The complete essay/report is now online at: http://www.inspireslearning.com/portfolio

1. Introduction to a designerly research project

My work at the University of Warwick provides me with a rich range of opportunities for investigating designerly student capabilities and their role in creating the “vitality”[i] of arts and humanities education. My study will pursue this at Warwick and beyond, building into a rich picture of innovative activities, methods and people. It is essentially an appreciative enquiry, seeking to discover, define and amplify the positive and effective aspects of already existent practices (Cousin, 2009: Kindle location 3260). The ultimate aim is to illustrate the high value that should be placed upon arts and humanities education, value resulting from its complex, non-deterministic and contentious nature and the designerly way of thinking/acting that it requires.

As a consultant and a teacher, I am called upon in my everyday work to offer good advice. And so, importantly, this project’s activities and findings should make sense to and be usable by students, teachers and policy makers. Such projects work best when they are participatory and open, engaged from the outset. The project’s methodology itself is designerly in a way that suits participatory projects. It neither invents entirely new concepts, nor does it discover perfectly formed, ready made things-in-themselves. It will design incremental improvements to an existing reality (see Latour, 2008 for the significance of this distinction). Keeping the principles of usable, durable, sustainable design in mind. I will, therefore, follow this good advice:

“Perhaps in this light, unstructured or semi-structured interviews are best conceptualized as a “third space” where interviewer and interviewee work together to develop understandings.” (Cousin, 2009: Kindle location 1450)

Such interviews will form one of five methods used in the study. They will guide the refinement of my hypotheses and the creation of my pedagogical designs and experiments, and will be used to ensure that my work remains connected with the personal experience of students, teachers and designers. Surveys, created using the Formsbuilder online tool, will be used to test my conceptual formulations and conjectures across wider populations and varying contexts (this method has proven effective in generating sample sizes in the hundreds). The investigation will synergise two parallel tracks: a study of learning and teaching, and a study of design methods (from the existing literature and from interviews with and observations of designers). The aim being to create a translational framework between the two domains.

Predictions based upon these investigations will then be tested through observing students undertaking tasks of a designerly and creative nature (for example, I have been observing different approaches taken when English Literature undergraduates at Worcester University create PowerPoint presentations, finding significant variations that seem to depend upon attitudes towards and experience of design, combined with modes of reflexivity). My Media Suite facility at Warwick, in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, provides opportunities for such activities to be integrated into teaching across the university, and consequently for me to observe how different students work. In addition, I will use a conceptual framework and survey design adopted from Professor Margaret Archer to investigate the crucial issue of how various modes of reflexive conversation effect designerly capabilities.

Finally, I have started to use a new methodology, taking the idea of a “third space” further still: open-space learning (Monk, forthcoming 2011). This theatre-inspired approach has developed as a form of rapid collaborative thinking that side-steps the usual problems that face learning and research in time-pressured environments: intellectual action undertaken at speed tends to simply reproduce well-established assumptions and stereotypes, as participants fall back upon familiar hierarchies, patterns and disciplines – throwing us back into the first and most familiar space, the past. Open-space learning (OSL) is a powerful means by which learners and collaborative agents can force themselves to break the discipline, to bracket out their assumptions and re-presentations (about the world, themselves and each other) so as to envisage different futures (the second, radically unfamiliar space). It provides a pared-down, minimalistic third space in which we are called to confront the affordances and constraints of the now and our embodied singularity.

A comprehensive list of educational research opportunities is given in the notes at the end of this paper. A survey of “design thinking”, with the beginnings of a deeper analysis drawn from work in philosophy and cognitive science is given in section 4 below.

The results of these ideational activities, documented publicly in a blog[ii], will then be presented back to the wider community, in the form of design patterns, conceptual schemas and learning designs. Conference presentations and publications will be used to explore these ideas through wider connections with greater scale and reach, suggesting new aspects to investigate or finessed granularity to be examined, and testing-out the viability of my propositions in wider educational contexts. To aid this further, interviews will be carried out with leading educationalists (including other National Teaching Fellows) and policy makers in Britain and beyond (including vice chancellors, registrars, head teachers, politicians). The project will proceed iteratively, building a more comprehensive and detailed picture until its conclusion.

