SENSEMAKING FOR THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2021 at 14:00 - 18:00 (EST/UTC/GMT-04:00)
Duration: 4 Hours
Language: English

As practitioners in the fields of Design or Business and Social Innovation, we often face problems that exist in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous reality. Creating a sense of that complexity is an essential step to design valuable solutions that are sustainable over time. Our understanding and possibilities are limited by our own experiences and perspectives. Time and budget pressures further limit our ability to "understand better" to "create better". Tools that help balance time limits and the need to know more about the systems that we intervene are becoming more and more important.

Digital tools and computational capacity can give us many advantages: Gathering information through digital surveys is an example. The analytics generated by virtually any platform are of immense value. Yet both lack the depth that we need when aiming to understand the personas we are designing a future for with a more human and nuanced approach. We are then challenged to find research tools that capture the depth of qualitative approaches, but with the scalability of quantitative methods to actually build collective knowledge through sense making in scale.

The objective of this workshop is to present a tool that helps to obtain this balance through the aggregation of micro-narratives. This tool allows incorporating a large volume of individual experiences and the meanings that people have given them, to a more complete construction of understanding about a complex phenomenon. Based on these micro-narratives enriched with signifier questions (which help us understand the meaning of the narrative for the person who narrates it), it helps us to analyze and synthesize the experiences of a large number of people in order to make better use of them in the design process. It allows us to "see the forest better" without losing sensitivity to the subtleties of the tree.

As a case study we present how the population of university students and professors in Mexico City have lived the challenging environment that has emerged from the need of taking their teaching and learning experiences online. Both parties have lived a very different reality, and are divided by a communication gap that's larger than ever before, aggravating the divide and hindering their own capability of making things better. Watching the phenomenon from a systemic and integrated perspective opens up tons of possibilities that are just a few decisions away. We are completely positive that these types of exercises can be the cornerstone of a much needed (and overdue) reinvention of the Superior Education Model in Mexico and other Latin American Countries.

Workshop Facilitated by Ángel Otero Mac Kinney

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