers value highly a third type of logic: abductive reasoning.”
Strategy by Design, Tim Brown
“Because it's pictorial, design describes the world in a way that's not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.”
What is Design Thinking?, Victor Lombardi
“Design Thinking is collaborative, abductive, experimental, personal, integrative, and interpretive.”
Management by Design, Richard Farson
“Design achieves its power because it can create situations, and a situation is more determining of what people will actually do than is personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.”
The design thinking way to brand management, Niti Bhan
“Design thinking is one of enlightened trial and error wherein one observes the world, identifies the patterns of behavior, generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats the process, and keeps on refining.”
The Design of Business (PDF), Roger Martin
“When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.”
How do business people traditionally make decisions?, John Zapolski
“A design approach tries to construct or shape reality. The worldview difference is that a business viewpoint defines a situation objectively, from the outside. "The world is out there, and we if we can understand it better than a competitor, we can respond more appropriately." A design viewpoint looks at a situation subjectively, participating in it from the inside. "We're making the world up by the choices, stories, products, and experiences we make. If they are compelling enough, other people will want to join in."
Thinking About Design Thinking, Dan Saffer
“If there is such a thing as design thinking it is probably shorthand for: a Focus on Customers/Users, Finding Alternatives, Ideation and Prototyping, Wicked Problems, A Wide Range of Influences, and Emotion.”
“Well, one, of course, is Design. The others are Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. Mastery of them—I call them the "six senses"—will increasingly mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. Fortunately, design is one profession that relies on all six of these abilities.”
Creativity that Goes Deep, Roger Martin
“Designers induce patterns through the close study of users and deduce answers through the application of design theories. However, designers value highly a third type of logic: abductive reasoning.”
Strategy by Design, Tim Brown
“Because it's pictorial, design describes the world in a way that's not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.”
What is Design Thinking?, Victor Lombardi
“Design Thinking is collaborative, abductive, experimental, personal, integrative, and interpretive.”
Management by Design, Richard Farson
“Design achieves its power because it can create situations, and a situation is more determining of what people will actually do than is personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.”
The design thinking way to brand management, Niti Bhan
“Design thinking is one of enlightened trial and error wherein one observes the world, identifies the patterns of behavior, generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats the process, and keeps on refining.”
The Design of Business (PDF), Roger Martin
“When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.”
How do business people traditionally make decisions?, John Zapolski
“A design approach tries to construct or shape reality. The worldview difference is that a business viewpoint defines a situation objectively, from the outside. "The world is out there, and we if we can understand it better than a competitor, we can respond more appropriately." A design viewpoint looks at a situation subjectively, participating in it from the inside. "We're making the world up by the choices, stories, products, and experiences we make. If they are compelling enough, other people will want to join in."
Thinking About Design Thinking, Dan Saffer
“If there is such a thing as design thinking it is probably shorthand for: a Focus on Customers/Users, Finding Alternatives, Ideation and Prototyping, Wicked Problems, A Wide Range of Influences, and Emotion.”
Design Programs & Design Thinking
Institute of Design at Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/big_picture/design_thinking.html
Rhode Island School of Design
http://www.centerdesignbusiness.org/programs.html
Rotman School of Management
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/businessdesign/default.aspx
Illinois Institute of Technology
http://www.id.iit.edu/
http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/big_picture/design_thinking.html
Rhode Island School of Design
http://www.centerdesignbusiness.org/programs.html
Rotman School of Management
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/businessdesign/default.aspx
Illinois Institute of Technology
http://www.id.iit.edu/
Monday, October 6, 2008
Strategy by Design
By: Tim Brown
In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and pursuing a strategy, the head of Ideo says, you need to learn to think like a designer. Here's his five-point plan for how to make the leap.
In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and pursuing a strategy, the head of Ideo says, you need to learn to think like a designer. Here's his five-point plan for how to make the leap.
It's remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them -- and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy -- spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks -- are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren't enough of those people out there. What's more, words are highly open to interpretation -- words mean different things to different people, especially when they're sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.
People need to have a visceral understanding -- an image in their minds -- of why you've chosen a certain strategy and what you're attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this endeavor. It can't help but create tangible, real outcomes.
