“Creative Problem Solving Strategies for the 21st Century” (1999)

A talk given by David Pesanelli for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Educational Design conference - Designing the Next Generation of America’s Schools: Case Studies in Creativity

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Background

My work has provided opportunities, as a planner and conceptualist, to be involved with a broad-spectrum of intriguing people environment projects. Assignments have been divided between corporate and institutional / government sites. The work is divided again - two thirds is in the area of the development of new types of places. One third is the evaluation of existing environments that, typically, are experiencing difficulties in how their target audiences perceive and use them. As a member of the adjunct faculty at American University in Washington, D. C., I devised and taught a course in problem solving to design students in their senior and junior years. For the past thirty years, I have brought behavioral team members into projects in order to keep the focus tightly on the user: visitor, patron, customer or student.

Currently, my office’s emphasis is on formal and informal education projects. Recently completed was the initial planning a for a 21st Century Manufacturing and Learning Center that will appear at an industrial museum. Students will pursue CAD work in classes and then visit the museum to complete their designs and manufacture products, packaging and marketing materials on computer numerically controlled equipment. They will also find manufacturing career education requirements and future jobs information within the environment. Another current assignment is the qualitative programming for the student environments at a school for special education students. Focusing on the student, teacher and specialist relationships and processes is expected to result in fresh concepts and a qualitative program that will assist the architect with developing a breakthrough solution for the building.

The focus of this session is problem solving - strategies, tactics, techniques and behavior-based environment development.

The “Competitive” School

Schools should be the first true 21st century environments. The designs of these environments can greatly influence behavior and especially motivation and performance. The schools are competing for the attention, interest and loyalty of young people; that competition is both fierce and crucial. The combined marketing and entertainment industries have learned to use the media in powerful ways that seduce, engage and influence young people with regard to their products and the attitudes that surround them - and not always in positive ways. An afternoon with MTV would seem to easily devalue about six months worth of child raising. Theme parks, themed restaurants, science centers, I-Max theaters and shopping center movie-rides make the school environment and activities seem tame and even boring by comparison to students. Though these over-excited sites cannot and should not be directly imitated by schools, their ability to stimulate and engage could well be emulated. There are lessons to be learned through understanding their appeal. These commercial places have seductive underlying themes of excitement, adventure and thrills. The schools cannot be left in the dust, by these often over-hyped commercial ventures, to be perceived by students as only minimum security institutions where attendance is an unappealing and mandatory obligation.

An Important Clue for Thinking About 21st Century Places

Two years ago, the President of the National Academy of Sciences opened a talk with an intriguing question. He wondered why children in the early grades of school are curious, creative, risk-taking problem solvers and why those qualities diminish as they proceed upward through the grades. It was an excellent question and one upon which someone could base an imaginative exploration of what the 21st century school environment might become. I suggested in an e-mail to the president that the first few grades of elementary school rooms tend to be filled with imaginative materials, objects and imagery. As learning becomes more serious in the succeeding grade levels, all that is charming disappears, revealing the true institutional “look” of the environment, with its underlying themes of discipline and control. Though materials and finishes may be a reflection of affluence, an institutional character may still define the total environment.

Object vs. Process Approaches to Environments

A fundamental problem with attempting to create breakthrough schools resides in the training and practices of the architect and designer. Both professionals tend to be objects rather than process oriented. Often the architects’ and designers’ principle objective is designing the beautiful object, whether it is 4-inches tall and sits on a desk, or four-stories high and stands on a site. In part, this happens because the education facility program with which the architect is often confronted is almost exclusively quantitative - so many square feet, so many tables, so many storage units, etc. This dry, lifeless program probably does not reference the 21st century, the future or themes that could animate it. Learning styles, processes, scenarios and the implications of technology are often ignored as potential design guidelines. So, when designing the school, the architect thinks of historical antecedents, currently successful stylistic design idioms, shopping malls and other analogs that have little to do with treating the site and buildings, as, for example, “learning tools.” The school design solution may well be award-winning architecture, but not necessarily supportive of learning.

