Mel Chua final reflection (Design, Cognition, and Learning Fall 2012) A Tale Wherein our Heroine Enters

rs the Training Grounds of Design, Cognition, and Learning and Experiences Intellectual Growth and Excellent Snack Food Once upon a time, there was a Mel in August of 2012. She had a couple interesting qualities with regards to Design, Cognition, and Learning. 1. A vast quantity of messy, unarticulated thoughts, and the belief that once she learned to voice those thoughts, she'd be all set in the World of Design. 2. A knowledge of a fair number of theories and concepts related to Design, Cognition, and Learning. Problem framing? Situated cognition? Reflective practice? Maybe she hadn't read all the papers on them, but she knew what they were to a respectable degree for a 3rd-semester grad student. 3. A large number of prior design experiences for a fairly small number of years in practice. Thanks to an undergrad alma mater (Olin College) with a heavily designcentric and project-based curriculum, plus a driving interest in pursuing even more design projects outside of class and after graduation, August Mel knew she'd seen a fair amount for her age, and was surprised at how little design exposure some of her grad school classmates had. (They had a lot more things, like more finely honed quantitative skill, a broader exposure to theory, and so forth, that she didn't have.) 4. A bit of cockiness. She'd read a lot about design and done a lot of design, so she should be able to learn this pretty well, right? And then the semester happened, and so did some learning. We'll go through three (types of) learning moments from the fall 2012 term that touched these 4 attributes of August Mel, and then see where December Mel has ended up and where she's going. Learning moment 1: Going from knowing concepts to linking concepts and context and experiences This moment hit most strongly when I made my 1-page comic of the Svnicki paper summarizing learning theories: sure, I'd heard of a lot of these ideas in isolation, but they had never been put in conversation with each other or with the context of the times. For instance, when I first read Schoen's reflection-in-action material last year, I thought it was nice, but obvious but this time around, I saw why it was such a big deal in context of the behaviorism that had been predominant around that time. It became clearer how cognitive psychology had developed from a response to behaviorism which didn't mean that behaviorism was wrong any more than the development of jazz meant classical music was wrong. The theories started to link and form up in relation to each other. Similarly, most of my design experiences had happened prior to encountering theory and remained largely unreified and reflected-upon. Through the course of the semester, I was able to revisit and draw upon those past projects to better understand and illustrate the concepts we were discussing, which also helped to deepen their sense-making in my own mind. For instance, the informed design patterns accurately described a lot of my teams' early errors and triumphs: skipping vs doing research? Yep, that would be the electronic Go board we

started to throw together before realizing that it had an impossible amount of circuit connections and would never physically fit on a single board. Haphazard/linear vs managed/iterative designing? That's why we were able to get a QA procedure for the world's first netbook turned around and executed so quickly we had a weekly revision cycle for the process itself that we knew we could count on. Key idea: The notion of design is a conversation that's spanned many people and many years, and needs to be understood as a messy social construct where all the pieces intermingle with each other in ways that mutually affect their meaning. Future influence: Don't read papers or critique ideas in isolation; find what part of the conversation they're responding to, and how other people have responded to it. Learning objectives addressed: Develop conceptual frameworks on the nature of design, design cognition, and design learning. Identify examples of, and trends in, design research. Translate research on design knowing and learning into practical implications.

Learning moment 2: Talking with others and its limitations I came in taking design for granted; I thought I had been taught design in undergrad at a basic level, and that although there would be variants across different practitioners and different fields, I was standing in a fairly generalizable place and would be able to adapt to them. As I started to connect different ideas and theories together, I started seeing where my own thoughts and experiences fit in and that they were actually far more limited and tiny than I'd thought. I had to look at my own biases and the limits of my lens and learn to value the vast experience brought in by the other students. It was originally far easier to look at what they were doing (playground task analysis? function tree analysis?) as missing the point or overly obscured precisely because I didn't really understand them. As it turns out, most people are way better at talking about design in conversation than they are at writing about it (and I'm no exception), and once we started sitting down for conversations, we found common ground and started to grasp each other's experiences. Oh, that's why you need to be so nitpicky on the playground task; you're trying to be able to draw comparisons across a lot of kids and you have multiple raters that need to be consistent. Oh, that's why you spend so long on sketching, which I'd considered a small and trivial things; there are actually a huge range of things that fall under the sketching umbrella and it's important to get everyone on the same page. When we took the time to explain what the boundaries of our conversations were instead of assuming everyone walked into the same design conversation space, our dialogues became far more successful. I also realized that my prior model of I have messy thoughts about design, and if I can articulate them, I'll have evvvvvvvverything! was oversimplified. Being conscious and being speakable are two orthogonal qualities of knowledge. It's possible to have unconscious and unspeakable knowledge (reflexes and biases that push us towards and away from certain things), conscious and unspeakable knowledge (how do you explain how you know you love someone?), unconscious and speakable knowledge (someone describing something without realizing it applies to them), and conscious and speakable knowledge (much of the typical

