Thinking About Design Then Thinking About Culture

This year, as part of orientation, we showed a couple videos to students to get them thinking about the key questions:

  • Why are we here?
  • What do we want our culture to be like?
  • What do we need to do to make our culture the way we want it to be?

The one I showed, a TED talk by Tony Fadell focuses on how he sees the world as a designer: looking for those small nuisances to which we’ve become habituated by paying closer attention to detail, looking for the big picture, and trying to see things with new, childish eyes.

I think it was successful in that I’ve been hearing it come up–particularly the term habituation (although the students could often not remember the actual term)–a few times already this semester.

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