A Faulty Developmental Process

In many counties, a group of educators get together and decide what they want in a school, pass the material to the school system planning group, which then prepares a program, for use by architectural firm. This is a tired and outdated version of a linear developmental process that smart organizations have long ago abandoned. In this developmental sequence, the architect is introduced too late in the game to utilize his creative perspective.

The Architect’s Complex Role

The architect is the premier design consultant on most projects, corporate or institutional, when a new structure or a renovated building is required. The client is often in awe of the architect; in addition to reflecting the cachet of the professional who is the “builder” throughout civilization, the capable architect possesses a great deal of technical information that is complemented by well-tuned esthetic sensibilities. Clients often assume that the architect knows everything that is required to complete a successful environment project. In fact, many architects know little about interior processes, communications, human behavior, marketing and interactive technologies. The architect is unlikely to relieve the client from his or her erroneous assumption about a span of capabilities, because of the necessity of preserving status within the client relationship. Or the architect may believe that he or she is highly knowledgeable in all relevant areas. The situation is hardly the architect’s fault. There are gaps of knowledge, information and communications within and between development teams on corporate as well as institutional projects. The teams are likely lacking some needed disciplines (for example, to reduce the negative impact of cliques in middle and high schools, the presence of cultural anthropologists and sociologists would be valuable). There is not a long-term context for defining how schools might evolve into a family of learning environments. Programs that the architect must respond to tend to reference the past rather than the future. The gaps that occur in much of environment development need to be examined and rectified so that the architect is not burdened by uninspired planning programs and forced to fulfill too many roles.

An Involuntary Audience

A distinction must be drawn between situations where people come to a site voluntarily, like a science center or mall, and those where their attendance is involuntary, such as a government site or school. If a site and building in the first category don’t communicate to its target audiences successfully, it may begin to fail financially soon after it is opened. If a site and building in the second category don’t communicate to its publics (students, teachers), it does not matter, in the sense that they must be there, whether the building is a failure or not. A school building’s interior spaces and traffic flow may be ambiguous, intimidating or otherwise unsettling, however, the school system is not penalized. Our work in the evaluation of how the public responds to sites, buildings and their interiors has revealed that some buildings attract, and some repel their intended audiences. A single perceptual cue can cause a significant percentage of a potential audience that comes to a place voluntarily to decide not to be there, even at the point of entering. A building and site may communicate negative cues: closed, deserted, unfriendly, off-limits. These powerful cues repel a percentage of the voluntary audience at the site.

While doing summative evaluations of two science centers, we were startled to find that up to 25% of the potential audiences at one, and at least 45% at the second, changed their minds at the point of paying for admission. People had made and followed through on several commitments: to come to a city, enter the general site, come to the specific centers’ sites, walk through two sets of doors, approach an admission counter and then (after a moment of quick decision making) experienced a change-of-mind. The implications of this scenario involve millions of dollars. At one of the centers, the problem was that of perceived value. A father would typically approach the admissions counter with family in-tow, look at the admissions sign, calculate the family cost, look to the left and then say, ”Let’s get out of here.” Mom would roll her eyes with a “What’s the matter with him now?” look on her face, just as the kids began to cry, and, they would leave. The environment / communications problem was that when daddy looked to the left, he saw the “Space Center” exhibit. Though it was a well-done, informative exhibition, it did not look impressive. The problem was one of perceived value. “What am I getting for my money?” Apparently not enough.

When you say “space” people think NASA, Disney, and “Star Wars”. That type of science center offering had better communicate that it is spectacular, or at least a visually provocative experience, in order to capture its intended audience. At an environment, “Everything is information and information is everything.” The shaping of the site, structures, signage, thematic graphics, verbalizations of staff and interactive content, as well as more subtle cues of illumination and patterns, must communicate to audiences in a seamless manner. Audiences must be able to scan, comprehend, formulate questions, make decisions and take action effectively for an environment to be successful.

Schools continue to be built with little reference to their success. We don’t evaluate the lost potential of the site and building in qualitative ways as, for example, teaching tools. Rather, we examine the students, teachers and principals without reference to the building. We look at scores rather than the qualitative shaping of structures and spaces. Once again - quantitative vs. qualitative.

