Climate Resiliency in the Bahamas is a class designed by Khipra Nichols from RISD and Michael Edwards from the University of the Bahamas and motivated by the harsh realities of climate change and the need for climate resilient solutions, specifically in the Bahamas post-Hurricane Dorian. Originally, the plan was to visit the Bahamas and learn from our collaborators at the University of the Bahamas in person, but it was hindered due to the COVID pandemic in early 2020.
Our initial intention was to develop and facilitate a in-person design workshop at a middle school and high school in the Bahamas; however, given the circumstances, we redirected our efforts to ask:
How might we create "design thinking" tools for children and youth?
Upon discussion and reflection, our group (two in Providence, one in Korea) realised that the root of the issue wasn't that students couldn't "think like designers" but that they often weren't provided the opportunities or environment to encourage critical thinking beyond their own experiences (a problem familiar to many schools).
Similarly problem solving, or "design thinking", seems to be inherent to human beings, thus problem solving and critical thinking alike can not be learned through prescribed teaching, but rather approached holistically.
Having identified the main "flaw" with the project overview, our group started to develop our idea with two new prompts in mind:
Quite quickly, we landed on the importance of curiosity — an emotion and behaviour that crossed the boundaries of both exploration and questioning — as it is able to help us generate ideas, be critical, and, ultimately, encourages us to make a difference. Our question thus evolved into:
How can we foster curiosity?
For the entire duration of this project, we ideated using the most conductive method for questioning and curiosity: conversation. It was also a way for us to reinvigorate these inherently human traits that we've been taught out of through education and adulthood. By using pure conversation as a design tool, we recognised how it's free-flowing, unstructured nature was incredibly beneficial to critical thinking and questioning.
As we were taking these notes every session, we realised that the linearity of note-taking on, for example, Google Docs, was antagonistic to way our minds actually work. For example, there was no elegant or convenient way to connect a thought from Tuesday 21 April to a somewhat related thought made on Sunday 3 May. Tracking, connecting, and reflecting upon our thoughts were essential to even more profound thoughts and discussions.
With this method in mind, our design focused on three main ideas:
Visualisation of thoughts
the ability to revisit one's thoughts and see it in context
See the bigger picture
finding connections between seemingly individual ideas
Building complexity
developing an ever-changing family of thoughts
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19 pages of 'meeting' notes that we took over the span of 4 weeks
As the project was restricted and difficult to realise due to COVID, testing was brief and limited. However, we were able to experiment with several methods of note-taking and conversation.
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Glance Back, by Maya Man, **captures a daily photo of you upon opening a new tab and prompts them to record what they are thinking about.
Our digital prototype of Thought Galaxy used the analogy of outer space in order to highlight and navigate one's thoughts:
We made sure that, when adding a new thought to the galaxy, there would be the opportunity to mention where the thought stemmed from so that the person can revisit that source later on. Furthermore, if the thought stems from an already existing thought, the new thought can be directly linked to a system.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/1e51ecdf-757f-4bc7-9973-8b080af8be0a/1.new_entry.mov
When a thought/planet is clicked on, one can see the connected strains, as well as mark said thought as a 'star'.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a3d97d59-d625-4215-8c01-f5a1d2f52ffb/2.show_connection.mov
As someone jots more thoughts down onto the app and develops the depth and breadth of content, they may see connections that they may not have noticed before; thus, they can edit the connections and create new systems and clusters. The visualization of these 'links' are shown through proximity and equalizing the distance between connected thoughts.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2db75f41-9061-4804-8eca-95add3eecbfa/3.link.mov
By Wonil Choi, Yilan Sun, and Trent Kim