preparing to be wrong

Yesterday I spoke of “big concept” teaching and related it to a personal experience:

In the mid-sixties, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I took a course in physics. In those days, they didn’t offer “Physics for Poets.” There were only hard-core physics courses, taken mostly by engineering majors. But I wanted to know how the physical world worked, so I signed up. A good student, I attended all of the classes, took thorough notes, read the textbook, and completed all of the assigned exercises at the end of every chapter.

All went well until the first exam. I opened the test booklet and suddenly wondered if I was in the right course. “When did we learn how to solve these problems?” I wondered in bewilderment. I muddled through them, trying to remember the formulae I had memorized. Needless to say, I didn’t do very well on the exams or in the course and therefore redirected my interests elsewhere.

What happened? If I had had the courage to ask my instructor about the exam questions, the professor probably would have been puzzled by my confusion. We had different views of the subject. For me, physics was a vast collection of different problems, each with its particular formula. If a problem looked like example 3.7 in the text, I felt confident. Or if a problem matched well with formula 3.5.2, then the solution was forthcoming. But if a problem was new and different, I was lost. My professor, however, had no box in his head that contained this problem.

He understood physics in an entirely different way. For him, physics consisted of big ideas and central relationships like Force = mass x acceleration. Problems on the exam were not independent problems but variations on the big ideas. Nothing would have seemed unusual to the professor; each problem was a variation of something well known. But everything seemed unique to me, his naïve student!

Big concept teaching, something my physics professor did not do, can result in big concept thinking. I related the story of Robert, a first grade student learning to solve equations in one of four forms: simple addition, subtraction, algebra addition (e.g., 5 + X = 7), and algebra subtraction (e.g., 5 = 8 – Y). For each of these four forms or subconcepts, the teacher treated in the same way: “We begin with the equal sign — what you count to on one side of the equal sign, you must count to on the other side…” After solving many problems in this manner, Robert solved a new form involving negative numbers (4 – 6 = ?). Why did Robert succeed? Becuse he was taught the bigger concept that united all of the problem types, including one never seen.

Think of an extremely smart person, someone many would describe as brilliant. How would you describe this person’s understanding of their area of expertise, whether it be finance, art history, biology, or any other discipline? Typically, these people understand big concepts: they see their world as a handful of basic themes with lesser concepts as variations on these themes.

Most of us don’t organize the world this way. We  don’t see themes and variations, we only see variations, each one independent of the other. Our heads are filled with disconnected facts and principles. But the very smart person reduces this wide array to a small set that helps him or her quickly grasp new situations.

Why is this instructional design insight — big concept teaching and learning — important for interaction design? For one, every interaction, every interface, must be learned. A design will be easier to learn if it is consistent (shares critical properties) with other designs. For example, we can learn to operate a new Mac application if we know how to operate other Mac applications. Certain menus are positioned in the same way making it easier for us to learn the fundamental controls. The designed consistency creates a big concept design for the user-learners.

But there’s another implication of big concept teaching and learning for us as designers. You may think of the seven themes — human-centered design, transparency, computer imagination, and so on — as the big ideas that help focus our attention on good design. The techniques that we learn along the way — persona development, goal-directed design — are simply tools for the designer; they facilitate the designer’s job.

To focus merely on the tools (like focusing on single physics examples or forumlae), you will memorize single techniques. Useful, yes, but missing the point. Instead, allow your mind to be reflective and ask yourself what do all of these techniques mean. You can read many HCI books (my office and home are filled with them) and can easily become confused by the suggested techniques — trying to line them all up — looking for consistencies and inconsistencies among them. But the expert designer begins to ask what these techniques mean. Variations (don’t worry about the vagaries among the techniques) lead to themes. Big concepts lead to big insights.

I didn’t have time to share the following video with you. But I’d like for you to take the time to watch it. The video comes from the TED conference, a conference attended by many influential people in the IT industry. It is a 20-minute talk by Sir Ken Robinson called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

We need to celebrate the “gift of imagination.” Robinson would say that we need to be prepared to be wrong. To put it another way, Richard Saul Wurman would say that there are three misrules we learn in school that do not serve us well:

• It’s better to say “I know,” than to say “I don’t know.”
• It’s better to answer a question than to ask a question.
• It’s better to worship at the foot of success than to understand the nature of failure.

How do we let go of these old habits?

Now is your opportunity to practice being wrong. Now is your opportunity to ask questions and make mistakes, individually and as a team. Our goal is to learn to think in big concept ways so that we may design in big concept ways. How else will we awaken possibility in people?

As designers and as world citizens, our future depends on it.

(As always, I’m interested in your comments.)