This paper introduces my starting points, motivations and “sensitizing concepts” (Cousin, 2009: Kindle location 720), drawn from personal experience and from existing literature and practices. It outlines the routes that I am taking, details the research opportunities that I am pursuing, and key sources in existing literature and practice. This should not be taken as either summative or comprehensive. Consider it to be a report from an ongoing research journey of some ambition. As such, the following text is generative and reflexive in nature, and will itself act to both expand and focus the scope of the study.

2. The value of contentiousness in HE arts and humanities learning

Learners in leading higher education institutions, we are told (through the cumulative advice of theorists and policy makers), should be creative and analytical, independent and collaborative, intellectual and practical, reflective and active, free-thinking and enterprising, global and local, specialized but with transferable generic skills. What else? X-ray vision and an aversion to Kryptonite? The reality of student life is often thus: to be a subject of contention and seemingly contradictory demands. For example, in a recent Woman’s Hour discussion[iii] concerning the lack of women in British philosophy departments, Dr. Angela Hobbs (Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy) described an academic discipline maintaining a gender differential. The mechanism maintaining this is a distinction between:

a)   pure and abstract intellectual activities deemed to be central to the discipline;

b)  impure, applied activities that are relegated to the margins.

Ethics is, it is said, a “soft”, even “girly” and hence peripheral subject – “pink and fluffy” as one male philosopher described it to Hobbs. Logic is “hard” and at the core (according to convention). Epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and the various “philosophy of…” blends are similarly arranged at various distances from the centre. It might be the case that most women coming to philosophy do so through connected subjects (for example, classics) and remain at the periphery (according to the hegemonic view). Or perhaps their interests are motivated by an interest in doing something useful with their academic skills? In their paper on Epistemological Pluralism, Turkle and Papert describe how the soft/hard distinction relegates a particular type of non-linear, non-programmatic thinking and problem solving (Turkle & Papert in Harel & Papert, 1991: 166). Similar concerns were hotly debated during a workshop on Co-authorship and the Practice of Collaboration in the Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies[iv]. In addition, on this occasion issues of cultural identity and difference were added to the mix of contentions by a group of early career researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. Whatever the reasons, academic disciplines often resemble the kind of geography described by Tony Becher and Paul Trowler in Academic Tribes and Territories (2001). Even within disciplines there may be divisive specialisms organised through what might be called an irrational tribalism, reinforced by expectation that to be academically successful means to become aligned:

“Even at the early stage, it is implied, each novitate ought to have developed a distinctive research concern. Collaboration, or even talking shop with other students, is subtly discouraged…Insofar as students talk to one another about sociology, their conversation is based on departmental gossip rather than substantive intellectual issues.” (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 51)

Becoming a philosophy student of any gender requires dealing with these contentious matters. On the one hand there is a “disciplinary socialization” (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 47) through which to pass (complete in some cases with initiation rituals). And on the other hand, there is the fact that very few students in any subject, even at PhD level, go on to academic careers in their discipline (Thrift, 2008: 31). When senior policy makers argue for an interchange “of researchers between industry and academia at every career stage” (Thrift, 2008: 31) a challenge is made to existing territorial arrangements, with the student caught in the centre of the contention.

The miracle of higher education in research-intensive universities is that many students do so well in dealing with these and other difficulties. Indeed, some students positively thrive upon them, and continue to do so with impressive results in their post-graduation existence outside of academia. This may not be the rule, but it certainly is a significant exception. Initial informal discussions carried out with a small number Warwick alumni working in media and communications, have shown just how effective these capabilities are when released into the wilds.[v] Through research carried out for the Arts Faculty Teaching and Learning Forum^[vi], along with a series of projects undertaken with undergraduates over the last five years^[vii], I formed the hypothesis that some students have a stronger and more granular sense of teaching and learning quality – both in terms of being able to recognise and choose quality learning opportunities, and in their own ability to design their own quality learning experiences and outputs. A sense of quality and strategies for achieving quality (regardless of external conditions) is vital in any endeavour in personal development. It enables discerning judgement, decision making and a sense of what might be worth trying in less certain conditions. It seems that this sense of quality engenders a confidence, which in turn amplifies the student’s sense of quality, resulting in the emergence of what can often be an outstanding aura of personal strength, individuality, creativity, perseverance and reflexivity combined with a surprisingly mature perceptiveness and flexibility (I have many individual students in mind when formulating this description).