Because it's pictorial, design describes the world in a way that's not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe. If, say, Motorola unveils a plan to create products that have never existed before, everyone in the organization will have a different idea of what that means. But if Motorola creates a video so people can see those products, or makes prototypes so people can touch them, everyone has the same view.
Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design's playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed -- someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy -- all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don't focus very much on making it better.
If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn't know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn't think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality -- they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality -- they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.
The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking -- not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we'll make it better. And that's an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow. Here is Ideo's five-point model for strategizing by design.
Hit the Streets
Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights about your market and your customers. Those insights come only when you observe directly what's happening in your market. As Jane Fulton Suri, who directs our human-factors group, notes in her book Thoughtless Acts? (Chronicle Books, 2005), "Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behavior in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people's behavior . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident."
Very often, you can build an entire strategy based on the experiences your customers go through in their interactions with your organization. Service brands have a horrible habit of focusing on the one interaction where they think they make money. If you're running an airline, there's an awful temptation to focus all of your attention on what it's like to fly a particular route on a particular aircraft. In fact, you can track backward and forward a whole series of interactions that consumers have with you that are very relevant. If you start to map out that entire journey, you begin to understand how you might innovate to create a much more robust customer experience.
Recruit T-Shaped People
Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can't just stand in your own shoes; you've got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
"We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do."
We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That's what you're after at this point -- patterns that yield ideas.
These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don't put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts -- notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they've seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another's insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.
Build to Think
"Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. In a sense, we build to think."
Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a drawing, model, or film that describes a product, system, or service. We build these models very quickly; they're rough, ready, and not at all elegant, but they work. The goal isn't to create a close approximation of the finished product or process; the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we're trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.
When you rapidly prototype, you're actually beginning to build the strategy itself. And you're doing so very early in the innovation cycle. This enables you to unlock one of your organization's most valuable assets: people's intuitions. When you sit down with your senior team and show them prototypes of the products and services you want to put out in two years' time, you get their intuitive feel for whether you're headed in the right direction. It's a process of enlightened trial and error: Observe the world, identify patterns of behavior, generate ideas, get feedback, repeat the process, and keep refining until you're ready to bring the thing to market.
Not long ago, we worked with a large food-processing company on the possibility of incorporating RFID technology into its supply chain. After many rounds of prototyping and getting feedback, we made a three-minute video that described a very complex interaction of suppliers, customers, logistics, weather, geography, and a host of other real-world conditions that showed how RFID might work. The video rapidly accelerated the development of a potential RFID-based strategy, because the company could instantly give us even sharper feedback and help us refine it. Rapid prototyping helps you test your progress in a very tangible way and ultimately makes your strategic thinking more powerful.
The Prototype Tells a Story
Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process -- it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections -- and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy.
Some years ago, a startup called Vocera came to us with a new technology based on the Star Trek communicator -- that "Beam me up, Scotty" device. They had worked out the technology -- an elegant device the size of a cigarette lighter that you could wear around your neck and use to connect instantly with anyone on the network. But the team had no way to describe why people would need the thing. We made a five-minute film that played out a scenario where everyone in the company had these gadgets. The storyline followed how one person used the communicator to rapidly assemble a crisis team dispersed across an office campus. The film showed that while fixed communications and mobile phones are very good for expected interactions, this device was ideal for reacting to the unexpected.
The team used the film to tell their story; it helped them raise VC funding and it acted as the guiding framework for the development and marketing of the product, which is called the Vocera Communications Badge. But there's an interesting twist to this tale. We thought the badge would work best on big office campuses. The market thought otherwise. Vocera's two largest markets are hospitals and big-box retail stores.
In the end, it didn't really matter that the market opportunity morphed into something different. Because you're testing and refining your strategy early and often in the design process, the strategy continually evolves. When the market changes, as it did with Vocera, the strategy can change along with it. This gives you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy, in which the first time you get to test the strategy's outcome is when you actually roll it out. You can't gauge the strategy's effectiveness until you achieve the end result and do your postmortem. I don't see why that's useful. By building your strategy early on, in a sense you're doing a premortem: You're giving yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in real time, as the strategy unfolds.
