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Tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from MIT to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools.

The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands.

Constructionist Approach

bringing human-centered design to education, government, healthcare — the sectors that need it most — requires a few important culture shifts:1. We need to bust out of siloed design practices.2. We need to develop ever-broader capacities, taking an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative approach.

We turn our own questions on ourselves: What if we could help design education that readies today’s kids for the technologically enhanced (and challenged) environment they’ll grow up into? While we’re at it, what if we could then start addressing the very policy that shapes those educational institutions? That kind of moonshot systems thinking requires both agility and scale — it requires networked organizations and creative collectives. It requires designers who never stand still.

when individuals with their own aspirations and talents come together to build upon each other’s work and drive toward a greater goal, we can gain traction on much bigger challenges — and find new ways forward.

Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.

And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.

Umpqua

He and a team of teachers set out to try to reconfigure how this big high school could structurally put student relationships with teachers at the center, and value mastery of content above all else.

‘If we don’t match our minutes to our mission, [teachers are] not going to shift.’

biggest obstacles to instructional changes of the sort Smith and his team were trying to engineer was the school schedule itself.

That’s the fastest the university has ever introduced a new degree program, a feat it achieved by adopting off-the-shelf course materials already developed by Microsoft that the company is distributing to help turn out more employees with data and computer-science skills.

The courses employers have been helping to create don’t just teach skills students need to work for Microsoft, Amazon or Google, like the highly specialized training classes that are longtime industry standards

Instead, the companies are working with edX and others to provide what they say are the educations that all of their employees require in common, including such abilities as critical thinking and collaboration.

at schools built on Deeper Learning principles, the meetings are often turned into student-led conferences, with students presenting their schoolwork, while their teachers, having helped them prepare, sit across the table, or even off to the side

students are responsible for their own success.

this is the student’s moment to share his or her reflections on achievements and challenges