Dreaming design

In February 2008, researchers from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) asked middle school students to design a gadget that would help “Rita’s grandma – sitting on a chair – to pick up her needle from the floor without bending?”

After following the complete step-by-step route to problem-solving, the groups came up with ideas that greatly differed in concept and complexity. One group sketched a collapsible rod with a magnet at its end. Another came up with an idea of a chair that used principles of suspension to be lowered and raised. A third group conceived of a remote-controlled car with a magnet on its belly that could be maneuvered up a ramp from the floor to the chair’s arm. The first design, in fact, came close to what a professional had proposed.

Beyond classroom
These researchers were among other Indian educators who met at the  IIT-Bombay in February this year, to continue from last year, the discourse on how design thinking should be infused into school curriculum. The project reiterated that children are natural problem-solvers who meet real-world complexities innovatively. And, introducing design thinking in schools would, by honing these abilities, make learning relevant beyond the classroom.

“We know children are born innovators. The problem lies with the teacher who is surprised every time a child does something creative,” says KB Jinan, an educator who has been studying how tribal children learn  for over 20 years. Put them in a system with teacher-centric, textual learning, and we have art classes where  students echo the sloping roofed house that everyone else is also recreating. “A teacher speaks some words and the students create images of the experience in their heads, which is not real experience. The subject is absent,” says Jinan.

Getting creative
That creativity, as author Ken Robinson says, “is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status” is universally agreed. The devil is in detailing how to achieve it. And the house is divided on a number of things: Should design thinking inform the whole approach to learning so that learning becomes effortless and fun? Should it be a separate subject module with specific goals that are easy to assess? Should education be revamped altogether?

So, this year, some old, some new players attempted to streamline the fuzzy aspects of marrying creativity to curriculum: a standardised mode of assessment, resources, role of the teacher, modes of student engagement and so forth. “While last year we were nebulously defining the idea, this year we have asked more practical questions,” says Chitra Natarajan of HBCSE, which is researching on designing design & technology modules for schools. The exercise aims at drafting a white paper that contains these discourses, which will be presented to the Ministry of Education.

Design education
“In today’s education system, teacher is the centre of the environment, whereas the focus should be on learners. And the teacher is the provider of all answers,” says one of the participants, Chintan Mody. “Current education system just builds on test-taking skills.”

Design education values the opposite. Given the present competitive and individualistic pursuit of knowledge, it is viewed as a vehicle for ushering in collaboration, at the same time being sensitive to an individual’s abilities. “Learning won’t be about one right answer, but multiplicity of answers, creativity and innovation, the assessment of which will be done in a non-threatening environment,” says Natarajan. It’ll be a bottom-up approach.

“With continual visual bombardment, children have stopped ‘looking’. Design sensitises a child. It introduces lateral as opposed to linear thinking. You start to see in layers, spaces and you learn to perceive and analyse,” says Indrani Dey Parker, communication designer, NID, Ahmedabad. “From introspection to externalisation, education becomes a holistic journey.”

Going about
“When you try to push for another subject, there is bound to be resistance. Design thinking should ideally permeate all subjects,” says Dr Ajanta Sen of the Industrial Design Centre, IIT-B. The NCERT framework 2005 tried to address similar issues to make education more relevant and fun. “Rather than a Wordsworth poem, children now read poetry they can connect with, like Messy Room, Dog Ate my Homework,” says Shaili Sathyu, education consultant, Akshara High School. But, adds Modi, “NCERT kills it by introducing same old standard questions at the end of it.”

Natarajan votes for modules because “there has to be a beginning and end to it so evaluation becomes possible.” The learning goals of such a module can come from the subjects so that “children have a stake, so do teachers and parents”. The first task would then be to sensitise teachers to design philosophy so learning becomes about each student, and no longer remains a one-way verbal transmission between the teacher and ‘class’.

However the case is argued: scaling up design education without additional infrastructure investments, creative problem-solving, creating more products or different worlds, the most interesting suggestion came from an audience member. “Should it be for an end? Just like we discovered our limbs in our first PT class, design education should be about discovering that we can create.”