My guiding hypothesis is that, put simply, contention is good. Educational “opportunities” (formal, informal, curricular or extra-curricular) that live a contentious life (even if it is short lived) are especially valuable. My second proposition is that some such “opportunities” actively deal with contention in useful, productive and innovative ways. They achieve this, I claim, through a designerly self-reflexive nature embodied in their chosen pedagogical methods, form of community, spaces and technologies. These opportunities are especially common in certain types of arts and humanities courses. Finally, the third part of my research hypothesis: a particular combination of capabilities develop (deliberately or accidentally) from these opportunities under certain conditions. These capabilities combine skills (physical and cognitive), attitudes, strategies and knowledge. The result being that some students are, as described above, especially successful in dealing with complex uncertain problems and domains. I will draw parallels between these educational capabilities and similar capabilities that are increasingly highly valued in wider contexts (social and commercial) – the kinds of capability that are being identified as essential components of “design”. The parallels will be shown to result from a strong similarity between the kinds of ill-structured, non-linear or “wicked” problems (Buchanan, 1992) found in the educational context and the kinds of problems encountered in some very significant “real-world” situations. That might occur designing products and services that are community-sensitive, glocalized (Immelt, Govindarajan and Trimble, 2009), and emotionally durable (Chapman, 2005). Or when dealing with rapidly evolving problems such as the unforeseeable waves of chaos caused by, for example, the banking crisis – problems that are best addressed with agile and imaginative collective acts of creativity and innovation. To put a simple but far-reaching spin on my argument: the claim is that arts and humanities HE learning acts as an essential breeding ground for graduates who can solve seemingly intractable problems.

3. Quality learning, learning quality

Concepts and indexes of “quality” provide a good starting point for investigating the varying responses to contentiousness in education as experienced by learners.

Quality in teaching is often conceived by students as being derived from the “joined-up-ness” of the experience. This might be the result of our industrial-consumerist culture. For example, cars are produced according to the principles of dimensional management. Spend some time with a Bentley, and you’ll literally feel the quality. The materials from which it is manufactured matter, but we are also subconsciously influenced by how well those materials are put together, by the neatness of the joins and the precision of the gaps. My Ford Focus is a good car, but obviously not so perfectly put together. It’s a matter of cost. Precision costs more. Quality in manufacturing is the result of a tolerance analysis: not simply an analysis of physical tolerances, but more importantly a trade-off between cost, precision and the customer’s expectations. With tolerance levels identified, the manufacturer’s task is then to control mass production to meet those specifications through the application of technical controls.

Writing in 1938, John Dewey redefined the role of the teacher and the educational establishment in a way that is compatible with dimensional management and this industrial-consumerist sense of quality. To promote intellectual and physical growth, the student must be given challenges that stretch them to just the right extent, in the required direction. Dewey describes learning as a balance between an experiential continuum (Dewey, 1938: 33) and challenging interactions. A gap must exist between what the student can easily do, and what they are required to do with some effort. At the micro-level, the teacher manages the gap for the student in the classroom. Challenging activities are mixed with opportunities for confidence-building reiteration; moments of reflection are added to aid integrative thinking. At a macro-level, the institution ensures cohesiveness and challenge across classes and courses. If we manage the gaps and the connections well, the student grows, satisfying an essential human instinct, and experiencing what seems to be a quality learning experience. In this model, learning is the consumption of a more or less joined-up experience. Education can be similar to manufacturing in that the student experiences quality as joined-up-ness and in the appropriateness of the gaps (students often complain about the incohesiveness of their studies).

But quality in education is also quite different to manufacturing. To begin with, the gaps and connections must be appropriate to each student, they must be personalised. However, assuring quality is still often seen to be a technical problem, solved by an entire industry of curriculum schemes and learning technologies: for example, virtual learning environments (VLE). These web-based systems mediate the teaching-learning process, drip-feeding new challenges to the student, recording progress, and providing a means to survey everything that happens (as course structures and as student activity statistics). Despite the addition of features like student blogs, the VLE is principally a means for observing, tracking and assuring teaching quality as joined-up-ness. This takes us nowhere close to the sense of quality that underpins the kinds of learning in which I am interested. It is too passive, and too wedded to cohesive and well understood domains of knowledge.

