Essentials Magazine Essentials Fall 2016 | Page 17

Design Thinking
ing with a number of really passionate
and talented school design / architecture
teams, working with a wide array of
schools with a variety of project needs
and aspirations, I have seen a profound
shift in how many are approaching the
design process. While many of their
questions still focus on easily measured/
easily-priced ‘objects’ – square footage, materials, furniture, 3D printers,
etc. – more and more of our clients are
starting the design process by asking a
different set of questions entirely:
• How will this process prepare our
kids, teachers, and community for the
ways they will teach, learn and collaborate in the future?
• Beyond spaces, what else must we
re-imagine and re-design?
• Can the design process itself be the
way our school creates and collaborates
over time?
In other words, as important as the
physical spaces are, there is a rising
sense that ‘how’ we come together
to design new learning environments
may be the most valuable asset of all.
And perhaps even more, the spirit of
wonder and curiosity – more so than
theory and certainty — must be front
and center at every design step along
the way. While I am extremely proud
of the ‘end products’ my WONDER
team creates with our partners, I am
most inspired by the ‘messy process’ of
discovery that has become central to
everything. At our founding three years
ago, our WONDER studio intentionally shifted away from the traditional
A&E business process of focusing on
the ‘building’ as the end product. In its
place, we invested in a human-centered,
multi-disciplinary design methodology
committed to uncovering what people
and communities ultimately ‘need’ so
they can thrive as learners, collaborators
and human systems.
It has become less about efficiently
guaranteeing predictable ‘projects’ that
are spreadsheet-driven and more about
‘expeditions’ that uncover the unpredictable.

Like professional design studios
IDEO and NoTosh, university programs
like Stanford University’s d.school or
MIT’s NuVu, or a rising number of K-12
schools like the Nueva School and Mt.
Vernon, we have embraced a ‘Design
Thinking’ process. Everything we do is
anchored in ‘empathy’ via purposeful
ethnographic methodologies and ‘prototypes’ via rapid development techniques
to re-think and challenge all of our
assumptions within every project.
In other words, we want to occupy a
mindset of wonder and curiosity as long
as possible. This means teaming up with
film-makers, scientists, technology-entrepreneurs, policy makers, and others

“As educators, distributors,
manufacturers, school and
community leaders, and
designers of future learning
environments, this means we
are being challenged to adapt
and shift on multiple fronts
in order to serve our students
and communities in ways we
cannot possibly predict.”

that do not normally ‘design’ schools so
that we can challenge every assumption
we have.
This means not asking kids and
teachers to be ‘school designers for
a day’ via traditional workshops but
instead teaming up with kids, teachers,
and community partners to take on
real-world design challenges beyond
the project itself in order to make real
community impact (and simultaneously observing ‘how’ teams instinctively
use spaces, tools and each other in real
time).
And it means getting involved in
projects far beyond architecture to
broaden our insights, whether it be
organizing multi-school leadership retreats to explore the future of education,

working with national foundations to
create multi-year films, or leading longterm teacher professional development
processes. Perhaps the process leads to
a better building. Perhaps it leads to a
decision not to build a building at all. Or
perhaps it leads to re-imagining ‘school’
in ways never before imagined.
Of all of these efforts that have had
the biggest impact on how our clients
engage the school design process—
and on us as a design firm—the most
striking are the year-long/multi-yearlong teacher professional development
design expeditions we regularly are
asked to lead. Generally, there are three
reasons why a school team makes such
an investment:
• They will renovate or build in the
future, so they want to amplify their
educators’ ability to solidify the non-negotiable cultural/behavioral characteristics that must underpin all future design
choices.
• They have already begun the architectural process and realize that educators must now collaboratively experiment and test new behaviors in order to
fully leverage emerging spaces.
• They realize that if they only
design new spaces without re-thinking
everything as a unified ecology—spaces,
culture, brand, time, schedule, curriculum, technology, partnerships, professional practice, etc.—they will never
fully realize the value of the architecture
itself.
Structurally, this process focuses on
the following elements:

Learning Design, Not School
Architecture
As much as we want to eventually
focus on the design of spaces, the focus
of the teacher experience can’t be about
solving that problem. Ideally, we can use
it as a spring board, but it’s never the
explicit focus of the overall experience.
Instead we want to find the underlying
questions worth exploring, whether it is
agility, collaboration, professional identity, a maker culture, etc.

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