Master of Design Futures: Capstone Research Project — A Summary Extract

Trans-disciplinary design for transformative learning: a participatory action research project

See the full length version of the final paper here.

Introduction

1. Purpose of my research project

This research project builds on the lineage of other designers and educators dedicated to building a more compassionate, regenerative and equitable world. Within this lineage, this research project aims to explore the value of trans-disciplinary design as a pedagogy for transformative change. Through exploratory research, I aim to generate insights about how education leaders might use design for education in the conception, planning and delivery of education with transformative purposes.

2. The focus of my investigation

My investigation focuses on how education and learning design leaders use or might use design-driven pedagogy. Supplemental research questions driving my investigation are:

• What is a future design based education model for transformative education, and how might educators use such a model?
• What type of design ought to inform such future education models for future focused educators and learning designers?
• How are education leaders currently using human-centred or design thinking in education, and what is the value of such approaches?

I interviewed 14 education leaders across secondary, higher education, and learning and development practice areas. Several of the practitioners had worked across all three areas of education and or learning and are held in high esteem as leaders, innovators and educators.

3. Findings

My practice is one of making change through co-creation, more than technological solutions: education is a relational process. External expert models are inherently limited to the extent the educator can use it to inform their relational work with learners. The Cargo Bike Education Model is a useful, apt metaphor that holds wisdom. However, this project indicates that this prototype model is a work in progress, and that its greater value may be as a co-creation tool for pedagogy and strategic education renewal, rather than a prescriptive model. In other words, I became more interested in the metaphor as a shared space for learning, dialogue and co-creation, rather than a model to solve design-based pedagogy. Based on this insight, I will continue to evolve the model into a co-creation approach for education renewal, working alongside educators.

Literature Review

1. The future of learning: transformative and trans-disciplinary education

In 1972, Buckminster Fuller wrote in the introduction to Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World about the global impact of the accelerating design and production competence, which he said is:

symptomatic of far greater transformations in the life of humanity aboard our planet… [and the] omni-specialisation by the education system was yesterday’s physical tyrant’s means of effecting their omni-divide and conquer strategy. If humanity is to survive aboard our planet, it must become universally literate and preoccupied with inherently cooperative [design] in which every human is concerned with accomplishing the comfortable sustainable well fairing of all other humans. (p. 19)

Almost 50 year later, in 2021, Buckminster Fuller’s prescient call to action rings home today with even greater force: the great transformations of human life on Earth are accelerating. Today, we see machine learning, rising inequality and climate extremes as drivers of accelerating change in how we live and work (OECD 2021; Victorian Department of Education 2019; McKinsey 2021; McNeill & Engelke 2016). The nature of these complex systems means the future is increasingly uncertain and hard to predict; as complex dynamic systems are characterised by indeterminacy, such as emergence, tipping points and self-organisation (Jackson 2003; Meadows 1999).

Thomas Bjorkman, co-athor of the Nordic Secret, speaks about another, less common aspect of system change: paradigm shifts, societal change and shifts in consciousness. Bjorkman says that we can understand system shifts happening at different levels: Level 1 is a shift in behaviour (i.e, switch from diesel to electric car because of a change in values); Level 2 is a societal shift, such as what people experienced during the Industrial Revolution (though still operating on the Enlightenment worldview); and Level 3 is where we shift to a new worldview (such as when we emerged into the Enlightenment period). Bjorkman believes that we are seeing a shift as deep as Level 3 today: new worldviews are emerging (Bjorkman & Fuller 2020; Hall 2020). Not only are we seeing drivers of change in some external system “out there” but we are seeing changes in how people make sense of the world and changes within our shared social reality.

Society has been through great flux and change before; and history shows that education has enabled adaptation and cultural renewal to support a peaceful transition in such times. Throughout the 1800s, the Nordic countries were among the poorest in Europe. Today the Nordic countries are relatively happy, educated and prosperous. What happened? Civil rights revolutions in the US and France and other reforms were driving transitions from rule by monarchy to rule by democracy. Visionary intellectuals and political leaders in the Nordic countries acted to prepare the people for transition by driving an education movement based on the German philosophy of bildung, which combined culture and enlightenment thinking, to develop consciousness (Anderson & Bjorkman, 2018). The Nordic countries transitioned peacefully from rule by King to representative democracy (of sorts), and today perform highly on happiness, education and economic development.