Design Is Never Done
Even after you've rolled out your new product, service, or process, you're just getting started. In almost every case, you move on to the next version, which is going to be better because you've had more time to think about it. The basic idea for the notebook computer came out of Ideo some 20 years ago: Ideo cofounder Bill Moggridge is listed on the patent for the design that lets you fold a screen over a keyboard. Since then, the laptop has been redesigned -- and greatly improved -- hundreds of times, because design is never done. The same goes for strategy. The market is always changing; your strategy needs to change with it. Since design thinking is inherently rooted in the world, it is ideally suited to helping your strategy evolve.
It all comes back to the fact that in order to really raise innovation productivity within organizations, at the strategic level and everywhere else, you have to increase the amount of design thinking inside organizations. Doing so helps you get to clarity faster, helps your organization understand where you're taking it, helps you figure out whether you're on the right track, and enables you to adapt quickly to change. Those are pretty valuable survival skills.
Some companies already understand this and are working design thinking into their organizations. It's not such a hard thing to do. The toughest part is taking that first step -- breaking away from your habitual way of working and getting out into the world.
Tim Brown is the CEO and president of Ideo, one of the world's leading product-design firms.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Experiential education
Experiential education is a philosophy of education that focuses on the transactive process between teacher and student involved in direct experience with the learning environment and content.[1] The term is mistakenly used interchangeably with experiential learning.[2] The Association for Experiential Education regards experiential education "as a philosophy and methodology in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills and clarify values."[3] Many will find a relationship between experiential education and Educational progressivism. The former is the philosophy and the latter is the movement it informed (some might suggest it is still a current movement).
About
John Dewey was the most famous proponent of experiential education, perhaps paving the course for all future activities in his seminal Experience and Education, first published in 1938. Dewey's fame during that period rested on relentlessly critiquing public education and pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences.[4] Dewey's work went on to influence dozens of other influential experiential models and advocates, including Foxfire[5], service learning[6], Kurt Hahn and Outward Bound[7], among others.
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and the father of modern critical pedagogy. He is often cited in relationship to experiential education.[8] Freire was largely focused on the active involvement in students in real experience, radical democracy and the creation of praxis among learners.
Practice
Experiential education informs many educational practices underway in schools (formal education) and out-of-school (informal education) programs. Each of the following teaching methods relies on experiential education to provide context and frameworks for learning through action.
Outdoor education uses organized learning activities occurring in the outdoors, utilizing environmental experiences as a learning tool.[9] Service learning is a combination of community service with stated learning goals, relying on experience as the foundation to provide meaningful experience in service.[10] Cooperative learning alters heterogeneous grouping in order to support diverse learning styles and needs within a group.[11] Active learning, a term popular in US education circles in the 1980s, places the responsibility of learning on learners themselves, requiring their experience in education to inform their process of learning.[12] Environmental education are efforts to educate learners about relationships within the natural environment and how those relationships are interdependent. The experience of being outdoors and learning through doing makes this learning relevant to students.[13]
Experiential education serves as an umbrella for linking these diverse practices in a coherent whole. Similarly, experiential education is also closely linked to a number of other educational theories, including progressive education, critical pedagogy, youth empowerment, feminist-based education, and constructivism. The development of experiential education as a philosophy is intertwined with the development of these other educational theories and have helped articulate and clarify elements this philosophy.
Examples
Examples of experiential education abound in all disciplines. In her 1991 book Living Between the Lines, Lucy Calkins states, "If we asked our students for the highlight of their school careers, most would choose a time when they dedicated themselves to an endeavor of great importance...I am thinking of youngsters from P.S. 321, who have launched a save-the-tree campaign to prevent the oaks outside their school from being cut down. I am thinking of children who write the school newspaper, act in the school play, organize the playground building committee.... On projects such as these, youngsters will work before school, after school, during lunch. Our youngsters want to work hard on endeavors they deem significant."
High school English classes in Rabun Gap, Georgia have published the Foxfire model (Wigginton, 1985). Students research the culture of the Appalachian Mountains through taped interviews and then write and edit articles based upon their interviews. Foxfire has inspired hundreds of similar cultural journalism projects around the country.
