2018 Cooper Hewitt High School Design Challenge!!
Cooper Hewitt is working with Target to hold a national high school design competition!
Participants are challenged to redesign something they use in their day-to-day lives, whether it be a place, process, or object, so that it becomes accessible to everyone (especially people with disabilities).
This is what brings a huge grin to my face: the challenge's description. Or, as I see it, a call to action that must be acknowledged by schools across the country.
"Nearly 56.7 million people in America are challenged by the environments in which they live and work. While great strides have been made to design for accessibility, many of our everyday tasks and surroundings still remain a challenge for people of varying abilities. This is where designers (and you!) step in. Designers are creative problem solvers who work to improve all aspects of daily life. They design solutions that eliminate barriers and improve access for all. The 2018 National High School Design Competition challenges high school students around the country to make the everyday—place, process, or object—accessible for all. Be ambitious, innovative, and bold! Identify a place, process, or object that you use often; identify a problem that makes it less accessible for people with disabilities; and design a solution for this problem. Create a sketch of your idea and describe how your design addresses the challenge. Review how to enter and use these resources to start thinking like a designer!"
Check out the website: 2018 Design Challenge
What makes me so darn happy and excited is that this is the kind of thinking that should be happening in schools. Students should be given the chance to identify problems in the world around them - and these problems can definitely be related to their preferred major or area of interest - to research those problems, and design creative solutions to them.
These kinds of inquiry-and-problem-solving skills are exactly what we need to be teaching our students to prepare them for future careers.
With design thinking, they learn to experiment, think outside the box, and manage projects independently. They become more creative and self-directed, and see mistakes as learning opportunities.
If you've never heard about all this stuff I'm talking about, it's coming directly from the core of what design thinking is - look up John Spencer and A.J. Juliani's book Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning.
That student-centered teaching style is exactly why I'm here today, doing my own independent projects and maintaining this blog (shoutout to my English teacher/independent study mentor!)
As you can kinda see, this design challenge is basically the epitome of what I love to rave about, so there was no question in my mind whether or not I was going to enter.
As I'm doing my independent study in learning technologies (i.e. how we can redesign classrooms and teaching styles to better meet the needs of our learners), I thought it would be fitting to design something related to the very learning technologies that I've been researching.
The primary resource that came to mind was Awakening Genius in the Classroom by Thomas Armstrong. Check out my book review and reflection here.
I want to focus specifically on the 12 qualities of genius that Armstrong enumerates:
From there, I can go in several directions.
>> Redesign a classroom, the users being everyday students
This one would be the easiest for me to do, because I've had experience with it before. My Design Lab class redesigned our classroom last year, creating a space that we thought would adhere to the discussion and project-based environment that we had going on. This time, I would design with every kind of student in mind making classroom environments engaging and collaborative instead of isolationist and inflexible.
>> Redesign the teaching process, the users being teachers
This is the design I think I'm going to go with. I'd be designing something that allows teachers to integrate the 12 Qualities of Genius (Awakening Genius, Armstrong) into their curriculum so that they can create a classroom environment that is more engaging and collaborative (which will ultimately benefit the students, so I'd knock out two birds with one stone).
I have until February 12th to define, research, iterate, and prototype my design.
That means I won't be able to go spend as much time in certain stages of the design thinking cycle, like building empathy and creating several prototypes of the design. That won't be too big of a problem, since I have already defined the users and problem that I'm designing for.
But designing still takes time, which is something I don't have a lot of right now.
So off to work!