I am not implying this is a template for a theory of change. But it is telling that education can play a major part in cultural transformation towards societal wellbeing. Today we again live a time of great flux and uncertainty, characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (“VUCA”). In response, education offers hope as a way to once again prepare the soil for healthy change and cultivate transformation and renewal.

2. Education reform and innovation

Education researchers are calling to reform the formal measures of success in education: converging around a common set of renewed competencies, such as imagination, curiosity, rational skepticism, exploratory thinking and collaboration (Claxton 2021), many of which could be delivered through future design education. Additionally, the OECD, in its position paper, Education 2030, calls for the teaching and recognition of transformative competencies (OECD 2018). These Transformative Competencies recognise the need for young people to navigate uncertainty and play an active role in creating new value, reconciling tensions and taking responsibility. Creating new value is about building competencies to create new products and services for inclusive and sustainable development; reconciling tensions is about systems thinking, empathising with others and making strategic decisions; and taking responsibility is about understanding the consequence of our actions, emotional self-regulation and practical ethics (OECD 2018).

Educators for sustainability have been arguing about the need for epistemic learning for decades (Orr 2004; Stirling 2010). Drawing on Bateson’s model of learning, Stirling (2010) describes three levels of learning: the first order of change is about doing “more of the same;” the second order change is about changing our values and assumptions; and third order change is about epistemic learning: “seeing thing differently” (p. 25). Taylor and Cranton (2021) conclude there are different methods for transformative learning, but the outcome is the same or similar — “a deep shift in perspective, learning more open, more permeable, and better justified meaning perspectives (Mezirow 1978, cited in Taylor and Cranton 2021)” (p. 3). Sitra, the Finnish public innovation agency, published a book called Sustainability, Human Wellbeing and the Future of Education (2019) includes several chapters published by different authors who talk to the need for transformative, creative, trans-disciplinary and innovative pedagogies as a pedagogical strategy for human wellbeing and sustainability (notably; Glasser 2019; Riordan and Caillier 2019; Laininen 2019).

3. Design-driven education as transformative and trans-disciplinary pedagogy

Future design-driven education potentially has a significant role to play in the future evolution of learning for social innovation and sustainability. However, this claim is difficult to make because the area of design pedagogy has very little empirical evidence: Sawyer (2017) conducted a systematic review of design studio education pedagogy across K-12 and higher education and found only one literature review on empirical studies of studio pedagogy. Nevertheless, I have found some promising signs that design-driven education and pedagogy is gaining recognition, both through this literature review and my own action research.

Design as a culture of learning

Cross (2006) writes about design as a third culture of education (besides the sciences and humanities) in which to conceive and make plans for the future (Cross 2006). Adding to this seminal work, Buchanan (1998) describes learning as a core part of design practice, where knowledge is formed through design processes, thinking and action across problem and solution spaces (Buchanan 1998; Buchanan 2001.b). While STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are predominantly concerned with abstract theory and objective knowledge, design focuses on what is concrete in human experience — the issues and problems that human beings beings face and what human beings can create, make and instigate to overcome those issues or problems. Designerly ways of working are built on a cultural and humanistic art — a discipline of transforming surroundings into environments for human experience (Ehrenfeld 2019).

Rittel argues that most problems designers address are wicked problems: a “class of social system problems which are ill formulated, where information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing” (Buchanan 1992, p. 15). In a VUCA world, this capacity to be comfortable with ambiguous problems and creatively respond by conceiving, planning and making, suggests design competencies are an important skill for future learners who will increasingly face complexity.

And indeed, in the past several years, design-driven education has been presented as a possible solution to teaching practical, authentic, future relevant learning, and has been linked with twenty first century learning skills (Heikkila, A, Vuopala, E & Leinonen, T 2017). According to “theoretical and empirical findings, balancing these basic skills (core subjects) with cross-curricula skills is what the teaching profession will most likely need to strive for the in the future” (Heikkila, et al, p. 480).

Design as trans-disciplinary education

Design-driven education supports trans-disciplinary learning. For example, the Parsons University trans-disciplinary design studio project challenges students to design a new government agency. The students are asked to imagine what the agency would do using a design approach for social innovation (Penin, Staszowski & Brown 2015).

