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I’ve been closely following the Design Council’s Knee High Design Challenge. The challenge consists of  a series of teams working to “improve the health and well-being of children under five and their families.” At this stage, the teams have designed and implemented their programs and are now gathering data/feedback to better understand the impact that these activities have in their participants’ lives. Evaluation is such a key component in the design process and its certainly emphasized in the short clip above. In this case, program designers realized that the walk to and from their destination was as important to the children as the destination itself. It was from this information, designers heightened their participants’ experience and engagement by creating innovative, exploratory paths for children and their parents to venture through. And as I watched the children walk hand in hand to the park, a verse from The Road Not Taken came to mind. It’s all about the journey folks! Even for the wee ones!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Even if you’re not interested in typeface development, I think you’ll appreciate the relationship between partners Hoefler and Frere-Jones and their desire to design beautiful work. My takeaway from this:

1. Grab the reigns and innovate if what you want or need fails to exist.
2. Work intimately with those that “consume” the product as it helps to feed the creative process.
3. Interrogate the micro and macro perspectives.
4. Remember that design decisions influence other aspects of the product including its relationship to the user.
5. Great collaboration requires a sprinkle of tension even if it’s as simple as an ongoing debate over the height of the lower case t.

Enjoy!

Inventor Portrait with Steven Sasson. My design takeaway: “The key is when you are putting across an idea, you have to understand the culture you’re dealing with first and foremost…”

Hans Rosling…he’s like the Superman of Statistics…fighting ignorance one line graph at a time!

Every time I watch French designer Jean-Yves Blondeau aka “Rollerman” fly down a mountain head first, I get this crazy itch to add a couple more wheels to my Samsonite and ride it.  Do not try this at home, unless it’s mine.

Steelcase launched the NEXT Student Design Competition to encourage the creation of innovative learning environments. The winner will receive $1,000! Entries are due November 21, 2014. To learn more and apply, click here!

“Surfing’s one of the few sports that you look ahead to see what’s behind” ~ Laird Hamilton

The International Society of Learning Sciences: Naples – Network of Academic Programs in the Learning Sciences offers the public access to a series of free educational webinars on a variety of topics including cognition and metacognition; assessment; workplace learning with digital resources; gestures in teaching and learning; and much more!

A few that caught my attention:

Physiological measures in the Learning Sciences research
Neurocognitive foundations for the Learning Sciences
Learning by Design
Design and Design-Based Research

Cheers!

 

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” ~ Richard Feynman
In general, people underestimate the knowledge and skill required to teach. It’s as if the public perceives teaching and learning as a some effortless process commonly referred to as osmosis. When in fact, teaching and learning are both rigorous exercises that involve extensive planning, organization, dynamic exchange, and ongoing evaluation. As I watch physicist Richard Feynman above, I am reminded of his brilliance and ability to engage a young group of students. A few days ago, Caltech released his physics lectures for free here but it sort of reminds me of my mundane experience reading Shakespeare. To reach a mass audience, you need the actor to embody and express these ideas and thoughts but more importantly to provide a human connection to the written word.