Molly Clare Wilson

Are you interdisciplinary or just indecisive?

molly clare — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:57:31 +0000

Here is what you should know before starting an interdisciplinary program at a college or university: it will not help you figure your shit out.

You think it will leave you flexible, versatile, and ready to spring into a variety of careers. But while you’re exploring and hedging your bets, the folks over in the single-scoop departments are busy learning to fit into the world. Ordinarily, this will hit you either after your first school break, when your family is eager to hear all about your exciting new program, or whenever the first campus career fair happens, whichever is sooner. Whether you come out the other side depends on whether you chose an interdisciplinary program for the right reasons.

Interdisciplinary programs are all over. You don’t have to design your own course of study to get a degree with an Oxford comma in the title. To say interdisciplinary programs are “cropping up” would put me decades too late. One of the most venerable interdisciplinary fields, American Studies, has been around since 1930. Degrees like Women’s Studies or East Asian Studies would have been considered interdisciplinary forty years ago, but now I know undergraduates creating custom majors by blending Women’s Studies and East Asian Studies. Go one level up, and more than a handful of universities, including UC Berkeley, Arizona State, and UVA Continuing Studies offer bachelor’s degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies (I knew this) and it turns out quite a few offer Ph.D.s in Interdisciplinary Studies as well (news to me). I don’t know these programs. It’s possible that Interdisciplinary Studies is just a trendy gloss on General Education or a catchall for students whose work doesn’t fit anywhere else, but at the very least the wording is notable.

Here, I’m talking about a specific kind of interdisciplinary program: one that’s not a department of its own (or just recently became a department) and aims to tackle a really complex social domain like sustainability, education, media, or health. The Stanford d.school, where I was a student and where I’m now a fellow/lecturer, is an extreme example. You actually can’t get a degree from the d.school, which I think is for the best. Mainlining our cocktail of design methods, interpersonal dynamics, and inspirational coaching would leave you excited to do everything and qualified to do very little of it.

Interdisciplinary programs are inherently transitional, Jerry Jacobs writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education (behind paywall). American Studies is now every bit as specialized and siloed as the fields it supposedly drew from. If an interdisciplinary field is important enough to last, it will eventually become a field in its own right. So an interdisciplinary field like educational technology design is either going to fall out of fashion or start developing a unique identity that distinguishes it from the programs it borrows from – education, human-computer interaction, psychology, and design.

You need to think about this as you’re going into one of these programs. Are you excited because the program’s very existence means that some fabulous intersection of disciplines must be legit? Not so fast, grasshopper. Don’t trust that, because a program exists, it represents a field that makes sense to others: to your parents, to your employers, to yourself. Go there because you need to see how these different kinds of knowledge fit together. You should need to know how social and natural science fit together around sustainable development. You should need to know how psychology and computer science illuminate educational problems. But if you’re just interested in all those fields and can’t make up your mind, you’re barking up the wrong ivy-covered wall with an interdisciplinary approach. You need to be okay with the idea that your program could disappear and that your acronym of a degree might sound totally obsolete in ten years. Not that I think it will; universities are pretty conservative. But if you aren’t too attached to the permanence of your program, you’re probably in the right head space to take advantage of it.

Sure, it’s hard to explain your degree to others, but that’s not the main problem. Interdisciplinary degrees sign you up for a lifetime, or at least a good five years, of feeling confused. If you’re not the sort of person who wants to make sense of the world from scratch, who takes masochistic pleasure in feeling a little bit lost and on the edge, steer clear. But if you’re driven toward the joy of assembling knowledge in a way nobody else has yet touched, welcome aboard – get yourself a degree with lots of commas with my blessing.

You will become more complicated. If you’ve read this far, though, I am guessing you always have been.

What Shall I Hack? (2012)

molly clare — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:34:26 +0000

I have so much love for DIYers, hackers, and makers of all stripes. I hang out at the legendary Noisebridge hackerspace most weeks. The biggest room in our apartment is called the Hackatorium and boasts more awesome tools and art stuff than I have any right to own. (“That’s supposed to be the master bedroom,” said the landlord, puzzled. “The office is supposed to be the little one.”)

Anyway, the best way to show you love somebody is to gently make fun of them, right? Or at least that’s what we learned in my family.

So check out What Shall I Hack?, Casey’s and my love letter/dig at the hacker community.

d.dataviz: Describing the Design Process (2012)

molly clare — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:31:30 +0000

(Cross-posted at the d.school blog.)