An example of service learning is Project OASES (Occupational and Academic Skills for the Employment of Students) in the Pittsburgh public schools. Eighth graders, identified as potential dropouts, spend three periods a day involved in renovating a homeless shelter as part of a service project carried out within their industrial arts class. Students in programs such as these learn enduring skills such as planning, communicating with a variety of age groups and types of people, and group decisionmaking. In carrying out their activities and in the reflection component afterward, they come to new insights and integrate diverse knowledge from fields such as English, political science, mathematics, and sociology.
Presidential Classroom, a non-profit civic education organization in Washington D.C. is open to high school students from across the country and abroad, where they meet and interact with government officials, media correspondents, congressman, and key players on the world stage to learn how public policy shapes many aspects of citizens’ lives. This form of experiential education allows students to travel to Washington and spend a week hearing from controversial speakers, meeting with interest group spokesmen and touring the nationals capitol. Students participate in a group project directed by experienced and engaging instructors, and have mediated debates on current issues facing the country. The focus of the week is to give students a hands-on introduction to how real world politics operate, and allow their classroom to come to life.
Friends World Program, a four-year international study program operating out of Long Island University, operates entirely around self-guided, experiential learning while immersed in foreign cultures. Regional centers employ mostly advisors rather than teaching faculty; these advisors guide the individual students in preparing a "portfolio of learning" each semester to display the results of their experiences and projects.
The New England Literature Program in the English Department at the University of Michigan is a 45-day program where University instructors live and work together with forty UM students in the woods of Maine in early spring. The program involves intensive study of 19th and 20th Century New England Literature, with a strong focus on creative writing in the form of academic journaling, as well as a deep engagement with the landscape of New England. NELP students and staff take hiking trips into the White Mountains and other parts of the New England wilderness each week, integrating their experience of the landscape with writing and discussion of texts.
Another example is Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture, the only nonprofit and independent experiential educational program for college students in the United States. The Chicago Center is distinguished by its unique experiential seminars characterized by a 'First Voice' pedagogy, its intentional location in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, and relationships with several hundred internship sites in Chicago.
While many of the students who attend Chicago Center grew up in cities, the majority of participants are from suburban, rural and even and farming communities. In addition to its Semester, May Term and Summer Session, which individual students sign up for, the Chicago Center designs and staffs what it calls "LearnChicago!" programs for groups, which promise non-tourist Chicago experiences.
Other projects and "capstone" programs have included everything from student teams writing their own international development plans and presenting them to Presidents and foreign media and publishing their studies as textbooks, in development studies, to running their own businesses, NGOs, or community development banks. [14]
At the professional school level, experiential education is often integrated into curricula in "clinical" courses following the medical school model of "See one, Do one, Teach one" in which students learn by practicing medicine. This approach is now being introduced in other professions in which skills are directly worked into courses to teach every concept (starting with interviewing, listening skills, negotiation, contract writing and advocacy, for example) to larger scale projects in which students run legal aid clinics or community loan programs, write legislation or community development plans.
Change in roles and structures
Whether teachers employ experiential education in cultural journalism, service learning, environmental education, or more traditional school subjects, its key idea involves engaging student voice in active roles for the purpose of learning. Students participate in a real activity with real consequences for the purpose of meeting learning objectives.[15]
Some experts in the field make the distinction between "democratic experiential education" in which students help design curricula and run their own projects and even do their own grading (through objective contracted standards) and other forms of "experiential education" that put students in existing organizations in inferior roles (such as service learning and internships) or in which faculty design the field work.[16]
Experiential education uses various tools like games, simulations, role plays, stories in classrooms. The experiential education mindset changes the way the teachers and students view knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just some letters on a page. It becomes active, something that is transacted with in life or life-like situations. It starts to make teachers experience providers, and not just transmitters of the written word.
Besides changing student roles, experiential education requires a change in the role of teachers. When students are active learners, their endeavors often take them outside the classroom walls. Because action precedes attempts to synthesize knowledge, teachers generally cannot plan a curriculum unit as a neat, predictable package.[citation needed] Teachers become active learners, too, experimenting together with their students, reflecting upon the learning activities they have designed, and responding to their students' reactions to the activities. In this way, teachers themselves become more active; they come to view themselves as more than just recipients of school district policy and curriculum decisions.
