Doreen Gehry Nelson, Hon. AIA, has spent over 40 years as an educator preaching the gospel of “design-based learning,” a teaching methodology she created to bring open-ended, hands-on projects to students of all ages. As the younger sister of Frank Gehry, FAIA, she had long been exposed to the idea of design thinking. But it wasn’t until she felt stifled as a public school teacher that she developed her methodology, which puts creative thinking into all subjects, rather than making it a separate subject. “What I wanted to do,” she says, “was to systematically define a set of specific tools and techniques for having creative thinking be part of all the required curriculum.”
If you ignite creative thinking, what your students produce doesn’t look like what’s already been created. If you want to teach them about bridge-building, and you ask them to build a bridge, you’d typically show them a picture and teach them how to structurally make a bridge.
Is what they then produce a replication? I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in giving students a design problem with multiple solutions, not an answer. I want them to ask, “What is this bridge an answer to?” And then to say, “Here is my solution.”
The goal is to put the learner in an almost-pretend position, as if they’re the first people on the planet and they think, “It’s raining outside. I have to get dry.” In that case, I use the word “shelter” instead of “housing,” because if you ask students to design a house, you know what you’re going to get. It’s paramount that the prompt is broader and addresses more essential topics than the answer. The answer is a house, the answer is a bridge, the answer is a city [or another typology]. But, what were the dilemmas that caused human beings to ask those questions in the first place?
There are programs in design-based learning—developed to train designers—that are now applied in K–12 education. These use a seven-step design process that I consider a frontward process: You define a problem and then do research before you start designing.
In my methodology, I turned everything around. Instead of going to the library first when faced with a design problem, or looking at how bridges and houses are made, I aim for what I call “backwards thinking.” The students are given a design challenge, but that design challenge has criteria with it that relate to basic requirements. They build their idea, then do research to learn about the criteria.
It’s as if they are facing a client who wants a shelter with a way to get in, a way to get out, protection from this and that, and a unique design. The client also wants you to build a model of it very quickly. Each design challenge is set in the context of building a miniature city-of-the-future based on each student’s own sense of community. —As told to Steve Cimino