International Journal o f Technology and Design Education 4, 289-297, 1994. 9 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Designing Education for Life on Earth MICHAEL J. SHANNON Center for Design Studies (director), 154 St. Nicholas Avenue, Englewood, NJ 07631 ABSTRACT: Designing, viewed broadly as the human capacity to link thought and action, has meaning and value in the world that transcends its material associations. Given the nature and urgency of current socioeconomic and ecological problems, the creative, generative concept of design must be made more accessible and useful. Accordingly, my intent is to dispel prevailing, narrow, specialist impressions of design and to advance in the public mind a larger concept that can influence deliberations and behavior in society-at-large. One of today's most critical areas of need, and one where I think design can make a particularly significant contribution, is education. A critical task for such "design-based education" is enabling people to design an ecologically and economically sustainable future. Keywords: Design, sustainable development, design education, technology education, environmental education.
There is no independent mode o f existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms o f the way it is interwoven with the rest o f the universe. Alfred North Whitehead
It occurred to me with increasing frequency during the 1980s that there were social and educational implications to what I had learned about design during my career as an industrial designer. This paper is based on that idea, i.e., that design represents a generative concept with utility and meaning beyond the production of artifacts. Pursuing this conviction, I enrolled in a college of education and established the Center for Design Studies. The Center is a non-profit organization for the research and development of 'design-based education'. Its emphasis is on educational reform. We offer our work to students, parents, teachers, administrators and businesspeople through publications and a variety of lecture, workshop and classroom presentations. The Center's broad view of design is founded on the work of Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Herbert Simon defines designing as 'devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones'. 1 In developing a general theory of design based on how people change situations into preferred ones, we associate designing with related words: creating, devising, engineering, inventing, planning, problem-solving, etc. These words are among those that refer to a special kind of focused, mental activity that we call 'purposive consciousness'. This goal-directed 'designmind' is what humans use to transform vision into action or translate abstract thought into concrete reality. Design-mind integrates thinking and acting. This process clearly has social and educational implications.
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Psychologists in the 18th century believed that the mind had three faculties: cognition (knowing, thinking), affection (valuing, feeling) and conation (striving, willing). I find this theory useful in describing designmind's operation. Purposeful consciousness represents the integration of the three faculties: cognition is linked with conation, or the will to action, in an affective, or values-based context. Students of design-based education, then, consider not simply, 'Can we act'?, but, 'Should we act'? They readily make value-based choices, commit to action and become accountable for what they do. Schools provide facts and skills, but not meaningful ways to use them. Hands-on, design-based education does. Students learn to view themselves as 'citizen-designers', who ask at every turn, 'Why are things the way they are'?, 'How can they be made better'? and, 'What should I do about it'? Students and teachers work together to design interdisciplinary projects about 'real world' situations that most concern students. Students are motivated by a form of education that becomes personally meaningful to them. Moreover, designing is not done to other people, or only for other people. It is generally done with other people. Multicultural, intergenerational projects broaden students' perspectives, increasing awareness of community and political issues. Designers are team players who learn when to lead and when to follow. And in an open-ended design process, where there are no right answers, but only better answers, teachers become learners, too. This potential for fostering effective, values-based action lies at the core of what I believe design can contribute to social intercourse generally and to education, specifically. We are responsible for designing our lives and, collectively, the future. The world's societal and ecological crises now demand that we accept this obligation and commit to action. Let's summarize for a moment. We have talked about what designing is - an expression of design-mind, a form of purposeful consciousness informed by values, that devises courses of action for changing existing situations into preferred ones. And we have discussed how such practice serves to motivate and educate students. The reader may now ask if all of these students really can be designers. So, having discussed what design is, we need now to look at who designs. The second person on whose work the Center's comprehensive view of design is founded is Howard Gardner, a MacArthur Fellow and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Howard Gardner's theory of 'multiple intelligences '2 reinforces Herbert Simon's broad definition of design. Dr. Gardner suggests that we have at least seven different kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logico-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, kinesthetic, inter- and intrapersonal. Humans express purposive consciousness, or in Herbert Simon's words, 'change existing situations into preferred ones' in all these domains of intelligence, not only in the visualspatial one to which design is usually relegated. In other words, humans design not only physical things like buildings and airplanes, but also