As students and teachers take on new roles, the traditional organizational structures of the school also may meet challenges. [17] For example, at the Challenger Middle School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, service activities are an integral part of the academic program. Such nontraditional activities require teachers and administrators to look at traditional practices in new ways. For instance, they may consider reorganizing time blocks. They may also teach research methods by involving students in investigations of the community, rather than restricting research activities to the library (Rolzinski, 1990).[citation needed]
At the University Heights Alternative School in the Bronx, the Project Adventure experiential learning program has led the faculty to adopt an all-day time block as an alternative to the traditional 45-minute periods. The faculty now organizes the curriculum by project instead of by separate disciplines. Schools that promote meaningful student involvement actively engage students as partners in education improvement activities. These young people learn while planning, researching, teaching, and making decisions that affect the entire education system.
At the university level, including universities like Stanford and the University of California Berkeley, students are often the initiators of courses and demand more role in changing the curriculum and making it truly responsive to their needs. In some cases, universities have offered alternatives for student-designed faculty approved courses. In other cases, students have formed movements or even their own NGOs like Unseen America Projects, Inc., to promote democratic experiential learning and to design and accredit their own alternative curricula [18]
Other university level programs are entirely field-taught on outdoor expeditions. These courses combine traditional academic readings and written assignments with field observations, service projects, open discussions of course material, and meetings with local speakers who are involved with the course subjects. These "hybrid" experiential/traditional programs aim to provide the academic rigor of a classroom course with the breadth and personal connections of experiential education.
Transitions from traditional to experiential
At first, these new roles and structures may seem unfamiliar and uncomfortable to both students and adults in the school. Traditionally, students have most often been rewarded for competing rather than cooperating with one another. Teachers are not often called upon for collaborative work either. Teaching has traditionally been an activity carried out in isolation from one's peers, behind closed doors. Principals, used to the traditional hierarchical structure of schools, often do not know how to help their teachers constitute self-managed work teams or how to help teachers coach students to work in cooperative teams. The techniques of experiential education can help students and staff adjust to teamwork, an important part of the process of reforming schools.
Adventure education may use the philosophy of experiential education in developing team and group skills in both students and adults (Rohnke, 1989). Initially, groups work to solve problems that are unrelated to the problems in their actual school environment. For example, in a ropes course designed to build the skills required by teamwork, a faculty or student team might work together to get the entire group over a 12-foot wall or through an intricate web of rope. After each challenge in a series of this kind, the group looks at how it functioned as a team:
- Who took the leadership roles?
- Did the planning process help or hinder progress?
- Did people listen to one another in the group and use the strengths of all group members?
- Did everyone feel that the group was a supportive environment in which they felt comfortable making a contribution and taking risks?
The wall or web of rope can then become a metaphor for the classroom or school environment. While the problems and challenges of the classroom or school are different from the physical challenges of the adventure activity, many skills needed to respond successfully as a team are the same in both settings.
These skills — listening, recognizing each other's strengths, and supporting each other through difficulties — can apply equally well to academic problem-solving or to schoolwide improvement efforts.
For example, the Kane School in Lawrence, Massachusetts has been using adventure as a tool for school restructuring. The entire faculty — particularly the Faculty Advisory Council, which shares the decisionmaking responsibilities with the principal — has honed group skills through experiential education activities developed by Project Adventure. These skills include open communication, methods of conflict resolution, and mechanisms for decision making (High Strides, 1990).
See also
- David A. Kolb
- Laboratory school
- Outdoor education
- Minnesota State University, Mankato Masters Degree in Experiential Education
References
- ^ Itin, C. M. (1999). Reasserting the Philosophy of Experiential Education as a Vehicle for Change in the 21st Century. The Journal of Experiential Education,.22(2), 91-98.
- ^ (nd) Experiential learning and experiential education. Wilderdom.com. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ (nd) What is experiential education? Association for Experiential Education. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ Neil, J. (2005) John Dewey, the Modern Father of Experiential Education. Wilderdom.com. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ Starnes, B.A. (1999) "The Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning: John Dewey, Experiential Learning, and the Core Practices." ERIC Digests - ED426826. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ Giles, D.E., Jr., & Eyler, J. (1994). "Theoretical roots of service learning in John Dewey: Toward a theory of service learning." Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Fall, 77-85. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ Gass, M. (2003) "Kurt Hahn address 2002 AEE International Conference." Journal of Experiential Education. 25(3), 363-371.
