thinkfetti

Via Boing Boing, a “periodic table of visualization,” itself a knowledge map — simply roll your mouse over an element to see that method of vizualizing exemplified.

Add this to Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations, and we’re coming up with lots of ways to communicate visually. If we had this down well enough to employ the optimal (or at least a very good) visualization method whenever we needed it, I think our ability to communicate in print and other document forms would jump to a whole new level.

I was poking around Technorati, searching at entries with education and design as tags, and I found this interesting blog describing “Web 2.0″ tools that could be useful to students and faculty at various level institutions. I looked at a few of the collaborative tools…somewhat promising.

But then I found a link to a course being offered this semester by Harvard Law School in conjunction with Harvard University Extension. As far as I can tell, this is a class about argumentation, particularly in relatively new venues such as blogs, wikis, and the like. That’s interesting enough in its own right. But then…much of the class is being taught within SecondLife, even the office hours of one of the faculty members are situated in the virtual world. Could “distance education” be about to experience a paradigm shift?

From Mark Oakley’s Managing Product Design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984:

“The role of the design manager is clearly a crucial one in promoting successful results. In many respects the qualities required in order to be effective in this job are substantially different from those traditionally exhibited by managers. The main emphasis must be on the design manager’s ability to deal with change and ambiguity.” (p. 56)

In teaching humanities in a science and engineering university, I have noticed that some engineering faculty find it odd that we humanities faculty members want to limit our class sizes. Teaching “soft skills” such as effective communication and tolerance of ambiguity, or skills that are elusive in both teaching and evaluation, such as critical thinking, requires (in my experience) much more time to be spent in evaluating and responding to student work. In teaching physics courses, I found evaluation of student performance to be more straightforward in most cases. There, I could maximize efficiency in grading and evaluating without sacrificing accuracy and helpfulness of response. Occasionally, I would incorporate error trends in assignment answers into my teaching; this feedback loop could help improve student performance, even in large classes. But where the “right” answer is not so well defined, and the process is being emphasized, there is simply more work to be done in evaluating student effort.

Ethics is not simply a trainable ability to select a “right” answer. Design is not simply choosing what is inevitable, profitable, or aesthetically appealing. Critical thinking is not simply a matter of following an algorithm. And because these activities are non-trivial, evaluating students as they develop their skills in them is time-consuming, and classes taught by a single professor probably cannot be scaled up in size without losing effectiveness.

Ambiguity provides opportunity (and risk), but to tolerate or embrace ambiguity requires time.

There are some things that are worth putting a lot of time and effort into. Design is one. Now, it’s not possible to focus on everything worthy of design all at once - there’s just too much. For example, I seem to have spent the last three hours tweaking, fiddling, replacing… all just working to put the right image on to the top of this website. Thank you to [Andrew Davidhazy->http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/] for allowing me to use one of his outstanding splash images on this site. All of the things I have not (yet?) focussed on, such as fonts, widgets, even good copy - maybe they benefit slightly by having something designed nearby.

I’m interested in thinking about the places design can operate. For example, I work alongside engineers at my university, and one of them recently remarked in a meeting that he thinks engineers should devote more time to studying ethics. In his design labs, he instructs the students to consider ethics as a design constraint. I would go further - to my way of thinking, ethics is a design problem. Questions that don’t have pat answers include: “What to do?” “Why?” “Why do I find this particular ‘why’ reason appropriate in this context?” In other words, an ethical person isn’t someone who somehow just “knows the right thing to do.” Rather, a person acts ethically when he or she takes the time that’s available to evaluate alternatives and unearth the assumptions that point toward possible choices.

With this view, it seems insufficient to me for students to study and discuss “case studies,” narratives that usually describe projects that went very poorly. Case studies are good for people who study ethics, but to learn how to act ethically, students need to think about designing their decisions.