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symbolic things like music, mathematics, poetry and social policy. We can see, therefore, that designing, construed broadly as a universal process for realizing ideas in the physical world, can serve effectively as the core principle of general education. Also, and more significantly, we can see that it can serve as the foundational process for restoring and conserving the world. We all design. To some extent we all direct our lives by design and, conversely, have our lives directed by others' designs. Far more than most of us realize, we are designed beings. We are designed to see, to say, to think, to buy, to act out our lives in prescribed ways - ways that often benefit others at our expense. Our homes, our food, our education, medical care and government, even the designed 'nature' that surrounds us inform our thoughts and behavior. I ' m not suggesting that we are victims, or that those who design us are malevolent. To the contrary. This designing has meant progress! The concept of progress, however, is exhausted and increasingly questioned as the earth suffers mounting social and ecological crises. My point is that human designing over the millennia has happened, in a collective sense, by accident, a more or less random conversion of the planet's resources into all that w e ' v e become. No one has been able to watch, much less control, the whole process of our evolution. The meaning of design as a public idea today is that we must learn from what w e ' v e designed, i.e., what w e ' v e allowed to happen in the past, and based on that we must learn to design better. We must be wiser in assessing what has been designed for us, more competent in designing for ourselves and more aware that we are now designing the conditions of our survival - or our extinction. This brings us to the major rationale for my wanting to extend the common, visual-spatial understanding of design to encompass purposeful consciousness arising in all cognitive domains. The creation in the next century of a sustainable future represents, in my opinion, the greatest design problem to confront civilization. Much of our world is going to have to be redesigned. Of critical importance is that we're speaking about redesigning not only the world's material aspects, but also its spiritual and cultural ones. If the public fails to comprehend design's whole potential, and continues to believe that designing is only what visual-spatial designers do, i.e., the work of architects, industrial designers, etc., then society, lacking public design imagination, capability and motivation, will continue to drift, a random exercise in consumption and waste unable to evolve toward more humane and ecologically viable ways of being. In fact, the problem is not just that the conventional understanding of design is too narrow to encompass the different kinds of designing that are needed, it is that this understanding is specifically opposed to the corework that must be accomplished. Clarifying this point are thoughts from Ezio Manzini. In Design Issues, 3 he discusses three 'consumption scenarios' that could characterize our future attempts to become global stewards. In
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the first one, the public is basically aware of 'environmental issues' and the consumer industry responds with new products that are 'green', and that can be repaired and eventually recycled. In the second scenario, there is a deeper public awareness moving 'beyond the notion of possession and personal consumption', to the utilization of non-individual, non-destructive product/services with high levels of social eco-efficiency. Finally, we come to the most radical scenario whose 'operation can only take place on the cultural level'. In this case, 'criteria of quality and value judgements' will need to be promulgated in order to cause 'the reduction of needs to be experienced as an increase in social quality'. I believe that Manzini's third scenario involving a 'reduction of needs' will have to obtain to make ecological recovery possible. The problem posed, however, by the prevailing, narrow definition of design vis-a-vis this scenario is that visual-spatial design is the genesis and engine of our material culture. Visual-spatial design drives consumption and development. It is the process of progress. It operates well, therefore, in the first scenario, and adequately in the second. New, green products and services can be designed that ameliorate, however superficially, society's impact on the environment. But this green approach to environmentalism, as laudable as it may be, will not do what needs doing. It will not restore the earth, nor improve 'social quality'. (Manzini uses the term 'social quality', because he objects to the 'hedonistic connotations' of 'quality of life'.) The essential design problem confronting us now is not the visual-spatial one of making 'better' (greener) products, but the one of reducing our desire to c o n s u m e products. This is the third scenario's issue - how to achieve a new cultural perspective that lowers the social value of material consumption, while raising the social value of 'social quality'. I am presuming here that what Manzini means by 'social quality' is a way of life that would correspond to one founded on awareness of our participation in the shared community of living things and dedicated to the cleansing and revitalization of the biosphere. But achieving social quality depends not only on w h a t we do, but on h o w we do it. The sense of spiritual communion that characterizes this scenario, requires that it be an attractive, freely chosen option, not a way of life that has to be adopted. Green products and services are associated today with deprivation, with unpleasant steps we have to take, as in war-time, to make do with less. The primary work, therefore, of creating social quality cannot be done with visual-spatial design, although there will certainly be roles for it especially in the fine and graphic arts. Instead, the main task of changing the existing situation (a material consumption-based culture) into the preferred one (a social quality-based culture) will require, in Howard Gardner's terms, linguistic and intra- and interpersonal design, forms of design that are not commonly recognized. The fact is, we are going to have to reduce our material consumption. Will we suffer doing it, because we have to change or will we, using design's w h o l e capacity, redesign our lives so that we w a n t to change?