- ^ Bing, A. (1989) "Peace Studies as Experiential Education." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 504., pp. 48-60.
- ^ Walsh, V., & Golins, G. L. (1976). The exploration of the Outward Bound process. Denver, CO: Colorado Outward Bound School.
- ^ Furco, A. (1996) Expanding Boundaries: Serving and Learning, Florida Campus Compact.
- ^ McInnerney J., & Roberts, T.S. (2005). "Collaborative and Cooperative Learning." In The Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Volume 1: Online Learning and Technologies. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing, pp. 269-276.
- ^ Bonwell, C. and Eison, J. (1991) Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. Washington, D.C.: Jossey-Bass.
- ^ Palmer, J.A. (1998) Environmental Education in the 21st Century: Theory, Practice, Progress, and Promise. New York: Routledge.
- ^ Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) (Hardcover) by Dave Lempert
- ^ Fletcher, A. (2005) Meaningful student involvement: Students as partners in school change. Olympia, WA: CommonAction. Retrieved 6/12/07.
- ^ Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) (Hardcover) by David Lempert
- ^ Best practice: New standards for teaching and learning in America’s schools. Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde, 1998, p.8
- ^ Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) (Hardcover) by David Lempert
- Calkins, L. (1991). Living between the lines. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc.
- Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books.
- Educational Writers Association. (1990). Lawrence grows its own leaders. High Strides: Bimonthly Report on Urban Middle Grades, 2 (12). Washington, DC: Author.
- Fletcher, A. (2005). Meaningful student involvement: Students as partners in school change. Olympia, WA: HumanLinks Foundation.
- Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Continuum.
- Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. NY: McGraw Hill.
- Kielsmeier, J., & Willits, R. (1989). Growing hope: A sourcebook on integrating youth service into the curriculum. St. Paul, MN: National Youth Leadership Council, University of Minnesota.
- Kraft, D., & Sakofs, M. (Eds.). (1988). The theory of experiential education. Boulder, CO: Association for Experiential Education.
- Rohnke, K. (1989). Cowstails and cobras II. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
- Rolzinski, C. (1990). The adventure of adolescence: Middle school students and community service. Washington, DC: Youth Service America.
- Sizer, T. (1984). Horace's compromise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
- Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfire experience. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
External links
Associations
- Association for Experiential Education
- The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning
- National Society for Experiential Education
- New York State Cooperative & Experiential Education Association
- New England Association for Cooperative Education and Field Experience
- National Service Learning Clearinghouse
Resources
- Experiential Learning & Experiential Education: Philosophy, Theory, Practice & Resources
- New Horizons for Learning
Articles
- Changing Schools through Experiential Education. ERIC Digest. The original version of this Wikipedia article is based on the public domain text at this site.
- Experiential Learning in Higher Education: Linking Classroom and Community. ERIC Digest.
- Incorporating Student Voice into Teaching Practice. ERIC Digest.
- Improving Evaluation in Experiential Education. ERIC Digest.
- Outdoor, Experiential, and Environmental Education: Converging or Diverging Approaches? ERIC Digest.
- Seven Steps to be an Efficient Science Teacher - Butterfly Fields Limited, India.
Art education in the United States
Art education in the United States reflects the social values of American culture. Apprenticeship was once the norm, however with the democratization of education, particularly as promoted by educational philosopher John Dewey, opportunities have greatly expanded.
