Proact

We borrowed freely from teachers, designers, artists, start-ups, and architects while thinking about what a design philosophy is and how one should be crafted.

Think like a designer

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people think innovatively and creatively about a problem or situation. It’s about applying a designer’s sensibility and methods to problem solving in order to create a viable strategy for change that meets people’s needs. It’s more of a philosophical approach than a particular tool or technique (Lockwood 2009). In fact, design thinking “is all about exploring different possibilities” (Brown 2009, 6) and may involve various methods, both informal and formal. The specific methods, however, are not as important as the overall approach to creative problem solving and working within constraints.

Focus on experience

According to Jared Spool (2009), founder of User Interface Engineering, a research, training, and consulting firm, there are five kinds of design decision styles:

Teams that adopt a user-focused design decision style are framed by user research and look beyond just activities, examining in-depth the goals, needs, and contexts of users, using that information to drive decisions. Our own design philosophy was informed by a user-focused approach. (We do also have plans to make user-centered research more concrete in the years to come. Although we had two years of field research in our first classroom, we have not formally researched student learning and experience in a collaborative learning space. We need more empirical, user- focused design research that addresses how physical classroom designs influence student’s learning experiences. As we collect data, we will better understand the contextual nature of student’s experience in the multimedia classroom, which will inevitably lead to an evolving design philosophy in the years to come.)

Move from data to story

Whichever design style is used, whatever methods are employed, a design philosophy is born from data. It may be as simple as entering into departmental conversations about the beliefs and aspirations that drive faculty, then looking for certain patterns to emerge. It may be a full-scale research study. The idea is to synthesize the data to tell a meaningful story. According to Tim Brown (2009), “Ssynthesis, the act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information, is a fundamentally creative act; the data are just that—data—and the facts never speak for themselves” (70). Crafting a story around the data is a generative, collective enterprise that becomes the scaffolding for the guiding principles of a department’s design philosophy.

Frame principles proactively

Simon Sinek (2008), a strategic communicator and consultant, suggested framing situations proactively, rather than reactively: “When we react, we look to point fingers and assign blame (to others or ourselves) for the existence of the situation. We work to compensate or prevent bad things from happening. When we proact, we accept the situation as fact and start looking for solutions or alternatives. We work to make good things happen.” Sinek’s “forward focused” approach encourages people to unite around their goals and intentions. Our philosophy reflected, in tangible ways, the motivations and proactive arguments that informed our classroom design. The principles clearly expressed our purpose in a way that helped us to garner support from those outside of the department.

Qualify and quantify

Sinek (2009) also encouraged people to state their goals as actionable verbs: “For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not 'integrity,' it’s 'always do the right thing.' It’s not 'innovation,' it’s 'look at the problem from a different angle.' Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea—we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation” (67). With verbs, there is a road map for decision-making and measurement. Instead of a vague or abstract concept, there is a principle people can act on or act out. Action verbs help to both qualify and quantify ambitions. The department then has a road map to action.