The greater the complexity of a problem area, the more “design pedagogy must acknowledge the need for trans-disciplinary educational approach that integrates fields of knowledge reaching beyond the boundaries of design” (p. 448). Kees Dorst, professor of design and architect of the UTS trans-disciplinary Bachelor of Creative Intelligence, also takes a design-based trans-disciplinary innovation approach, using design practices of frame creation and open dialogue to achieve outcomes (Dorst 2018). This pedagogical development is good for innovation education because often people with highly innovative minds traverse disciplinary boundaries (Gardner 2006).

Design as transformative learning

We can think about design-driven education as transformative in two ways. First, design education that includes transformative learning pedagogy helps students see the world differently. Second, systemic design approaches that inherently include systemic change as part of the design process requires developing transformative skills such as reflexivity and taking responsibility.

The first approach is about human-centred design education, such as product or service design, that uses a transformative pedagogy. As a thought experiment: the Australian curriculum (2021) general capability “Creativity and Critical Thinking” includes exploring and organising ideas, generating ideas and actions, and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. Moving through a typical discovery, ideation and development process in digital or service design, would include building all these general capabilities. Furthermore, the cross-cutting curricula of sustainability is framed in the Australian curriculum under the organising ideas of human-biosphere interdependence, and a worldview that recognise interdependence of all living things. Design-driven education could conceivably build creative and critical thinking skills while engaging learners in project based learning in the area of circular design, such as circular food innovation, to learn about the worldview of inter-dependence of all life. If done well, this could indeed be transformative for the learner.

The second approach is using a systemic design approach that is inherently transformative in its make-up and practice. There are many design-based approaches that increasingly orientate towards transformative aims (Sangiorgi 2011; Margolin 2015; Dorst 2018; Dorst 2019), shifting the current system to a future state. These systemic design approaches represent a new design paradigm, based more in complexity theory and systems thinking (Boulton, Allen and Bowman 2015; Jackson 2003) than design as problem solving. Within this new paradigm, there appears to be a proliferation of designerly ways of working with systemic change goals — for example, regenerative design, strategic design, dialogic design, social design, all explicitly include some form of change in social or organisational systems (Robertson & Simonsen, 2013; Christakis 2014, Vink 2017; Wahl 2016, Jones 2014).

Concepts of learning and transcending are embedded in transformation design and participatory design (Shuler & Namioka, 1991; Sangiorgi 2011). As we facilitate participants through designerly activities, such as collective imagining, dialogue and creativity, we aim to shift consciousness and awareness — deliberating provoking reflexivity that is at the core of enabling change in social systems (Vink 2017). Through this experiential process of designerly ways of working, in particular embodied, creativity and imaginative processes, we can then use reflective practice or double loop learning (Schön 1991, Kolb 2015), to facilitative the transformative part of the design process (Sangiorgi, 2011).

The Cargo Bike Education Model — Project Report

1. This project as part of my emerging practice

High quality educational experiences have provided me opportunities for moral, vocational, spiritual and economic growth throughout life. But inequities in Australia prevent many young people accessing similarly powerful educational opportunities. My practice goal is to design and facilitate cultures of learning that are meaningful, connected and transformative, especially for those who stand to gain most. This project is part of my long term practice goal. This project’s focus is based on theory and practice. In my practice, I realised that design-led projects can offer an interesting pedagogy for transforming self and systems, which is a big part of our challenge as a society moving forward. This is my orientation as a designer in education and why I framed this final capstone project in such a way.

2. The participants

I recruited fourteen participants for this project. I interviewed education leaders across secondary, higher education, and learning and development practice areas. Several had worked, or do work, across all these spaces. See the full length paper for names of contributors.

3. The action research & a shift in project intention

The original project intention was to create a new pedagogical model: the Cargo Bike Education Model. However, the dialogue generated by the Cargo Bike Model and co-creation in meaning-making led me to shift my intention away from expert model maker (design as problem solving), to designerly and strategic practice method of influencing education practice ideas. This subtle shift in framing changed the project plan emphasis away from the education model as repository of wisdom towards seeing the visual co-creation practice as the value generation through insights, shaping intent and design dialogue.