Fifty-Thousand Crucial Questions

The American mission to the moon was an incomparable feat. The amazing combination of science, engineering, courage and will, still has the power to astound all of us. A little known fact about the venture is that at NASA, most of the “right stuff” questions about the bold project were asked at the beginning. Fifty-thousand questions about the mission were identified that had to be answered and were placed on a single wall. Creating learning environments isn’t rocket science, though it might be far more complex than is currently thought. It seems that there must be 1,000 to 2,000 questions that need to be identified and responded to when creating breakthrough school designs. Eventually most of the relevant questions for any type of project are asked. But some are asked in the middle of the project and some at the end, like … “How did we ever go in this direction?” (much too late in the game for that sort of query).

Problem Solving Strategies, Tactics and Techniques

The quality of the problem solving process applied to an environment project is highly dependent upon the adroit use of quantitative and qualitative information - finding, organizing, interpreting, coding and visualizing it. Discerning relationships and patterns in this mass of information is one way of defining concept directions that might be pursued. At the center of this information is the problem definition. That definition, ideally with its focus upon the audience / user, can be diagrammed, with further definitions sought for each key word, in order to expand the spectrum of potential solutions. Imaginative definitions encourage the exploration of an environment’s processes - the relationships between students and teachers, curriculum and technology, daily scenarios and learning environments components before the architecture is considered.

Successful environments are conceptualized by remaining tightly focused upon target audiences. Unfortunately, a funny flip often occurs in the attitude of development team members. The empathy for the audience / user is often replaced by an attitude - one that suggests that if the that audience doesn’t immediately embrace the solutions, they may not be worthy of them! At the moment of the developmental team’s shift of perception toward the audience, a lot of projects are at the start of a downward slide from which they never recover.

The psychologist can be a highly effective developmental team member who provides assistance with keeping audience / user needs, expectations and limitations in mind. There are at least five key times when the psychologist is very useful in an environment’s development:

1) Prior to conceptualizing, providing general behavioral guidelines.
2) When mapping the behavior of the audience / user in and around the environment, as its scenarios are defined.
3) At reviews of both basic and design concepts to ensure that they respond to previously defined behavioral guidelines.
4) When formative evaluation is employed for testing concepts for spaces and components.
5) After the completion of an operating prototype or the complete operational environment, using summative evaluation techniques.

Meta-cognition - thinking about how to think - is an important component of a problem solving strategy. At what level is the environment project to be accomplished? Is it to be revolutionary, evolutionary, or only reflective of incremental improvements? Is the project to be advanced and futuristic in its design idioms and cues or just advanced in its process? What is the role of critical judgment in the interplay between the developmental team members? It is important that the developmental team be aligned on these matters or there will be a constant struggle during the planning and conceptual phases.

Most projects succeed or fail based upon the nature and quality of communications between client and consultant or between team members. As communicators, clients tend to be verbal and numerative while designers and architects are typically visual in what they express. Many projects become problematic because the designer or architect has failed to stay in the client’s communications realm long enough,. i.e., until enough basic issues have been verbalized and agreed upon. Instead, the architect begins to design prematurely - before the client feels secure. There are two “moments” when clients may be overwhelmed by their feelings of insecurity - when the design concept is introduced and when the contract must be signed that commits the multi-million dollar implementation funds. If the client is not feeling secure in a way that allows the introduction of the design concept to be a comfortable experience, the project’s developmental process may never recover. From that moment on, the client picks at the concept, annoying the architect and compromising the conceptual direction. How can this situation be avoided? One way is to communicate about basic issues in a language that is verbal and visual and with which all participants can feel competent. That language is diagramming.

Diagrams are a medium through which all types of processes and physical relationships can be expressed without a premature introduction of design formats. Key words, diagrams and “word-o-grams” can fill a wall providing a highly communicative overview of an environment project that is flexible, entirely changeable and not precious to the slightest degree. It is much better to throw out a lot of quickly accomplished diagrams than a carefully done design concept. Making the problem visible and highly understandable can be achieved with a small investment of time that pays big dividends of clear communications and an enhanced developmental process.

A project may also become highly visible through scenarios expressed on index cards - again, a flexible medium. An environment’s process can be storyboarded, like a movie and coordinated with the scenarios to visualize what the audience / user will experience in the environment. Time values, the levels of intensity of experiences and their other qualities can be coded into the storyboard sheets so that pacing and scoring of the environment are clearly understood by all members of the developmental team.