Referring back to Dewey, there’s a glimpse of a different possibility, derived from a different epistemology. Begin by considering the problem that he posed in Experience & Education:

“We have the problem of ascertaining how acquaintance with the past may be translated into a potent instrumentality for dealing effectively with the future.” (Dewey, 1938: 23)

Dewey uses the word “future” to refer to the unknown, the unpredictable. I have argued that a sense of quality is essential to this, but when dealing with the future (the indeterminate and unpredictable), it cannot be dependent upon the expectation and provision of simple joined-up-ness. Rather, the learner must have an independent and reliable capability for sustained investigation, imagining, building, taking risks, overcoming failures etc. And in order to achieve this, they should be able to get, create, adapt, invent epistemologically plural instruments for learning appropriate to the emerging investigation. Such instruments would span across cognitive, technical, physical and social dimensions (I will give an example presently). A sense of quality may then be grounded in the student’s confidence with effective instruments, and with their ability to tweak their instruments so as to provide opportunities for creating, affirming and breaking the continuum of experience – so as to keep growing.

Towards the end of Experience & Education, Dewey concludes something along these lines:

“…scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live.” (Dewey, 1936: 88)

“Scientific method”, for Dewey, was the reliable instrument for learning. My hypothesis contests this claim by proposing that non-scientific methods (in the narrow sense) from the arts and humanities are equally and in some contexts more powerful and trustworthy, providing a foundation upon which students can judge and design quality learning opportunities.

My work with the Institution for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) at Warwick has provided me with rich opportunities to observe various such instruments at work. IATL brings together two existing Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning:

The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research has, for five years, developed and promoted a research-based learning (RBL) approach. RBL combines a kind of academic apprenticeship model with the freedom for students to create their own projects and to discover their own intellectual goals and values, within the negotiable bounds of sound academic practice. Methods used include blogs, documentary film making, poster displays, the Reinvention Studio (a non-hierarchical space) and an inter-disciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research. These are instruments of experience that equip students to address contentions and complex problems with confidence. The sense of quality that students use with these instruments to work in a RBL mode is quite different to a simple joined-up-ness judgement.

The Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning (CAPITAL) Centre has focussed more upon helping teachers and students to stage inspirational, thought provoking events, often using methods that encourage active “theory building” and risk taking in an “ensemble” like social environment. Such events can prove to be important “launch pads” for the kind of student described above, setting them off and motivating their independent journey armed with some very effective instruments with which to propel their journeys. The Risk Factor is a great example of what is possible[viii]. The action takes place in a “black box” theatre studio at CAPITAL. A single student enters the darkness, guided into position by a spotlight. It feels risky. Students today rarely have to perform in this way on their own. Teamwork is much more common in the contemporary classroom. The “compere”, represented by ensemble theatre expert Jonathan Heron, introduces the challenge. The relationship between “compere” and “contestant” is friendly, but with a conspiratorial edge. When the student randomly picks a challenge from Jonny’s big pink hat, their loneliness on the spot is immediately clear. It gets worse: further spotlights illuminate a row of three judges sitting at a desk. The judges are wearing masks, denying eye contact and any possibility of guessing what will work with them. And so the student is left to improvise and impress, talking on an unfamiliar topic for two minutes. When they escape the spotlight, they are immediately interviewed on camera. That kicks-off the process of reflection connected to an experience through which fellow students have also passed: collectively thinking about risk, performance, strategy, judgement, relationships etc.

The Risk Factor is an instrument of experience, but one that is quite different to scientific method. By intensifying the sense of individual subjectivity and otherness in the open-space, it forces a reflexive “bracketing” of what previously seemed to be matters of fact, becoming what Latour calls “matters of concern” (Latour, 2008: 2) – to be contested and subject to designerly reconsideration. Students may attest to this being a “quality” learning experience, but it surely is a very different kind of quality.

4. A survey of design thinking and design practice

“The more objects are turned into things – that is the more matters of fact are turned into matters of concern – the more they are rendered into objects of design through and through.” (Latour, 2008: 2)

Design thinking and design practice provides this study with an initial framework for describing and understanding cognitive and practical activities when everyday or otherwise uncontested objects (including people) become matters of concern. To explore the basics of this framework, we must first be clear as to what is meant by “design”.

