The context in which we view something, or the perspective it is given, can greatly impact our impression of an object, picture, person, etc. Take the two images below.
Though we would expect the one on the right to garner more outcry and despondence, it is #TheDress that has had social media in a tizzy over the last few days, not the beheadings but an optical illusion fueled by poor photography. The environment in which the picture was taken greatly influenced over half the world to see it as white and gold, rather than the true colors: blue and black.
(Source)
However, how we identify the surrounds of the picture: do you perceive the dress to be backlit or not, is the underlying factor to perception as one color over another. This will tie to our identities, what we have experienced and built over the years. 2.3 millions people who looked at #TheDress, saw it incorrectly. 2.3 MILLION people. How we react to the second picture, that of a headline from an ISIS beheading will also be driven by (and shape) our identities—are you political, religious, pro-war? You will react differently depending on your identity with and within a community. Our identities shape what we see. If we design without care for the impact those designs will have on others, consequences can be grave. Though a silly comment about color of a dress is fine here in the United States, where we can comment on religion as we see fit, or see what we want to see, similar conversations in other countries will result in imprisonment torture, or loss of life.
The community identity will shape not only what we see, but also what we design. “Any design endeavor takes place in relation to a cultural environment, and the more that environment accepts design as a valid approach for intentional change, the better it provides support for design and for the designer” (Nelson & Stolterman, p. 225). For a design to be impactful and lasting, designers need to have support from the client community. Cuban gives us the example of policy makers (designers) and teachers (clients, sort of.) Current policy reforms are not being accepted in educational communities, and policy maker/designers are confused. They would do well to look at the IDEO HCD Toolkit’s exemplar of the farmer design challenge. The designers gained the trust of local farmers by showing investment and interest in their specific community, and a commitment to staying. Most teachers see policy reform as waiting for the next dictation to come upon them. Policy makers are not their allies but their judge and jury. In the Toolkit, designers are seen as collaborative, not combative.
We need to also look from the perspective of the designers—what does the designer need to influence the design more than what the client needs? It is possible that a designer of say, #TheDress, knows that their design can be seen in multiple ways. This could be intentional to be more generalizable, or cause mayhem. The identity of the designer needs to be balanced with the needs and identity of the client. This lack of regard for teachers as clients in policy reform “has led to overestimating the influence of personal traits and underestimating the influence of the context in which teachers find themselves every day. Because of this fundamental attribution error, as it is called, policy makers have undervalued the power of the age-graded school, particularly the way it isolates teachers from one another, discourages collaboration, and influences daily teaching. Moreover, policy makers have ignored what students bring to school. Context matters.” (Cuban, p. 12) The teachers, and even students’ identities have been diminished for the identity and needs of the policy maker-designers. We have pushed teachers into a non-participation role and subsequently created marginalized roles for them and their students in a process so crucial to them. However, designers need not be walked-on by overzealous clients.
“Good designers do not accept any situation as given; instead they always begin by asking challenging questions to better understand the true nature of what they are dealing with. They never settle for the ‘problem’ as presented to them by clients, users, or stakeholders. They do not accept the initial ideas for ‘solutions’ given to them, not even by people who live and work in the situation and who see themselves as experts in the environment. Designers always need to expose the underlying forces of change that their design intervention is expected to successfully confront, modify, and use. They try to become aware of problematic symptoms, and they try to expose underlying forces and root causes that need to be taken into account when attempting to actualize expression of desiderata for the particular situation at hand.” (Nelson & Stolterman, p.249)
“It also means constantly engaging in the creation, application, and critique of ones own schemas (p. 224).
We need balance of identities and community support in order to create effective designs.
We conclude with the needs of higher education- are designers, like Batman and Gotham, therefore “not the hero [they] deserve, but the one they need right now?” Designers will need to ask hard questions, but still be willing to invest themselves in the communities that require their services. It is a never-ending reiterative process in which designs will grow and strengthen over time as designers are brought into the communities of practice for whom they are designing. What we need now though, are the design heroes who can help us solve the the wicked problem that is ISIS, and how to stop seeing that damn dress on Facebook.
-Katie, Zach, Dean
Priscilla Taylor says
Your line “Our identities shape what we see” makes me think of the Stephen Covey quote “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it.” Our identity colors the way we see the world. The communities that we are a part condition how we see the world as well.
I have been thinking as teachers as designers but your article makes policy makers designers which is an interesting way of looking at it. This relationship would be designer expert in which the designer comes in with predetermined outcomes and the client mostly responds to the designer’s plans. Design should take place in community. With that said, policy makers should include teachers, principals, specialists, and school staff in the process of redesigning education.
Brandon says
That damn dress. Why is it more important than the headline? Because most people go through the world imagining that what they sense is what is, seeing is believing, what you see is what you get. As if, in comparison to what we know of the electromagnetic spectrum, we were privy to more than the tiny shard of information our senses can actually take from the environment. As if that little information wasn’t mediated by neural processes we barely understand. It is a visceral, undeniable example of something that happens constantly in more subtle ways. Two people look at something and see two different things. Surprise, welcome to the world. That headline? Business as usual, the sort of thing that we’re comfortable seeing as polyvalent.
Isaac Jason Bretz says
I am not sure if I quite follow the dress metaphor but your problematizing of age graded schools does raise some important questions. What about bullying? What about children preferring to be with peers their own age? What about the poor teacher who has to cope with even greater differences in maturity and skills than in standard classrooms?
