Year of Innovation pop-up houses on display at @The_School

See the full gallery on Posterous

After the incredible success of the Tools at Schools design collaboration with aruliden and Bernhardt Design, Don Buckley (@donbuckley) was inspired to have faculty at The School apply the design thinking model for our Year of Innovation.

These pop-up houses, on display throughout the school for a few weeks, are the result of many months spent researching discussing, researching, ideating, and prototyping. Inside are snapshots and notes from each group and an iPad3 (on an iPevo Perch with headphones) running a video where students, faculty, and parents talk about each concept (Homework, Discipline, Recess, Lunch, Grading). Kudos to Hil Szanto (@hilszanto) and Cristina Martinez (@finlaycm) for the videography and editing!

Faculty at The School kicked off The Year of Innovation this week thanks to @donbuckley and Aruliden.

Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.– Erwin Schrödinger

Don Buckley (@donbuckley) is the Director of Innovation at The School at Columbia University and my boss. It has been a pleasure to work with him for the last 5 years, and he has only continued to amaze me with his energy, creativity, and refusal to be stagnant or predictable.

Last year, Don was instrumental in partnering with Aruliden and Bernhardt Design for the Tools at Schools design project. Our 8th graders learned how to research, analyze, ideate, design, prototype, and present, and the full-size models of their desk, chair, and locker were on display at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in May. Incredibly The School won the Editors Choice Award for best design school! I wrote a post about it here: http://karenblumberg.com/tools-for-schools. Don submitted a SXSW proposal about this project. Click here to vote for it: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8644

This year, Don and the incredible designers from Aruliden (founded by Rinat Aruh and Johan Liden) will teach our faculty to think like designers in order to redesign our school. We were told that Design Thinking entails the following steps: Define, research, analyze, ideate, prototype, refine, repeat, choose, implement. As an introductory activity we worked in small groups to define problems we recognized within education and specifically at our school. We were then told that our groups would be focusing on one of the following issues: discipline, lunch, grading, homework, recess. My group was assigned discipline, and we spent time talking about how ideally we would teach kids to be more disciplined by teaching them to find interests and be self-motivated to develop strategies to maintain focus.

The timeline for our Year of Innovation is:

Day 1: August 30 – Define the problem

Day 2: October 4 – Map out the problem

Day 3: October 25 – Allan Chochinov – Reframe the problem

Day 4: December 6 – Blue Sky brainstorm

Day 5: January 3 – Paola Antonelli – Blue Sky to real life

Day 6: January 31 – Kickstarter – Communicating creativity

Day 7: February 7 – Story solutions

Day 8: April 3 – Tell the story

Day 9: April 17 – Aruliden open house