Our final day began with an exciting talk by Dr. Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and D-Rev. Dr. Polak is also the author of Out of Poverty, a book that inspired the exhibition Design for the Other 90%. After his talk, Dr. Polak was kind enough to sign copies of his book for participating teachers.
But truly the culmination of the week were the group’s presentations of their Design for Necessity projects. An expert panel critiqued each group’s process and ideas. The panelists, left to right in the picture below, are Design Corps architect Bryan Bell, Dr. Paul Polak, Walker Design curator Andrew Blauvelt, designer Tom Oliphant, Ann Ledy of the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, and Target creative director Ruth Balbach.
Problems the teachers tackled were varied and diverse, but centered on their own experience in schools. Challenges ranged from lowering the school building temperature during summer school without using air conditioning, to enhancing the bus experience, to identifying at risk students more effectively. Presentation styles varied by group and included posters, skits, and models.
Many of the participants felt this was a life changing week, and as staff we could not agree more. Teachers can now confidently take design based learning techniques into their classrooms in the coming year and beyond.
Final musings on the Summer Design Institute workshop of the 5th and final day…
The last day of a great event / experience / collaboration is always both exhilerating and somewhat sad. That was no less true with the feelings generated on our last day together as a creative and designing movement – well it felt that way to me at least. The energy that was generated by what had been a group of people with few connections to each other at the beginning of the week, now seemed to be almost one bundle of enormous energy drive and invention, bursting at the seams with idea generation and ‘aha’ moments galore.
Culminating this extraordinary week was our speaker, Dr. Paul Potak, whose own energy and verve, if harnessable, might well eradicate the present energy crisis we are dealing with in this country! That amazing presentation was followed later on by a very stimulating series of our own presentations from the 6 groups that had been created to consider problematic issues surrounding K-12 education and possible solutions to those issues through utilizing a design-based strategizing and thinking process. The individual groups did a wonderful job in working through that process as it related to each of their topics, coming up with inventive and progressive ways to make the educational system more responsive to the needs of students, teachers and the communities that it serves.
As the coming weeks before school come all too quickly to an end, I will be fervently working on my lesson plan for submission to the Cooper-Hewitt Institute and am really looking forward to sharing the work with my classes.
In closing, I just want to say thank you to all of those hard-working folks who put this workshop together and gave us such amazing insights and resources to draw from. It truly has been a pleasure working with all of you.
Kevan
Comment by Kevan Nitzberg — August 1, 2008 @ 11:37 pm
What a great week! My favorite speakers were Bryan Bell and Dr.Paul Polak mainly because they focused on providing design solutions to better our gobal community. This is an intriguing aspect of design that has come to light for me through this workshop and the Design For The Other 90% show. I can’t wait to get started on Dr.Polak’s book Out Of Poverty.
My favorite activities of the week were the hands-on creative experiences (the bag, the dots, the picture cards) nothing beats getting your hands busy!! I am going to adapt some of these lessons for my kindergartners.
I am truly blessed to work with 5 and 6 year old children. They love to create and design things and can come up with the most clever solutions to seemingly complex problems. I just love this age group! Ofcourse, I say this after 7 weeks away from kids and two glasses of cabernet but hey! the sentiment rings true!! To my fellow colleagues, thanks for a great week and to Kim- this is my first blog EVER so I hope I can figure out the spellcheck piece:)Just joking-You guys were awesome! Lisa
Comment by Lisa Arcand — August 1, 2008 @ 11:47 pm