Zach Lonsinger says
Hey @Isaac, what we are trying to say with the dress metaphor is that people’s identities influence what colors they see the dress as. For example, I saw the dress as black and blue. I attribute this to my background and experiences as a videographer. I understand how light affects different subjects. I studied both photography and videography. Did my education and experiences automatically lead my brain to see black and blue? Would I have seen white and gold if I wasn’t a videographer? My fiancé (and millions of other people) saw white and gold, and they strongly believed that the dress was actually white and gold. Was this because these people didn’t understand light? Or maybe they didn’t have any experiences with photography. Or maybe they just have a fashion background and thought the dress looked better as white/gold, so that’s what they saw. I hope this helps with where we were coming from with #TheDress. It’s definitely a silly and pointless debate on the surface (who really cares what color the dress is), but I think there’s a lot more to this heated internet color debate of the 2015.
Dean says
Hey @Isaac, also what we were going for here was how your choices, what you identify with has effects and sometimes consequences.
Scott P McDonald says
I wonder about Isaac’s comment in the sense that we have an implicit (cultural-historical) bias that homogeneity makes learning environments better (or at least easier on teachers). There is so much embedded in this assumption that it is even hard to unpack. Is it really harder to teach a group of people with lots of different abilities, or is that a holdover of our current notions of teaching and learning. Many learning communities that are less formal have tremendous mixes of abilities and yet still function quite well. What other assumptions are limiting our ability to design our way out of the wicked educational problems we are in?
Audrey Romano says
Your third paragraph very much jives with our post, except for, as Priscilla pointed out, you viewed the policy makers as the designers. “Design has always been and will continue to be collaborative at its core” (p 257). I’m not sure the motivations of the policy makers necessarily allow them to possess the attributes of a designer as per N&S. Maybe the reality is that there’s just no room for a design process or culture in their equation. And that is why they fail.
The dress thing? Science, not Identity, dictates what we see right there. Cones and things inside the eyeball. My 3 yr old saw white/yellow and has no concrete perceptions on white balance or fashion. Just sayin.
Brandon says
I’m skeptical of linking the dress with identity, particularly when people see it both ways at different times of day. More revealing is how one reacts to it (from “this is amazing, let’s get a tattoo of it!” to “are we seriously still talking about this?).
The homogeneity in the classroom question is interesting. I think having wide gulfs in age/ability/what-have-you is really only a problem when you are using a classroom model where everyone is expected to accomplish the same things at the same levels, and all learning is meant to come from the teacher and materials, radiating out to each student equally. It seems not having homogeneity in the classroom is trouble when the model calls for homogeneity. Hmm.
Dean says
@audrey I think some may argue that “seeing things” scientifically is just inline with one’s identity. Having a science educational background, it makes sense to say that it’s just science, and that is what dictates how one sees the dress. I don’t know if there is more to it than just science, but it seems like there would be. Because there are so many experiences, beliefs, and nonsense packed up in our identity, I think that it’s really difficult to decipher what is real and what’s for sure. Socrates was onto something when he said that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing, which is inline with my identity. So my response makes sense, right?
Leah Bug says
An following along the lines of Socrates, the more I know, the more I realize I don’t know! Maybe if policy makers had this attitude, they might reach out to all members of the community (teachers, administrators, businesspeople, etc) to collaboratively design effective school systems. If all members of the community open their eyes to their assumptions and become willing to hear and incorporate others ideas, then maybe we can move forward in an effective design. However, it’s difficult as this post and a comment by Priscilla remind us that we see what we want to see. Until people can be willing to see that there are different ways to see and solve the problem (blue/black; white/gold) and be willing to compromise, then we will remain stuck.
pul121 says
I agree that understanding context is more important and accurate when viewing something, hearing stories or describing perspectives. Human beings are always biased due to prior experiences, existed knowledge and personal background. We can’t deny, ignore or avoid what our identity impacts the way of what we say, how we do and who we are. However, we can learn how to be more empathetic, critical and knowledgeable when interpreting what we see and what we hear. We also need to learn not to be emotional and judgmental when only knowing the part of stories. Indeed, stories are best ways to connect people but one side story or a single story can’t represent the whole. The context is the broad picture we need to understand and keep in mind.
Koun says
I couldn’t agree anymore with your statement that “most teachers see policy reform as waiting for the next dictation to come upon them” which is also true in Korea. When teachers identify themselves powerless and receiver of what policy-makers decided to do in top-down manner, I think the real danger is not about they inevitable follows the rules/policy, but they become familiar with ignoring/close their eyes rather than feel mad at the situations where they are treated as the weak, having no equal rights as the policy-makers. I agree that it is not fair that all the blames put on the teachers for not adapting innovations (new pedagogies, integrating technology in class…etc). However, I do not think the change of their environments will come from the change of policy-makers’ thinking or attitude.
Michael Sean Banales says
I have to admit, I’m struggling with the idea of the dress color as being from identity. Speaking from a science background, the primary factor is actually a mixture of individual color perception (which, admittedly, can be trained) to the type of screen you have and how color reflects of your screen and such. While I feel like I could tie this all into identity, I feel like I would be forcing the argument a bit. Maybe it would be easier to argue that our identity influenced our own interests in the dress? I have multiple friends obsessed with it, where as I simply looked at it and had a rough idea of the science and lost interest within about 5 minutes.
Dean says
Perception has to be tied to identity in some way. We should talk about this in class.
Adam says
I’m not sure I would trivialize ISIS as a wicked problem. The problem and the complex are enormously complex and while it might fit the textbook definition of wicked problem, I feel like that trivializes the reality in that region.