4. The Cargo Bike Education Model: the ideas and research that make up the bike: a trans-disciplinary field

The Cargo Bike Education Model was initially a design-driven education or pedagogical model. However, the more I reflected and engaged in conversations, the more I realised how action-orientated designerly-driven education is inherently inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary in nature. Each time I iterated the more nuanced the model became, drawing on education research and practice, ethics, systems thinking, trans-disciplinary innovation and designerly schools of thought and theory. Which is why the current iteration of the Cargo Bike is focused on a trans-disciplinary design-driven education for transformative learning.

There are many dimensions to explore at the intersection of design and learning, such as learning design, design education and design pedagogical content knowledge. The key difference between learning design and design-driven education based on designerly ways of working, is that the latter is not content and subject matter agnostic (it’s not just a process). Rather, I argue that some aspects of design practice and knowledge — such as prototyping as simulation and reflective practice — are valuable for learning outcomes.

The current iteration (version 4) includes the following areas of design-driven education:

• Conditions for learning: the thinking, planning and facilitation that helps to manifest conditions of safety, interest, motivation, meaning and play to activate effective learning.
• Capabilities: designerly and other capabilities of the facilitator and learner to develop through learning and practice. Many of these capabilities take time to build and so we could imagine mapping them against a design maturity spectrum.
• Practices of the educator as designer: designerly and teacherly practices that will enhance the efficacy and quality of a design-driven education process.
• Mindsets, attitude and disposition: internal orientation and frames of mind that are important for influencing how a designer makes sense of the world. Qualities such as optimism, navigating ambiguity and seeing things whole, are important for the qualities of being, seeing and creating that are essential to future designers.
• See the image below of the current iteration of the Cargo Bike Education Model:

Insights from the Project

Through this participatory action research project, I gained insight into the value of design-drive education and pedagogy, insights about strategic design and leadership in education change, and about future trans-disciplinary design-driven education.

1. Insights about the value of design-driven pedagogy and andragogy

Beware of the expert mindset, we are all learners

the expert — people are the expert in their own lived experience’. Similarly, designers also talk about a beginners mindset as a way to look at situations afresh. During this project, I was reminded of this participatory design wisdom when a few education leaders — speaking from their teaching experience — cautioned against investing too much weight in a theoretical model or expert mindset. This insight resonated deeply with me, perhaps because of my co-design experience, which respects practice wisdom and lived experience, as well as professional expertise. The education leaders I spoke to made this point, implicitly and explicitly, for different reasons, but the outcome is the same: respect the fact that learning is an organic, relational activity, driven by mystery and discovery, and no one framework has all the answers:

— Mona Nasseri and I agreed on a fundamental insight: that no designers working in complexity in the area of systemic design, such as ecological design thinking, are the expert. “We are all going into this new era, and no one knows exactly what it is,” says Nasser.

— This comment echos the sentiment of Bjorkman: we are in a paradigm shift. This means that even though leaders are supposed to know the answer to complex problems, we rarely do absolutely. This reinforces the pertinence of the designerly disposition: be comfortable in ambiguity — see Figure 4 for my synthesis of the role of the designer in complexity.

— Chris Higgins and Hamish Curry cautioned against the over-use or misuse of expert frameworks for education, though for different reasons. While Higgins and Curry reflected on the value of design thinking, they also highlighted its downsides: such as, everyone creating their own brand, external consultants making teachers feel inadequate and the common misapplication of external frameworks within education.

— Fitzgerald, Pro-Vice Chancellor at CDU, said: “anything that helps visualise a set of ideas and factors is really productive — it’s a good way of stimulating conversation.” But be careful about how much emphasis you give frameworks alone — “learning is a relational activity — it’s about building relationships.”

While we are all learners, we still need teachers

While the role of educators might be shifting, this does not mean we are all self-directed autonomous learners. Learners exist in a social fabric and common humanity, as captured by the African Ubuntu philosophy: “I am because, we are.” And how do we cultivate our common humanity and learn how to take responsibility? The answer to these questions lies in part within the role of people in places of respected positions of moral authority. Susanna Carman emphasised the importance of teacherly authority, and that facilitating student voice ought and can be part of a healthy polarity. As Fitzgerald says, “the most important skill that a teacher has is about understanding others.” Only when you truly understand someone can you know how to guide, instruct or give complete agency to ride the bike alone.