“Design…was a way to redress the efficient but somewhat boring emphasis of engineers and commercial staff.” (Latour, 2008: 1)

“…design has been spreading continuously so that it increasingly matters to the very substance of production. What is more, design has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and, as I will argue, to nature itself.” (Latour, 2008: 2)

Designers engaged in addressing non-trivial cases (for example, better integrated and more human-centric health care) employ a powerful set of strategies for finding or creating inspiration, experimenting with possibilities (“building to think”), and moving to implementation (Brown, 2008). Typical design activities include iterations of:

o  actively discovering opportunities and problems;

o  observing, documenting and designing human-human, human-machine and machine-machine interactions and interfaces (interaction design);

o  considering constraints, enabling constraints and affordances;

o  identifying and investigating differences, local specialisations and diversity;

o  abstracting from experience to form reusable “design patterns”;

o  creating and testing physical and mental prototypes based upon their discoveries;

o  and translating this creative-experimental learning into repeatable, scalable and robust end products.

The ultimate goal is to design products and services that are integrated into a “user experience” that is functionally effective (Norman, 2002) emotionally engaging (Norman, 2004) and emotionally durable (Chapman, 2005). In addition, issues of sustainability, life-cycle, and manufacturing optimisation are necessary considerations (although in some cases the design activity may be worthwhile and yet not actually lead to any specific product). In many cases, to achieve this goal means modifying the wider context in which a product is deployed. Sometimes, this deeper change may itself be the aim of the design activity. In other cases, we may need to create products that can adapt to and be used in a range of varying contexts (or by a range of different users). This is, increasingly, being achieved through a participatory and inclusive methodology, aiming for results that represent the full range of present and future stakeholders, through a kind of democratisation of design facilitated by design agencies working together with communities.

This approach has been called “design thinking”, a fashionable phrase that fails to communicate the rich and diverse assemblages upon which it depends (Kimbell, 2009). Designerly activity combines academic and technical cognitive processes with embodied, reflexive, aesthetic, spatial, social and performative techniques. Complex domains (like health care) demand a challenging combination of knowledge (of many types and from many sources), technical skills an appreciation of aesthetic aspects that may not be quantifiably measureable. How can we make some sense of this complexity? One approach is to see how two counter movements are synthesised into an evolving process:

"...creativity research has tended to focus on divergent (concrete and reflective) factors in adaption such as tolerance for ambiguity, metaphorical thinking, and flexibility, whereas research on decision making has emphasized more convergent (abstract and active) adaptive factors such as rational evaluation of solution alternatives." (Kolb, 1984: 32)

Designing combines creativity and decision making. At points divergent and at other points convergent, a process that passes through different phases in response to an evolving design. Sometimes, it may feel too open and chaotic, and at other times, too closed-down and sterile. The art and science of design is a matter of judgement, knowing when to move in a convergent or a divergent direction, and then choosing actions and techniques that will move the project along. Rather like academic writing. There are obvious parallels with other creative productions that balance certainty and uncertainty, order with chaos, predictability with improvisation. Film making, for example, employs a tried and tested approach as documented in the article A Film Maker’s Guide to Creativity (Morley & Silver, 1977). The “ensemble” method in theatre provides another model (Brook, 1972). Creative writing shares many strategies with design (Morley D. 2008). And even post-representational painting has much to say about techniques of chaos and order (see especially Deleuze on Francis Bacon, 2003). Design practice freely adopts methods from these other domains.

In a series of publications, members of the IDEO design company have described various techniques that they use to facilitate such projects. In an influential Harvard Business Review article Tim Brown describes how his design teams move in a non-linear but intentional way between distinct spaces custom designed for each phase: inspiration space, ideation space, implementation space (Brown, 2008). The spaces are both metaphorical and real – but most importantly, they are well understood and clearly signposted by collaborators. Tom Kelley (also of IDEO) describes how Prototyping is the Shorthand of Design (Kelley, 2001) – how ideation and inspiration work best when we are able to rapidly create and test lo-fidelity prototypes (something that students often struggle with when trying to grasp threshold concepts). Kelley goes on to describe how he composes design teams from Ten Faces of Innovation (Kelley and Littman, 2008) – ten different ways of acting and thinking – maintains the necessary balance and flow through collaboration (in no particular order):

o  experience architect;

o  story teller;

o  set designer;

o  anthropologist;

o  director;

o  experimenter;

o  cross-pollinator;

o  hurdler;

o  collaborator;

o  caregiver;