Enrolment in art classes at the high school elective level peaked in the late 1960s—early 1970s with that period's emphasis on individuals expressing uniqueness. Currently 'art(s) magnet schools', available in many larger communities, use art(s) as a core or underlying theme to attract those students motivated by personal interest or with the intention of becoming a professional or commercial artist. It is widely reported that the arts are losing instruction time in school based upon budget cuts in combination with increasing test-based assessments of children which the federal government's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act requires. It is worth noting that while the NCLB retains the arts as part of the "core curriculum" for all schools, it does not require reporting any instruction time or assessment data for arts education content or performance standards, which is reason often cited for the decline or possible decline of arts education in American public schools.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Education began awarding Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grants to support organizations with art expertise in their development of artistic curricula that helps students to better understand and retain academic information. One such model of education was created in 2006 by the Storytellers Inc. and ArtsTech (formerly Pan-Educational Institute). The curricula and method of learning is titled AXIS[1]
Since WWII
Since World War II, artist training has become the charge of colleges and universities and contemporary art has become an increasingly academic and intellectual field. Prior to World War II an artist did not need a college degree. Since that time the Bachelor of Fine Arts and then the Master of Fine Arts became required degrees to be a professional artist, necessities facilitated by "the passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944, which sent a wave of World War II veterans off to school, art school included. University art departments quickly expanded. American artists who might once have studied at quaintly bohemian, craft-intensive schools like the Art Students League (as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko did) or Black Mountain College (as Robert Rauschenberg did) or the Hans Hofmann School of Art in Greenwich Village began enrolling at universities instead. By the 60's, Yale had emerged as the leading American art academy; its alums included Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Jennifer Bartlett and Robert Mangold, making it seem as if every hip artist in New York was obligated to have an Ivy League degree."[2] This trend spread from the United States around the world. Now the PhD in studio art is becoming the new standard. Although in 2008 there are only two United States programs offering a PhD in studio art, "10 universities offer the degree in Australia, and it is ubiquitous in the UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and other countries. It is already expected for a teaching job in Malaysia." [3] As James Elkins, the chair of the department of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the chair of the department of art history at the University of Cork in Ireland wrote in Art in America, "By the 1960s the MFA was ubiquitous. Now the MFA is commonplace and the PhD is coming to take its place as the baseline requirement for teaching jobs."[4] This is in reference to teaching positions for studio art at the college level. The Ph.D. degree has been a standard requirement to be a professor of art education for many years.
The Picture Study Movement
The study of art appreciation in America began with the Picture Study Movement in the late 1800’s and began to fade at the end of the 1920’s. Picture study was an important part of the art education curriculum. Attention to the aesthetics in classrooms led to public interest in beautifying the school, home, and community, which was known as “Art in Daily Living”. The idea was to bring culture to the child to change the parents.[5]
Picture study was made possible by the improved technologies of reproduction of images, growing public interest in art, the Progressive Movement in education, and growing numbers of immigrant children who were more visually literate than they were in English. The type of art included in the curriculum was from the Renaissance onward, but nothing considered “modern art” was taught. Often, teachers selected pictures that had a moral message. This is because a major factor in the development in aesthetics as a subject was its relationship to the moral education of the new citizens due to the influx of immigrants during the period. Aesthetics and art masterpieces were part of the popular idea of self culture, and the moralistic response to an artwork was within the capabilities of the teacher, who often did not have the artistic training to discuss the formal qualities of the artwork.
A typical Picture Study lesson was as follows: Teachers purchased materials from the Perry Picture Series, for example. This is similar to the prepackaged curriculum we have today. These materials included a teacher’s picture that was larger for the class to look at together, and then smaller reproduction approximately 2 ¾” by 2” for each child to look at. These were generally in black and white or sepia tone. Children would often collect these cards and trade them much like modern day baseball cards. The teacher would give the students a certain amount of information about the picture and the artist who created it, such as the picture’s representational content, artist’s vital statistics, and a few biographical details about the artist. These were all included in the materials so an unskilled teacher could still present the information to his or her class. Then the teacher would ask a few discussion questions. Sometimes suggestions for language arts projects or studio activities were included in the materials.
The picture study movement died out at the end of the 1920’s as a result of new ideas regarding learning art appreciation through studio work became more popular in the United States.
National organizations
National organizations promoting arts education include Americans for the Arts[6] including Art. Ask For More. [7], its national arts education public awareness campaign; Association for the Advancement of Arts Education; Arts Education Partnership [8]; and National Art Education Association.[9]
References
- ^ AXIS - Education Revolution
- ^ "How to Succeed in Art" by Deborah Solomon, New York Times Magazine. June 27,1999
- ^ "Art Schools: A Group Crit," p. 108. Art In America, May 2007.
- ^ "Art Schools: A Group Crit," p. 109. Art In America, May 2007.
- ^ Smith, Peter (1986,Sept.) The Ecology of Picture Study, Art Education[48-54].
- ^ Americans for the Arts
- ^ Art. Ask For More.
- ^ Arts Education Partnership
- ^ the National Art Education Association
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