Reflecting on Crane Designs

As a wrap-up discussion for people who are going to lead other people in completing design tasks, Bernie addresses a number of key points in his questions to after-school teachers and team leaders attending his workshop:

• Get students to articulate how they collaborated, and encourage more collaboration and varied ways in the future;
• Get students to articulate their reasons for design decisions. This is one of the hallmarks of doing Informed Designing.
• Review thinking on the toughest problems with the crane challenge and ask how people solved them. Good designers know that their real job is not to solve everyday problems with out-of-the-box solutions, but to do insightful Problem Finding. Their challenging and creative work is to explore a design challenge until they are sure about what the difficult and novel problems are, and then to focus their full attention in solving those problems. The remaining issues/problems can be handled by any journeyman designer.
• Give opportunities to students to reflect on their own work as designers in different ways and formats.
• Articulate the process of Task Decomposition -- this is a design's approach where a whole problem is seen as a system with parts, and each part has design sub-problems that can be approached and solved separately.