Designerly-driven pedagogy has potential as a transformative pedagogy, but so far design thinking is the norm

Most education leaders I interviewed see or use design thinking or human-centred design widely in education for a range of purposes, including program design, innovation and design thinking education, innovating pedagogy, curriculum design and consulting. In the secondary school space, teachers are starting to use design thinking as an innovation learning process, but rarely do teachers appreciate designerly ways of working, which indicates an under-appreciation of design history, culture and epistemology (Laursen & Haase, 2019). An education consultant I interviewed said that almost no schools currently use design-driven pedagogy. Design education is not commonly part of a teacher’s education degree, and few educators receive further education in design beyond informal and boutique design thinking training, usually based on the Stanford University originated design thinking model.

The Stanford design thinking model, popularised through its application in business as an innovation method, is now used widely in management, business and government, and has spread into education, as an innovation process. Design thinking has raised the status and value of design generally, which is good for increasing its value, including in education. Interestingly, though, in the short 15 year history of design thinking, this concept has predominantly been about non-designers applying design thinking in non-design contexts (Laursen & Hease 2019). Design thinking has become business innovation capability, mostly focused on innovation and outcomes.

Within the context of socially responsible education, it is important to realise that design thinking approaches show little of the reflexivity of other anthropologically informed and socially aware design (Kimbell 2011); and design thinking lacks guidance when it comes to selecting, adapting and using design tools and techniques in a designerly way (Laursen & Hease 2019).

This research project — and all the literature that underpins this emerging practice — is drawn from designerly thinking (Schon 1983, Cross, 2006, Buchanan, 2001.b, Vink 2017, Dorst 2011). Designerly thinking is distinguished from design thinking in that designerly practices are part of situated design practice, done by people who identify as designers, and have respect for design methodology, praxis and social contexts — which are all important for reflexive, methodologically appropriate and efficacious designing.

Teacher as designer

Currently, design thinking is often just a tool in the teacher’s toolkit, as Higgins and Carman say. However, I wonder if this misses the ontological power of being a designer? Perhaps this conception misses an opportunity for educators to use designerly ways of working, going beyond design as an innovation method — to design as a way of being? This does not necessitate falling into the binary, teacher or designer, as a teacher can be an educator and a designer. Teachers are already learning designers, even if unwittingly (Garreta Domingo, Sloep, & Hernandez-Leo 2018). But the formal acknowledgement of the designerly ways of working within this role could empower teachers to redesign what is not working, and use design-driven pedagogy beyond design thinking.

2. Insights about strategic education design and leadership

Strategic design for strategic learning design

The Cargo Bike Education Model indicates how designerly ways of engaging in strategic conversations about design-drive pedagogy might lead to positive change in strategic direction; blending strategic design (Hill 2012) and education innovation (Ellis & Bond 2016).

A few observations of education leaders, who exercise stewardship of learning and education, generated this insight. Farrant at Gippsland Tech School commented that the current design thinking programs for students do not include reflective practice or ethics, but these are both areas he would like to see in future programs. And Fenton spoke with conviction about the power of human-centred design in today’s world, and the responsibility and ethical education that we ought to take on to match this responsibility: “ [design] engineers that designed these technologies did not intend to cause a breakdown of democracy or body dysmorphia, but these are the unintended consequences,” says Fenton.

I was grateful to stimulate conversation about how we might change current conceptions of design-informed education towards more designerly and socially responsible ways of design learning. The key insight here is an opportunity to use co-creative designerly ways of working for strategic education design as a practice.

The importance and character of design leadership

Relatedly, the components of reflexivity, intention, and ethics in the Cargo Bike Education Model prompted conversations about design leadership. Participant 1, from higher education, spoke about the importance of reflexivity in leadership training. And Fenton, spoke about the importance of young people and learners as future stewards. The insight is that designing on behalf of other people is a responsibility and an act of service. As designers (teachers, learning designers and design students), we ought to learn about our role as leaders in making change to take responsibility and co-create with with compassion and integrity.