We gave the 76 students in the fall course Design Thinking Bootcamp a challenge: describe each design process mode in one sentence. We’ve had the individual responses posted on our wall at the d.school for a while, and we love the headlines:

Then we got curious. Could we find patterns in their responses? We aggregated their sentences and got a totally different view. We lose the students’ cleverness and style. But we start to see a rhythm revealed behind the design process.

Each slice shows the number of times a word was used. The area of a slice is proportional to the frequency of the word. We broke the frequency down further into singular and plural forms. The diagrams are all drawn to the same scale.

What does this tell us about how we’re teaching? Here’s what we noticed first: Empathy and Test, which we usually present as the bookends to the design process, sure have a lot in common for our students. This makes sense, as they both involve engaging heavily with users (see the User/Users graph). They start to look different in the Idea/Ideas graph and the Solution/Solutions graph. This suggests that the distinction we’re drawing here is that testing involves the designer’s own concepts, while empathy doesn’t. Put another way, Test = Empathy + Concept.

One more callout: it looks like students see some process modes as about keeping multiple concepts in play, and some about working down to single concepts. Students wrote about “solutions” and “ideas” in the Ideate phase, which changed to “solution” and “idea” in Prototype and Test. We know that we emphasize the broadening and narrowing, or focusing and flaring, of the design process, and that we tie this rhythm to certain steps in the process. What about building this broad/narrow pattern into other process modes as well?

About the visualization

The graph format above is called Nightingale’s Rose, after a now-famous diagram by Florence Nightingale illustrating casualties of the Crimean War. Read about Nightingale’s Rose in the Economist.

Intro Design Workshops

molly clare — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:10:51 +0000

At the d.school, we’re constantly hearing from groups seeking short workshops introducing them to the principles of design thinking. Some educators would find doing constant introductory workshops boring, but it totally fascinates me: design thinking is not an especially complex set of concepts, but it’s fiendishly hard to teach well. I’m always trying to find the perfect balance of lecture and hands-on design challenge, helping people find their way through the content both theoretically and emotionally.

Here’s a sampling of workshops I’ve taught. The range of participants, partners, and projects speaks to design thinking’s reach across sectors.

Teach For America (2012)

Participants: Teach for America corps members interested in bringing a more innovative mindset to their classrooms.
Design challenge: The teachers came in already having done fieldwork in an area they wanted to improve, such as parent engagement or student attendance. They used the notes they’d brought to brainstorm and draft solutions.

TEDx Manhattan Beach (2011)

Participants: Conferencegoers with an interest in transforming education, the theme of TEDx Manhattan Beach 2011.
Design challenge: My co-presenter Darri Stephens and I staffed a booth where we helped participants through a rapid-fire design challenge. We used the classic d.school wallet project.

Stanford Knight, Sloan, and Bio Design Fellows (2011)

Participants: 160 fellows from the Knight (journalism), Sloan (business), and Bio Design programs at Stanford.
Design challenge: Redesign the savings experience (partnered with Fidelity. This was a two-day challenge, and I lectured and coached along with the rest of the d.school faculty.

Freshman Resident Fellows & Stanford Department of Public Safety (2011)

Participants: 40 freshmen from Serra Hall with a general interest in design
Design challenge: Redesign one aspect of bike safety on campus: attentiveness, rules of the road, or helmet use. Ariadne Scott from the Stanford bicycling program helped present the design challenge, and students prototyped all kinds of crazy ideas over the course of the evening workshop.

Education Pioneers Fellows (2011)

Participants: 20 Education Pioneers Fellows, outstanding graduates with business backgrounds, immersing themselves in for-profit and non-profit education organizations for a year
Design challenge: Redesign an aspect of a teacher’s life. My co-presenter Leonard Medlock and I brought in former classroom teachers to serve as users and interview subjects.

Watercolors (1998-2007)

molly clare — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:31:54 +0000

I wish I could tell you that I still go off by myself regularly with a paintbox and two spare hours, taking the time to really see shapes and forms. The truth is that I haven’t done a decent watercolor in a couple years. But I refuse to bury my old hobbies or get rid of the paraphernalia. One of these mornings I’ll grab my paints, and by the afternoon I’ll have a new painting to add to this page.

About me

molly clare — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:29:55 +0000

I teach design thinking at Stanford’s d.school. This is work that resists easy description, but if I had to say what I do in one sentence, it’d be this: I attempt to catalyze a designer’s mindset in teachers and learners who want to change the world but aren’t making the impact they’d hoped for.

