(MIT) ideation lab

Day 1:  Sunday

 

AM - Innovation through Experiential Learning

 

This workshop was intriguing to me mainly because it raised a lot of questions. The main thrust of the workshop was that not all “hands-on” learning was truly experiential learning.  They make the case that what the educator expects to happen cognitively from a learner’s perspective during an activity is different than what actually happens.  To illustrate this they use a cross between Kolb’s model of experiential learning and Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive thinking.  The main question as I understand is, 

• during an experiential learning activity, are the students really practicing higher order thinking skills or are they simply repeating and applying what was told to them before?

The problematic area for me comes from trying to prove this.  Overall, I am really interested in their theoretical model and can see its usefulness as a tool for helping curriculum developers prepare their activities, but I wonder how you can show the effectiveness of any of these techniques or activities.  I questioned them and there wasn’t a decisive answer to how you can convincingly measure improvements in innovation.  The education professors pointed me towards some papers about indicators you can use to show people are cognitively engaged in the subject matter, but they didn’t address innovation specifically.

 

Other random thoughts:

-Prof. Mistree is a big proponent of the need for interdisciplinary skills in today’s “innovation” economy, and talked a lot about the investment in manufacturing and engineering in India and China.

- The word creativity was not used once throughout the workshop.  “Creating” and “innovation” but no creativity.

-A lot of talk about diversity and how it helps to have many perspectives in a “learning community”

-The three little pigs as told by Farrokh Mistree is hilarious, activity around the story was also very interesting

-Prof. Mistree likes to give hugs, gave me one as part of the scavenger hunt and then invited me to lunch.  Takeaway from lunch, it’s not about research, it’s about the scholarship of education.

-Another thought from lunch, current generation of academics promotes MechE as things that they liked (cars, tools, Prof Mistree used Tim allen from home improvement), we need to redefine MechE for a new generation.  

Ideation Friday, November 13th

The theme for this week's ideation was "patient waiting rooms". Similar to last week, we spent a few minutes defining different "spaces" for the ideation theme in order to frame our ideas.

After we had generated a list of about ten different spaces, we chose the six we thought would be the most helpful and interesting. Unlike last week's ideation where we also created a list of categories, this week we went through each category sequentially, spending three minutes on each.

Overall, this ideation method was very effective. The sequential approach to the categories meant that each category was given an equal chance for exploration. Also, limiting ideation for each category to three minutes seemed to provide a little bit of urgency and possibly increased our output rate of ideas per minute.

Also of interest:
How Doctors Think
Ben Schneiderman on electronic health records search and visualizations.

Ideation Friday, November 6th

This time our theme for ideation was "How to promote recycling and reuse at MIT". We started off by brainstorming about categories as a group, and then we wrote them on the board for everyone to see. After spending a few minutes on categories, we then switched to ideating concepts on individual pieces of paper and posting those to the board.

Looking back at the session, the categories were helpful for coming up with ideas, but our ideation might have been helped if we structured a few minutes for each category, rather than a free-for-all. There's definitely some more experimenting we can do with this method, and I'm sure it's something we'll come back to in the future.

Wind Generator

I went to the presentation at MIT by William Kamkwamba and Bryan
Mealer about the wind generators William has built in Malawi.

William's story is very inspiring — incredible when you think about the lack of support or materials available to him. Learn more about William from his TEDTalk or the book he wrote with Bryan.

--Geoff

Ideation Friday: An Experiment

Friday, October 9th we had our first "Ideation Friday". So far this is
just an experiment, but we hope it will become a weekly event.

How did it go? See for yourself with our sketches of concepts for
clothing and clothes organization:

Design for the Bento Box

Great op-ed from the New York Times about bento boxes.

John Maeda's ideas on "doing more with less" are insightful, but don't miss some of the commentary at the end.