Process models are also helpful. These quickly completed dimensional representations of activities are not realistic visualizations or precious. Rather, they are experimental, fluid, taped together and easily rearranged and coded with markers - intended to represent processes rather than design formats.

These easily created and useful working tools are very communicative elements of the problem solving process that make situations visible, and thereby more easily understood.

The Prototype Process

Sometimes school systems managers will decide to develop a prototype of, for example, a classroom. The second element of their decision is to create the prototype environment as another space in a new school that is being designed. They may be surprised when the effort fails to meet their expectations. The negative result may well be inevitable when the prototype is treated as an isolated development, that is folded into the schedule of a regular school, that must meet time and budget constraints. A prototype has a greater chance of becoming a success if it is viewed as part of a continuum of advanced development. Otherwise there may be an attempt to solve far too many problems within a single experimental effort. Too much pressure is then applied to one, isolated environment. It is much better to project a family of prototype classrooms, none of which should be overburdened with problems to be solved or ideas. Attempting to create a prototype within a standard school that must go on line in a relatively brief time is another difficult situation. Developing a prototype and employing formative evaluation to predict the effectiveness of evolving ideas and then summative evaluation to examine the completed environment require a different time frame and pacing from that of a customary project. There must be time allowed for reflection on ideas and their potential outcomes.

Prototypes - new ideas - have to be marketed to various audiences: students, teachers, administrators, parents, PTAs and politicians. My first position was at Ford Motor Company in 1960. Though lacking the specific training in automotive design, I was able to land a job in advanced design /styling. Ford is where I became fascinated with the future. Sitting to my left was Sydney Mead who years later designed everything in “Blade Runner” and many other movies set in the future. To my right was Alex Tremulis, who designed the Tucker and who was then working on the concept for a two-wheel gyroscopically balanced vehicle. We worked on vehicle concepts that were fifteen to thirty years advanced - not that what will be correct for the market can really be predicted that far ahead. However, the system of developing advanced concepts and prototypes at the company worked very well. The pre-production design operations worked on concepts that were six to ten years advanced. The production vehicle studios developed designs five years ahead of the product introductions. Advanced design influenced what was conceived in the pre-production studios which affected the work of the production design operations. When production models were introduced to the public that were really new, Ford would also reveal experimental models in magazines and at car shows that had similar styling themes that were expressed in more radical forms. Then the new production designs didn’t startle the public and were accepted more quickly. Something can be learned from this multi-level strategy that can be applied to the development and exposure of new learning environments to their several audiences so that they can more quickly find acceptance. Carefully staging the development and introduction of learning environment prototypes can be accomplished as cleverly as other new types of concepts that are gracefully introduced to their publics.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

The problem solving process is both linear and multi-dimensional. A spine of “events” and milestones runs through it that ensures that progress is being made and that potential confusion when developing something fresh is lessened. During this process, when team members work together, many ideas are pursued. Critical judgment is suspended and no one hesitates about expressing even a half-formed or even seemingly irrelevant thought because within it may be embedded a superior concept. All ideas are recorded - perhaps on index cards - so that they can be easily categorized and grouped for immediate consideration or for a later time or even another project. There are free-thinking moments in the process as well as more analytical, organized intervals.

Opportunities for Change in Learning Environments

An important area to pursue is the staging the home-to-school, on-site and school-to-home experience. What can appear in the home, that is from the school, beyond a laptop computer? Perhaps a “piece” of the school learning environment that links the two places? What can happen in transit on the school bus that sets up the on-site experience for the students and decompresses them from it on the way home? How can the site become a stimulating of piece of ground, perhaps with “packaged”and active phenomena instead of just an identification sign? What about the building’s entry experience - can it include a revelation or a surprise each day?

A number of problem solving approaches have been suggested in the last hour or so. They only work well if there is enthusiasm and perhaps even a passion for imaginative change present in the team members.

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Author Info:

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Contact Info:

David Pesanelli + Company
14508 Barkwood Drive, Rockville, MD 20853
Phone / Fax 301-871-7355 | e-mail dpesanelli@aol.com