I teach grad-level courses, I work on curriculum strategy and development at the d.school, I run workshops for educators and the ed-friendly, and I advise a handful of interesting folks in the educational technology area. (I’m into ed tech not just because I’m a nerd, but because I find it’s the place where a lot of important conversations around education are happening right now.) On good days, I’m living the interdisciplinary dream; on not-so-good days, I’m trying to wrestle some sense into an emerging and unconventional field.

Ed Cred

I earned my M.A. in Learning, Design, and Technology from Stanford University School of Education in 2011. (If you’ve found me because you’re interested in this program, I’m always up for talking to prospective students – shoot me an email.)
I taught high school history and writing at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, PA for two crazy years. I also advised Model UN and the Gay-Straight Alliance and lived in the girls’ dorm.
I was a teaching intern at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I co-taught writing courses and lived in a girls’ dorm.
I was a teaching intern at The International School of Stavanger, where I taught primary school science. Jeg kan fortsatt snakke litt norsk.
I interned in exhibit design at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle de Nice. I know a lot about southern French scientific watercolorists now. Je parle aussi francais.
I did my undergraduate work in History of Science at Harvard University.

Nerd Cred

I was the UX designer for Harvard@Home, a now-defunct site featuring videos of Harvard lectures and conferences.
As part of my MA in Learning, Design, and Technology, I took CS106A (Programming Methodology) and several other courses focusing on interaction design.
I push pixels at the advanced-intermediate level. This means mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
I’m quite fluent in front-end web development: CSS, JavaScript, and (though I know it’s not cool these days) ActionScript. Yes, I can theme Drupal, Tumblr, WordPress, and all that. I do this for love, not money, these days, but I like to keep my chops up.

More about me on the web:

You want all the sordid details? Download my resume (.pdf).

Colophon

WordPress theme based on F8 Lite by Graph Paper Press.
Text set in Museo Sans 500 by exljbris.
Photo of me by Natalie Glatzel.

Harvard Student Portal Redesign (2009)

molly clare — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:42:16 +0000

In 2009, I created the theme for my.harvard, Harvard’s student portal. I did the graphic design as well as the CSS work. I’d had the ivy squiggle on my mind for several months. I’d drawn it for another project but didn’t end up using it there, and was delighted to be able to splash it all over my.harvard. I mean, really, what better place for an ivy squiggle.

Client: Harvard Instructional Computing Group (now Academic Technology Group)
Details: Graphics drawn in Illustrator and optimized in Photoshop. CSS hand-coded as a theme for Harvard’s iSites, a learning management system developed in-house.

Make A Star (2006)

molly clare — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:30:40 +0000

The assignment that led to Make A Star was an interesting one: instead of leaving sound until the last minute, as animators notoriously do, begin with a soundtrack of local sound and build the animation around it. I recorded at a contradance, and the idea of Rachel flowing through her day followed naturally from the sound.

Make A Star from mollyclare on Vimeo.

Wish You Were (2005)

molly clare — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:18:30 +0000

I studied animation at Harvard while I was an undergrad. This animation, Wish You Were, received the jury prize for best student animation at the 2005 New England Film Festival.

Wish You Were from mollyclare on Vimeo.

Design Thinking Bootcamp 2011

molly clare — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:16:51 +0000

The d.school’s flagship course, Design Thinking Bootcamp, is an intensive quarter-long introduction to design thinking. It’s open to grad students from all over Stanford. I took it in fall 2010, and was immediately struck not just by the content but by how much fun it looked to teach. The class was different every day, with a huge variety of activities, and everything from instructional rhythm to classroom layout to background music was intentional. Little did I know that I’d be teaching Bootcamp myself one year later, along with my stellar d.school colleagues Thomas Both, David Janka, Lia Siebert, and Sarah Stein Greenberg.

On the last day of class, we asked students to write a message to the world about the course they’d just completed. This is my favorite response:

Students: Stanford graduate students who want to infuse their professional studies with a shot of creativity and collaboration. 76 students took Design Thinking Bootcamp in fall 2011.
Time: This was a one-quarter course that met three times a week, each time for two hours. Students put in anywhere from 2 to 20 hours outside of class.
Project partners: The American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute and DIRECTV.
My goal for students: Listen to others. Listen to yourself. Be humble. Be confident. Trust your heart, not your perfectionism. (And I could go on.)