engineering curriculum). All four categories are there, and all four are okay; some kinds of knowledge can cross from one category to another, but some can't, and that's okay too. Not everything needs to get chased down to 100% understood completion today. Nowadays, I know that there's a lot of stuff I'm still unaware of and I'm okay with that. I still have messy, unarticulated thoughts and I'm okay with that. Some of them will become articulate and some of them won't, and that's okay too! And when I work on my articulation and my communication in any form (written, spoken, anything), I know it's important to tell people what you'll tell them, then tell 'em, then tell them what you told 'em draw the edges of the stage you're dancing on, or somebody may miss part of your choreography. Key idea: When you're discussing something fuzzy, it's not just about where or how you hit the target, it's also how you draw the target and with something fuzzy, the target needs to be drawn extremely well. Learning objectives addressed: Identify quality resources for investigating design cognition and learning such as journals, community, and individual researchers. Identify examples of, and trends in, design research. Learning moment 3: Oh hey, it's a cognitive apprenticeship! Most of my ENE classes have been taken with people from my batch. This class was lovely because it had such a wide range of ENE batches, which turned it into something of a cognitive-apprentice-style shop floor. One of the big features of a cognitive apprenticeship is the ability to see yourself as part of a continuum of learners, in a certain place along that continuum. During our discussions, I began to see those trails of journeys more and more clearly, although I can't articulate very well how they became clearer. I think it had something to do with noticing how more experienced people like Lindsey and Noah could draw upon a much broader range of contexts and readings and prior graduate school experiences to connect and make sense of what we were discussing. I think it also had something to do with watching new folks like Jake come in and just barely start to have those connections, and noticing sometimes that the new folks didn't see the connections I was making until I pointed them out. I think it had something to do with being with people in my batch like James and Farrah and being able to refer to common experiences in our core classes (remember when we read so-and-so in Dr. Evangelou's class? Yes, and that one time in History & Philosophy when Brent said that...). Watching all these different batches respond to the same classroom experience helped me step back and see what that ability development and experience development of the ENE progression is, even if I can't articulate it very well. (Unarticulable knowledge is still knowledge, though; see Learning Moment #2.) If I had to pick a framework/theory for this, I'd say I was watching the development of our abilities to handle context, as in the novice/expert continuum of Dreyfus & Dreyfus that gets at some of it, but not very much of it, but I'm okay with that too. Key idea: My fellow travelers on this journey might not be following the same trail we're all striking our own but we're headed in the same direction and can find each other on our

maps, and it's useful to do so. Learning objectives addressed: Articulate your own view of design and become more confident about your ability to work as a designer. Translate research on design knowing and learning into practical implications. The Mel today Where's December Mel compared to August Mel? 1. Well, she still has a vast quantity of messy, unarticulated thoughts, although some have become better-able to be voiced now that she recognizes the importance of setting the stage before jumping pell-mell into discussion. However, she no longer believes that all thoughts will become speakable and that's the primary skill of moving in the Design research world. She knew that comfort with delayed decisions and ambiguity were vital in the world of doing design, but they're also just as vital when researching design; there are unknowns all over our studies as well as in what we study, and we've got to become comfortable with that discomfort. 2. She knows about even more theories and concepts related to Design, Cognition, and Learning, and more about the ones she came in with. They're grounded in more literature now. She doesn't quite know where she'd find more, but she's got the library search skills to do that if she needs them. Plus they're linked to each other, as well as to... 3. ...that large number of prior design experiences? Yep, they're better-understood in connection with theories and frameworks, and thus made far more communicable to others. It's hard to say I built this thing! and wave your hands around while trying to explain exactly why that was such a profound experience, but to be able to say and this was when my cognitive schema for such-and-so developed, so I could do things more quickly because I wasn't wrestling with working memory limits makes the experience a lot clearer to people who weren't there. 4. The cockiness is still there, but I hope it's tempered with more humility. Yes, December Mel is excited about and has a knack for design, but unharnessed talent doesn't mean much in the long run. If she wants to actually contribute to this area instead of being a potential in it forever, she's got to start taking some steps forward in discipline and focus and setting boundaries and limits on what she's doing instead of trying to solve the entire world at once. Say no to some things, step out and away of some worlds at least for now. Get a small solid piece done. And then you can step back out. What's next? Discipline/routine/boundary development and a focus on curricular redesign that focuses on design curricula (how's that for loopy, multi-layered work)? A prelim proposal, someday. I now have a richer language to take across a wide range of contexts, and the context I think I want to focus on is the design not of physical products, but rather of the environments that shape learning societies. We'll see what happens.