Transcriber: Hue Chi Lam Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
I would like to begin with a confession.
When I was 12 years old,
I convinced myself that my mother was a spy.
(Laughter)
When I was growing up,
I loved hearing stories about my parents before -
about their life before I was born,
and before they met each other.
When I asked my mom what she did before she met my dad,
she told me she was a teacher.
And I easily imagined her like the teachers I knew at school.
And, one day, when I was 12,
I was rifling through a shoebox of her old photos.
I was looking at pictures of her as a child,
in prep school and in college,
and her life as a young adult.
Then I saw a picture of her as a teacher.
She was standing in a classroom giving a lesson.
But two things about this picture really struck out to me.
The first was: all her students were marines.
And the second was: there was a map hanging behind her,
and it was one of those topographic maps.
(Laughter)
So you can imagine the kind of conclusions that my 12-year-old mind had drawn.
(Laughter)
So the reason why I am sharing this with you today
is that this was the first time in my life
that I can recall having my assumptions about learning being challenged.
Prior to that moment,
I thought the sole province of learning was childhood.
So, given that conclusion
and the fact that my mom wasn't really lying to me,
one could call this a small, but useful, deception.
So as I talk about learning and design today,
I would like to introduce another small, but useful, deception.
And this actually turns out to be pretty sound design advice.
It is this:
Imagine that everything you design is alive.
Like -
I am talking everything, from a thumbtack to a space station.
And when we start thinking about
all of these objects that surround us as living, learning entities,
the first thing you might ask is:
What would these objects possibly be learning about?
Well, for starters, they'd be learning about us,
and they'd be learning about other objects,
much in the same way that we learn about objects
in our everyday environment.
This way of thinking about things
has a couple of really meaningful implications.
The first of which is it reveals the kind of emotional impact
that our surroundings have on us.
A really easy way of illustrating this
is that we can often infer personality traits from everyday objects,
whether they be directing and polite, or friendly and inviting,
or they display a kind of delicate genius.
Another thing that this way of thinking does
is it shifts our perception about our relationship with the world:
rather than thinking about ourselves as somehow separate from our surroundings,
that we become a thread in the fabric of our environment,
that we become part of a continuity of context.
Now, this way about thinking about things and learning and design
is important for two reasons.
The first is, in its most general sense,
design becomes a fundamentally human activity.
It suggests that we are world makers,
that we have to adapt our environment in order to survive.
As Dan Leahy pointed out earlier this morning,
we do so in order to rise to the challenges that we face,
as individuals, as a society, and as a species.
Because, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said:
The Universe was not built for our happiness.
And the second reason,
and this excites me the most, especially as a designer,
is design is starting [to be] increasingly perceived [as]
less about the mere styling of objects
and more about the development of sophisticated systems of behavior.
Then the tenets of learning become paramount.
So much so that we are starting to witness a shocking overlap
between the discourses of the two fields.
And what I would like to share with you today
are three points of unity between the two.
To the educators in this room, this might seem like old hat
drawing from the likes of Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert and Edith Ackermann.
But what I am trying to do is not to present a survey of learning,
but rather convey these points as principles of design.
The first of which is that learning is always indirect.
In other words, we never take messages at face value any longer:
we take them, and they are always mediated through our own knowledge and experience.
For example, we could take two wooden sticks:
to one person, they might be eating utensils;
to a second they might be hair accessories;
to a third they might be part of a musical instrument.
So, whether we are talking about learning or design,
people always transform the input of the system
through the lens of their experiences.
Secondly, it is important
that we abandon the conduit metaphor of communication.
In other words, knowledge is not information
that's transmitted from one end and received at the other
and then applied.
This is an extension of the deeply flawed deficit model of learning and design,
a model that suggests
that people have this gap, or this void, in their knowledge,
and somehow information can be funneled directly to fill it,
when, in fact, knowledge is an experience.
It's an experience to be constructed and designed
through our interaction with the world.
And, finally, our ability to externalize our ideas
is vital to both activities.
One could argue
that designed objects are projections of our inner thoughts and feelings.
In assuming so, then objects only embody goals.
They make skills manifest.
They shape the identities of the users.
Or as Marshall McLuhan said: We become what we behold.
We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
So, what I am trying to show is just a glimpse of the wealth of knowledge
that the field of design can glean from learning from this rich tradition.
I would like to go back to the moment when I saw my mother's photo.
I was so surprised and shocked
that I immediately put the photo back in the box
and put the box away.
Even as a twelve-year-old child,
I knew then that I would not ask about what I had seen ...
until a couple of weeks ago.
So, I called my mom -
(Laughter)
I called my mom,
and I asked her for permission to share this story today.
She was tickled by my account of discovering this picture.
She acknowledged, yes, she had been a member of the intelligence community.
She was recruited right out of college.
And so, finally, I asked her the question that I had kept with me all these years.
I said, "So, mom, what was it that you were teaching?"
And she said, "I can't tell you,
(Laughter)
even though that race was finished long ago."
And her answer reminded me of the words of H G Wells
who said that the future is a race:
a race between education and catastrophe.
And I would like to take the optimistic stance
and assume that we will prevail,
especially in part through learning by design.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)