Using design to create innovative and relevant educational content and products.

Cleber Carvalho - Senior Designer and Educational Technology Specialist

?Hi my name is Cleber Carvalho, I'm a designer and I've been working with education and technology for over 11 years. During all this time, I had the possibility to work with design of educational materials, creation of digital products such as games, apps, websites, audiovisual content and even the design of modern classrooms for schools.

?The funniest thing is that during my studies at the university, using design in education was never a life goal, in fact in design courses it is very rare during the course to introduce students to the possibility of working with design in education. On the contrary, most students dream about working with product design in big companies like Apple, BMW, Google or productions for the mass publishing market.

?Because of this lack of content that I myself faced throughout my education, I decided to write this article explaining how rewarding it is to work with design in education and how the knowledge of our field can be of great value to help schools and teachers improve their teaching processes and maximize student learning. Although this content is focused on designers, I believe that it can also be of great value to many other professionals involved in the creation of educational content.

?In my opinion the first, and most important, similarity between the field of education and design is that it is human-centered. I believe that most people imagine that design is always something "high tech", connected to the electronics industry, or "fashion" connected to the glamorous world of fashion, but the truth is that design is primarily concerned with something much more relevant, that is, human needs and problems, that is, the real designer's job is to make people's lives better and easier by creating resources that provide possibilities for change. Like education, design should not be something expensive and made only for a privileged niche, it should be an accessible and useful resource to promote improvement in the lives of the greatest number of individuals.

?Design is also multidisciplinary, those who work in this area need to study and learn about different areas to work on their projects, such as learning about biology to create a product based on some characteristic of an animal, studying physics to understand the resistance of a material, studying psychology to understand the behavior of a user. Nothing different from the routine of a student in a school with a multidisciplinary curriculum.

?The famous PBL (project based learning) so talked about recently among educators and in many cases cited by school chains as innovative, is already taught as an approach for design projects even by the famous German Bauhaus school opened in 1919. Every design project starts with a driving question that must be asked in the right way, followed by a process of research and discovery, going through several moments of prototyping solutions, analysis of results and improvements, until a final solution is reached.

?Thinking about all this, it is impossible not to see similarities with the process of education and realize that there may be numerous possibilities for collaboration between these two areas of expertise. Design, if used in the right way, can be a great ally and factor of innovation for the creation of products or educational content relevant to the teaching and learning process.

?It is a fact that creating products or content for students and teachers requires several very strict pedagogical care, such as specific font sizes depending on the age group, selection of images that convey the appropriate message, inclusive and so on, but even having several restrictions and pedagogical recommendations delimited, there are still spaces for several approaches already used by other industries (such as technology and entertainment) to be applied.?

?For example, the processes used by Apple to create modern, attractive, user-friendly products could be used to create innovative courseware. Even design thinking approaches could be used by teachers to maximize the students' interest and engage them more during the lessons. This is where the great innovation lies, using strategies from other productive segments in education is not a common practice, in most places this junction is not even thought of.

?To be innovative is not to invent something totally new, revolutionary in a "eureka" moment, but to combine in an unprecedented way elements known by all, to reach a unique result. A designer is trained throughout his or her life to make these unprecedented connections, and having someone with this expertise working on the creation of educational products is certainly a huge differential to facilitate the education process.

?To illustrate the potential of a design approach in the creation of educational products, let's look at a case study of a project I participated in:

?In one of my first experiences within this world of education, I had the mission to pass the content of a course on entrepreneurship and leadership to children. The themes are not common or attractive to this age group, so we had to have a different approach to engage them and transmit the content in an easy, fun, and direct way. We chose to use comics, but using sequential art in the educational process cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as something innovative, this strategy has been used by several teachers and teaching materials for a long time, but what most of these attempts fail to evaluate successfully is that it is not enough just to adopt a format that is more popular to students to get their attention, it is necessary to bring an extremely didactic content. Students are even attracted at first by the differentiated format, but as soon as they start consuming the content they realize that they have been somewhat deceived and that the same boring discourse is inside, disguised, leaving them on the defensive and unreceptive to learning.

?So for our comic book material we aligned the form and content to a language common to students. This means producing content with more narrative quality, more striking characters and with visual appeal for children, all the didactic content was diluted within the narrative in small pills that made sense with the flow of the story. Nothing should seem forced or like a patch, like those merchandising actions that we often see inserted into soap operas where we notice a total lack of sense with the story being told.

?The interesting thing was also to use a very sophisticated graphic language, similar to drawings and comics that the students already consumed as entertainment.

The big problem in using quality illustrations in didactic products is the high volume of materials that are usually ordered in a short period of time and with budgets that are obviously much smaller than the pompous values of the entertainment industry.

So to make this possible we had to develop a new technique of producing illustrations faster and cheaper. They were all produced in 3D in a process similar to that used by big animated film productions such as "Finding Nemo" and "Toy Story". About 40 issues with at least 20 pages of comics were produced by a team of no more than 3 people. With this new production method, with a quality worthy of major releases from famous publishers in the sequential art segment.

?We also had the advantage of being able to produce, from the same process as the comics, 3D animations. As I had said, the production process for the illustrations was the same as for animated films in this same format, so it was possible to go a step further and create our own animated clips and interactive digital games to promote the content among the students.

?All this content was inserted in a platform that could be accessed by the students at home, allowing them to venture further into the universe created for the comics, this way the empathy and interest for the characters grew more and more, awakening in the students the desire to receive the new issues with the educational content of science, biology, history, etc. embedded in each one.?

?Besides the comics used in class, there were also animations, internet games, fictional blogs of each character, and even a thematic board game. All this material was updated frequently, as if they themselves were writing there. We can say that a cross media process was used, very common in the entertainment industry, within an educational project this approach is quite innovative for an educational product.

The project was a success with the target audience, the children were interested in the characters and stories and ultimately learned, without realizing it, about decision making, leadership, entrepreneurship, etc. All the content was completed within the stipulated time and budget and with a production flow that proved so practical and innovative that it ended up being used for the creation of other products in subsequent years.

One of the interesting points to observe in the case described above is that in order to make our initial idea viable and deliver a quality educational content, it was necessary to develop a new production method and also learn and use new and cutting edge technologies. As sophisticated as the production of the material was, all this technology was totally adjunct to the delivery of the final product, it did not take the focus off the content, which were the comics, and much less the goal, which was the teaching process itself. All the technology used was not cheap pyrotechnics to serve as a sales argument, but only to add value, make feasible, and give quality to the final educational product.

With the case study above, we can see a design approach applied in practice within the teaching process. Problem definition, understanding the pains of the target audience, prototyping, and final result.

This was just a report of a series of educational projects in which I have been involved until today, I hope it has been useful to give some insights to you and that it somehow sparks a spark of interest in the use of design in education, fostering creativity and innovation in the teaching and learning process.

?Keep following this thought-provoking discussion about design and education. Until next time!