Emerging paradigms for education

Greig and Carman, in particular, highlight the systemic aspects of our current education system and that society needs to transition to a new paradigm. We did not have time and space to talk about this new paradigm, but I hope to continue the conversation about how we might enlarge the living system worldview (Warden 2021), supporting a pedagogy of interconnectedness and interdependence (Cook 2018). This emerging paradigm includes an emerging third phase of science that recognises that learners are engaging in sense-making about objects of inquiry through an interdependent social, dialogic process (Bausch 2014). Education systems are social systems that are best understood as learning ecologies (Snaddon, B, Morrison, A, Hemmersam, P, Broom, A, G, and Erstad, O 2019), rather than industrial education systems with fixed units of skill and knowledge for fixed units of production.

3. Insights about trans-disciplinary design-driven education as an emerging practice

Education design is easier when the ideas are made easy to understand

The ideas and competencies found in trans-disciplinary design-driven education go well beyond traditional boundaries of design. It is difficult to know what label to give this form of design because it draws on many different areas of contemporary and emerging design, such as strategic design, systemic design, co-design, transformation design, and others; as well as other disciplines, such as education, learning sciences and leadership. I think this porous and adaptable way of seeing design-driven education is an advantage, because it reaffirms how such a model is apt for project-based, real world learning. However, this ambiguity and complexity in the fields of study and practice could hinder its value, says Currie: “let’s not dress it up more than we need. I basically say [when working with teachers] that the first half [of the double diamond] is about dealing with something complex, and the next part is about making it simple.” The insight for me is that people do not have to necessarily understand all the nuance of the Cargo Bike Education Model for it to be useful and for me to co-create change. It is a framework for me to enable others to make changes they care about.

The project endorsed the model as a useful device for dialogue

Despite the possible limitations of the Cargo Bike Education Model and constructive feedback I received, I also received a lot of positive affirmation about its value. Each time I shared the model, the energy in the room changed, and we were able to immediately step deeply into ideas of education, learning and pedagogy innovation. The overwhelming feedback on the Cargo Bike Education Model was positive and appreciative. Susanna Carmen commenting that “I picked up what Design Thinking leaves out,” and Jack Greig commented that it is apparent I know the field [of learning] and have captured the key elements.

Design and education from the heart for doing good

In design thinking and human-centred design we talk about starting with empathy to understand your customer needs. This is important, but possibly superficial. Using empathy to understand human desire so that we can design and sell something does help the learner clarify the larger purpose and ethics of a situation. Empathy can be used to manipulate, too. The idea that knowledge and skill alone, such as empathy, creates goodness is a myth (Orr 1991). Similarly, the idea that education is inherently good, is a fallacy. As Greig says, “mainstream education is manifestly failing kids with trauma-impacted backgrounds. And systemically, the education system is letting down teachers because it is built around models that institutionalise stress, based around a kind of academic progress that doesn’t harmonise well with human needs.” This comment re-affirmed an implicit intent in my approach: that this design-driven education approach is led by a genuine intention to regenerate living systems and support wellbeing for people and society. If designers do not start with a compassionate intent, we risk just using design as an instrumental mechanism to perpetuate technology that is violent towards human and ecological life systems (Schumacher 1973). The motto of Rudolph Steiner’s education philosophy, “head, heart and hand” resonates with this understanding. Fitzgerald spoke to this philosophy, too, saying “we often don’t talk about the heart in education.” In my view, the more education and design can start with the heart (compassion and care), the more likely we will create ideas of intrinsic value.

Shifting from human-centred design, to human relevant design

As mentioned in the literature review, design-based approaches are increasingly orientated towards transformative aims (Sangiorgi 2011; Margolin 2015; Dorst 2018; Dorst 2019). In these design spaces, design does not have all the solutions. As Nasseri of Schumacher College says: for this approach to design, it is more important that we live the questions than find the answers. Also, says Nasseri, “we need to move away from human-centredness to human relevance.” If we continue to put humans at the centre of the world and above the natural world, we will continue to destroy our planet. But if designers make living systems and regenerative design as the goal, where humans are inter-dependent with our planet, we will open up endless possibility for innovation.

Conclusion from the Project

While it is difficult to draw conclusive outcomes from my short project, I can conclude three key statements: the first statement is about how this designerly action research project shifted my internal orientation about the value of the Cargo Bike Education Model; the second statement is an informed speculation about the future of design-driven education; and the third statement is about my contribution to human-relevant design.

