Students have lost touch with hands-on learning. “Design thinking,” with its emphasis on exploration, prototyping and iteration, tries to spark a rediscovery of making things as a path to learning and insight into the creative process.
An interesting phenomenon occurs when I assign a classic exercise in my introductory course, Design Matters (pun intended). Students are assigned to teams for a friendly competition, challenged to build a tower of uncooked spaghetti that elevates a marshmallow as high as possible in 18 minutes. It is fascinating to see them try to plan their way to victory.
They conceptualize in pursuit of perfection. Cautious of failure, they’re reluctant to risk building a less-than-ideal structure. You know what they don’t do? Touch the marshmallow, play with it or test its weight against the structural qualities of pasta.
After many minutes of talking, they begin to build, tentatively taping together strands of spaghetti to realize the concept they have in mind. As the clock ticks down, their spaghetti towers stand proud. When they finally place the marshmallow on top, they learn the perils of planning and perfectionism, watching helplessly as their structures topple under the marshmallow’s weight. Roughly half the teams don’t even have a standing structure to speak of at the end.
In 10 years of running this exercise, the record holder, with a tower standing 32.5 inches, remains my then-5-year-old daughter with her 3-year-old sibling shouting encouragement and threatening to eat the marshmallow at every turn.
Children consistently outperform adults on such tasks because they embrace the messy process of making to learn, a time when creativity thrives. What looks like play in this case is actually an investigation of these odd materials and their qualities as the children test ideas quickly and frequently while adapting in real time. Unsurprisingly, kids often also produce more dynamic, innovative and unique ideas.
By the time students reach a place like Notre Dame, their education — focused on exams, PowerPoint lectures, content regurgitation and increasingly digital interactions — has taught them to censor their ideas for fear of judgment and, especially, failure. Over time, too many young adults start to see themselves as lacking creativity, unable to bring something new into the world that might be beautiful or useful.
They’ve lost other things, too: their joy in the process of creation in all its untidy glory and their confidence in the act of making — sketching, drawing, cutting, sewing, gluing, sculpting, assembling, building. From infancy, we learn about the world through that kind of physical exploration. Yet in an academic landscape that prioritizes reading, writing, discussion and lecture, college students may graduate without ever building something tangible with their own hands — or feeling the deep satisfaction of doing so.
All too often, ideas and concepts remain mired in planning or the digital realm, where students miss out on the visceral experience of interacting with a tangible prototype to gather impressions, check assumptions, consider refinements and iterate, iterate, iterate. And the earlier they get their hands involved the better, because as the process races to conclusion, it becomes increasingly difficult to let go when something isn’t working. Likewise, people are reluctant to give honest or detailed feedback when a prototype looks and feels “done.”
On the first day of Design Matters, I stand before students of every academic discipline and try to define design. One of the most useful definitions comes from the social scientist Herbert Simon, who says design aims to “change existing situations into preferred ones.”
We’re problem-solvers at heart, but the outcomes of our efforts rarely turn out as expected. To me, the design process involves getting from point A to point B without knowing what B is. We trust the hands-on nature of the process to illuminate our path a few steps at a time, until we arrive at a compelling solution that is, almost always, not what we imagined at the outset.
Solving problems in a compelling manner, creating products that people will integrate into their lives, requires a deep understanding not only of people’s needs but of their desires and aspirations, and that means testing ideas against real-life use. We don’t know what the best solution will be, so with a bias toward action, we try, make and do things, creating prototypes to discover what we need to know as we go.
When I ask students what it means to prototype something, they offer an almost universal response. A prototype, they say, is the final model you hit “print” on right before going into production. But in its Greek roots, the word prototype derives from prototypon, a combination of protos, first, and typos, impression. Quite the opposite of our mainstream understanding, a prototype is meant to be the initial manifestation of a concept, an idea made tangible. We build prototypes in order to think through our ideas and learn by trial and error.
Throughout the semester, students make use of similar humble materials — cardboard, duct tape, Velcro, fabric and any other objects they can adapt to prototype their ideas. The quick, hands-on nature of what we call low-fidelity prototyping helps students overcome planning paralysis. All too often, we mistake perfectionism as the pursuit of excellence, when in fact, it’s the procrastination born of a fear of failure. When students let go of that mindset of perfecting a vision before ever beginning to build, the outcomes are revelatory.
They can experiment and think through their ideas, discovering that imperfections and even failures are not actually failures but rather necessary steps toward refining or course-correcting well before it’s too late. The iterative process inherent in design thinking emphasizes a continuous cycle of ideating, making, reflecting, testing and adapting that leads to more meaningful solutions.
Throughout this journey, the students become more comfortable with uncertainty, embrace trial and error, and cultivate a cognitive agility. They rediscover play and experimentation while tapping into the thrill of creating and the satisfaction of bringing something to life.
Reawakening creativity may be one of the most profound effects of a design-thinking mindset. We distinguish between intelligence and creativity, but in an age of artificial intelligence and computational power, imagining alternatives, thinking flexibly and making something new is the smartest thing you can do. We’re not limited to physical products, either. Students are encouraged to prototype everything from digital tools to less-intangible services and system interventions, using everything from paper mockups of digital workflows to improvisation and roleplay.
Like any muscle, creativity atrophies when it isn’t exercised. Letting students get their hands dirty with design rekindles their wonder and pushes the limits of their ingenuity and imagination.
In the business world, design thinking is everywhere. The explosion of interest in it encourages students to embrace experiential and hands-on learning, and to reclaim their curiosity, their confidence and their creativity in a digitally saturated educational landscape that too often leaves them restless and uninspired.
Ultimately, making something with our hands inspires a sense of agency and possibility in bringing abstract ideas to fruition, but more importantly, it reawakens a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
Ann-Marie Conrado is the Cregg Family Director of the Program in Collaborative Innovation and an associate professor of design at Notre Dame.