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Our question now must be: What is the most effective process that we can design for orienting people culturally and spiritually, for helping them achieve social quality? I submit that it is a form of personal, transformative designing generally called 'education'. I'm speaking of a kind of holistic, progressive education that does not impose established ways of being, but elicits new ones in a context of humane caring, affective engagement, vitalizing activity and ecological sensibility. We'll now discuss such an educational process. I call this form of K-12, design-based education, 'education for life on earth'. It is based on multi-dimensional purposive consciousness - designmind - whose overarching theme is the development of a sustainable future. My design objectives are: 9 To imbue a curriculum with compelling meaning, and 9 To develop humane, ecologically-grounded designers of a sustainable future. In this curriculum 'ecology', and 'sustainable development' are not treated as academic subjects, p e r se. Rather these expressions of life's interconnectedness and the mandate to design holistically, form the underlying themes for every subject. Sustainability is the foundational idea of the new curriculum, a basic value, the fundamental rationale for education. Sustainability is the lens through which learning is perceived and experienced. I envision the K-12 continuum as having three phases: a K-4 'Identity' phase, a 5-8 'Context' phase and 9-12 'Designing' phase. The entire K-12 curriculum would be based on issues related to designing a sustainable future. The three phases would apply the major theme of sustainability in sequential sub-programs developmentally appropriate for each grade level. They would do this by emphasizing the following qualities that characterize education for life on earth: 9 Identity - deep internalization of sustainability values, 9 Context - the practice of hands-on, project-based, constructivist pedagogy, and 9 Designing - learning that is thoroughly integrated with community life. We'll now examine the phases in more detail. All of the teaching and learning that defines education for life on earth is design-based. That is, it involves the students in designing their own education in preparation for designing their communities and their lives. They are encouraged to be concerned, to think and to act, to participate in making their world. 9 Identity p h a s e
In this first phase, the primal bond between humans and their earth will be awakened in young children. The goal here is to establish a deep "earth identity" that will shape the child's attitudes, values and priorities throughout life. Technical skills and scientific knowledge that will be learned later could be subverted without values in place that ensure integrity of purpose. In this initial phase, acquiring intellectual knowledge is not the primary goal.
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Rather, the emphasis is on affective growth, building a strong foundation of spirituality that, later, will energize symbolic learning and properly relate what is learned to productive, holistically considerate action. At the same time that children's affective ties to the earth are being established, their confidence and self-esteem are growing through successful performance in simple, action-based design projects. These projects will include a lot of earth play for the children. Gradually their play will turn to working with the earth, growing plants, food, flowers. The children will transform earth-play into the structured miracle of bringing living things out of the mud. This metaphor for evolution, for life, for the nurturing 'mother' role of the earth will be explored, discussed, experienced in a variety of ways. Indoors and out, every season, rain or shine, the children will get into the dirt with their hands, minds and bodies and make new life. Every subject area will be incorporated into this program for growing. The children will work in teams with other students, younger and older, with parents, with senior citizens and with visitors of all kinds. They will celebrate the rituals of planting and harvesting, of life and death and the life cYcle that is wholly dependent on the earth and its light, air and water. Having thoroughly internalized their 'earth indentities', profound regard for, and dependence on, their home planet, and having developed confidence, selfesteem and motivation for learning, they are now ready to explore their context for living. 9 Context phase In the 5-8 grades, the students will enlarge their identities to encompass their operating contexts. At this point, with emotional and motivational bases established, the development of basic skills is accelerated. Secure within themselves, the children will look outward at the many ways there are in the world to apply what they've learned to designing sustainable futures. Having experienced earth, the foundation of life, they will now experience and study infrastructure - what we've built on the earth, in it, with it. Students will take field trips to cities, factories, mines and harbors. They will learn about the systemic nature of infrastructure and the assumptions and vulnerabilities that enable and support it on the one hand and endanger it on the other. They will study the myriad interactions, both conflictual and symbiotic, that inextricably link the 'natural' and artificial environments. The effects of, and process of, policy-making will be studied and demystified. All of this learning will be undergirded by their commitment to ecologically-compatible design and practice. Their projects will become their ways of living. They will begin to see themselves as agents, as worldmakers not working on, or doing to, the earth, but being in, and doing with, the earth. 9 Designing phase In the final, 9-12 phase, students begin to work in the world. In the Identity
