Living Spaces Unit: Design & Play

Today we had another lesson for our Living Spaces Unit (Grade 9/10 ESOL). You can read about the introduction to the unit here. The session today was aimed at introducing students to Stanford's Design Cycle and the idea that play can help us be more creative, which can help us with coming up with ideas!

We will soon be starting our living spaces design challenge with the Extraordinaires. Here students will have design for fictional characters. As they are not able to meet or interview with them, they will gather clues from illustrations - they will need to be creative here and will use a certain amount of play to emphasize with their characters.

As a class we watched this TED Talk, with Ideo's Tim Brown -Tales of Creativity and Play. Throughout the video the speaker challenges the audience to do several activities, which we also took part in. If you want to do this too, you need a piece of paper with 30 empty circles, some paper clips and a pencil or paper.
The challenges were:

• Draw your neighbor in 30 seconds (happens one minute and 23 seconds into the video)
• 30 Circles Challenge (happens ten minutes, thirty one seconds into the video
• Paperclips challenge (happens thirteen minutes into the video)

At the end of the video we all shared out what we made with our paperclips. Prototypes included; a waterslide, earrings, a ring, a pencil holder, a spatula, a crown, hearts, snakes and more!
As this was for an ESOL class I also put key notes on the board throughout the video!

Lastly we ended by looking at IDEO's Brainstorming Rules! Students were each given a print out of these, which they will use in the coming weeks.  (You can see more details about each of the rules here - I shared this information with the students verbally).

Our next step is to introduce the characters and have students brainstorm. They will then start ideating and will use various bits and bobs to help them prototype (Lego, Play Doh, etc!)
Watch this space for the next update!
​Full presentation here.