VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

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When providing students with opportunities to engage with emerging technologies, complexity appears in several contexts. While complexity theory and systems thinking are explicitly introduced in design studio classes, these topics arise organically in interdisciplinary technology courses as well. Several courses mix students from the arts, design, engineering, and the humanities. In other classes all students are designers, but from different sub-disciplines, and are required to collaborate, despite different skills and interests. In a graduate-level design studio, students arrive with different undergraduate backgrounds and professional goals. These constraints intersect, then interact to create complex multidimensional spaces that must be navigated by students and instructors alike. Assignments ideally provide vehicles for exploring these complicated emergent possibility spaces, rather than forcing such rich diversity into uniform outcomes. Students are given opportunities to use their skills to visualize relationships between individual learning goals, societal needs and impacts, design processes, and technological capabilities. They are asked to generate prototypes and system diagrams using unfamiliar technologies, providing them with new alternative approaches for considering complex systems. After exposure to emergent problem discovery, students have expressed increased comfort with unexpected complexity. The acceleration of technological change calls into question the utility of merely teaching individual technologies (and known impacts). Students require the skills and confidence they’ll need to face the increasingly inevitable unexpected. The intersection of design, complex systems, and rapid technological change is critical for both students and instructors to engage with as we are continuously required to relearn how to learn.