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Phase, they constructed and internalized their roles as committed citizen/ stewards and competent learners/designers. In the Context Phase, they ventured forth into their environmental context and studied natural/artificial infrastructure. Now they are ready to integrate identity and context in action. They are ready to engage the world, to design their lives. When we talk about students 'working in the world', we are talking about learning activities in both school and community. The difference between 'work' and 'education' is deliberately blurred. Education for life on earth integrates living/working/education. For example, even entry-level work at MacDonald's or in a parking lot will be subjected by the student to ecological design critique, to observation in journal writing and to discussion in class. Every aspect of daily life will be reflected in some way in the student's education. Conversely, many aspects of a student's educational program will relate directly to their everyday experience, thereby reinforcing the perceived relevance of academic work. The lesson is that life is learning. The school becomes a community center where learning becomes a lifelong process involving everyone as both student and teacher. (Both Context and Designing Phase students are involved in these kinds of joint activities.) There are classes where adult and youth education merge. Young people teach old people about computers, art or dance, for instance, while old people teach young ones about mathematics, history or growing corn. All students, male and female, college-bound and blue collar, take shop classes and get working exposure to manufacturing technology and industrial process. Besides the joint adult/youth programs on the school site, the community supports a number of programs that bring young and old together in the community. These include service-learning activities, internships and apprenticeships with local businesses and manufacturers. The fullest dimension of 'community-as-learning-laboratory' is 'education-based community development', an urban renewal design process that involves Designing Phase students in the authentic work of city management and development. Students, along with their professional mentors, wrestle with real-world issues and policies at the local, state and national levels that affect the quality of life in their communities. They learn firsthand about the conflicts and complexities that characterize the problems of making economic growth sustainable. Students develop a sense of place, of belonging and being needed. They become personally invested in designing and caring for their community and by extension as adults, caring for their families and for themselves. The 'education-for-life-on-earth' model we're discussing has profound implications for the ways schools are run. Conventionally conservative teachers and school administrators will find the 9-12 Designing Phase particularly daunting. This is because at this level, school and community become thoroughly integrated as mutually supportive resources. Course work is based on, or closely relates to, real life circumstance. The school walls become porous as students move out and townspeople move in. Educators who are tied to standardized, textbook-driven curricula will have
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difficulty tolerating the lack of formal structure. Additionally, for the program to work, teachers and students must have roles in school governance and finance. Many new voices will be heard. In short, education for life on earth requires a thoroughly restructured educational environment. At the end of their 'education-for-life-on-earth' curriculum, students are prepared to move into mainstream life as productive adults, not just in the sense of being law-abiding consumers and workers, but as holistically conscious earth-stewards, designers of humane, aesthetic, sustainable systems. These people will have profoundly internalized their earth-identities, the understanding of their essential interdependency and connectedness with their h o m e planet. This essential wisdom will undergird and inspire the highest qualities of creative thought, design and action enabling them to fulfill the promise of their education - their achievement of a sustainable future. In conclusion, we see that constructivist, design-based education is more than thinking critically about problems; it's doing something about them thinking and acting - being effective. Designing is how we use what we know. It gives meaning to knowledge. It is the art o f work. Whether w e ' r e designing systems, policies, processes, statements or artifacts, we are realizing imagination, accomplishing objectives . . . worldmaking. Design-based education does not just produce visual/spatial designers, or discriminating consumers or intelligent critics of technology. While it does accomplish all of these things, its primary goal is to enable each of us to internalize our own roles as designers, and so prepared, to participate actively in creating an ecologically and economically sustainable world. Each individual must b e c o m e a more assertive, creative and h u m a n e designer so that our collective design-mind can effectively address the world's manifold crises. The future must stop happening to us. We must start designing a future for us. -
NOTES 1. 2. 3.
Simon,Herbert A.: 1969, The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge, 129. Gardner,Howard: 1983, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, New York. Manzini, Ezio: 1994, 'Design, Environment and Social Quality: From "existenzminimum" to "quality maximum" ', Design Issues, Volume 10, Number 1, 37-43.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael J. Shannon holds a degree in Architecture from Princeton University and is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Technology in Education at Columbia Teachers College. He is director of the Center for Design Studies, a non-profit organization for developing and implementing design-based education, service-learning and education-basedcommunity development. Mr. Shannon also founded and heads the New York Forum for Design Education, a group of designers and educators that discusses and develops design education initiatives.