1. My perspective on the Cargo Bike Education Model

A key outcome of the project was a shift in my inner orientation towards the Cargo Bike Education Model. After speaking with wise educators with deep experience, I was reminded of the importance of humility and relational ways of working in educational contexts. While I received positive affirmations for this model as a possible pedagogical tool for design-driven education, I shifted my emphasis away from it as an educational model, like the double diamond in design thinking, to seeing it as a shared visual metaphor for dialogue and co-creation about education innovation, pedagogy and renewal. This insight was as much about me and my practice, as it was about the quality of the tool. I realised that my practice is not so much about expert pedagogy and education consulting (problem solving) rather than a relational practice grounded in a living systems worldview that aims to create the conditions, structures, ideas and prompts for life-affirming learning and co-creation for unfolding.

2. Design-driven education for transformative learning

Design-driven education has the ingredients to fulfil the demands of transformative education, such as creating new value and taking responsibility. However, the aims of transformative education (that is, to enable young people to transform self and systems for societal wellbeing) will not be achieved with design thinking alone, as this is essentially an innovation method which will continue to innovate using the same mental models as before. A trans-disciplinary design-driven education based in social learning, collaboration, dialogue, reflexivity, co-creation and capacity to continually self-renew, are needed to help us see things differently (Stirling 2010). This is a challenge not only to design thinking, but also to traditional notions of design. Within this trans-disciplinary approach, we are constantly learning, with humility, courage and compassion.

3. My contribution to this emerging design field

I discovered that design thinking, human-centred design and co-design are gaining increasing recognition as an innovative pedagogy, and are being used for a range of innovation applications in education systems (outside of higher education design colleges). A few educators see current notions of design thinking as lacking, and so are working to design learning in a more coherent and responsible way. However, most educators using design thinking see it as another tool in the toolbox or something that is not yet well understood from a design methodology and design practice perspective.

Design-driven cross-disciplinary education beyond design thinking is nascent and very marginal at this stage and not well researched. There are a range of projects and research initiatives focused on design-based learning, but its value as a pedagogy and educational model is young, particularly in terms of transformative education. This research project hopefully opens more possibility for people to think about design-driven education, based in designerly and trans-disciplinary approaches, for transforming self and systems. We humans are good at engineering technology; and we need to become just as good at using our creative power to re-imagine our shared social realities and systemic structures. This paper hopefully contributes to the conversation among education leaders about how we can use responsible, design-driven education to harness the creative power of learners and build capabilities for young people to engage in societal renewal.

Final reflections

There are many different types of design that are appropriate for their purpose. I think being method agnostic to achieve a goal is a sensible and pragmatic approach. But let’s not forget that all design is a species of rhetoric — we aim to construct arguments, make things and perform to influence behaviour and deliver outcomes. So there is no escaping the inherent politics and power of design. And with power, comes responsibility.

During my legal ethics studies, I admired the logicians who pursued truth through rational argument, and was very skeptical of rhetoric as the dark arts of persuasion, using emotion and personality. However, the more I understand humans and social systems, the more I realise that humans are not logical creatures — and we cannot use logic alone to understand the living world. We are social animals and the living world is complex. And so I have learnt to embrace rhetoric, design and metaphysics (as well as logic and empirical facts), as a way to work with change, human nature and living systems. We need engineer designers to build infrastructure, and we also need social designers, poets and teachers working to foster human ingenuity, creativity and culture.

I hope the increasing influence of design in education creates a practical, third, compassionate avenue to educate minds that is not merely objective, rational or subjective, but that instead considers these all to be valid ways of interpreting the world as a complex whole. Empirical evidence is vital for evidence-driven decision making, truth and justice. And yet, we need to understand the limits to objective empirical arguments when human experience and mindset is an indispensable part of meaning making and human behaviour. By acknowledging human complexity and many ways of knowing, we can realise how much there is to learn.

What we have yet to discover, I believe, is how to combine the best of our rational enlightenment thinking, with very best of social imagination, human intuition, creativity and co-creation. And as design combines critical and creative thinking, perhaps designers can help to design and facilitate this collaboration of minds. Let us learn for life and design change for living systems that encourage collaboration and cooperation.

Thank you for reading this paper. And may our ideas of today be our seeds of tomorrow that allow life to flourish.