DIY Learning

Self-propelled learning is one of the most crucial aspects of both postpedagogy and design studio pedagogy. DIY (do-it-yourself) approaches to teaching encourage students to become responsible for their own learning. Arjun Dhillon, then-head of studio for the EthicsLab at Georgetown, describes DIY learning as a “squiggle.” In the drawing and audio field note below, Dhillon provides a sense of design work as requiring self-motivation and resilience—of knowing that you need to put in the work and imagining the necessary steps as emerging from the end goals rather than proceeding through the stages of a scaffolded assignment.

The “squiggle.” Three drawings. The second and third drawings represent problematic examples of the design process; the second is simply a straight line and the third has a couple of loose loops before turning into a straight line. The first drawing, the actual “squiggle,” features a large, tangled knot on the left side that resolves into a line of smaller tangled knots. Eventually this process results in a straight line, which is represented by the arrow (pointing right) directly below the squiggle.

Pavesich: “In my interview with Arjun Dhillon at the EthicsLab at Gerogetown University, Dhillon drew this image as we discussed the rhythms and patterns of design work. Our conversation, though, didn’t really lend itself to an audio clip, so I’ll try to distill things for us here. Dhillon calls this image ‘the squiggle,’ and he uses it to disrupt student expectations, to give them a preview of the work in our Studio Collaborative. That is, the work will be nonlinear, just as the squiggle is, and therefore intentionally inefficient. Students, Dhillon says, need to expect to be creative, to generate multiple competing big ideas, to test them, to fail, and to re-start. More than once, even. Dhillon also noted that the squiggle represents two major stages he’s observed in design work: the big squiggle, on the left side of the image, which is when students move back and forth between the large context of an issue or a site and solutions from different paradigms and even fail with multiple prototypes. And then there’s the little squiggle on the right side of the image, the tighter but still loopy pattern, which is what happens once a design team settles on the general parameters of their work while still iterating with the specifics. From what I’ve seen there is a drawback to using the squiggle in this way. It seems to kind of ‘black box’ things. But here’s what’s good about that. The squiggle doesn’t pretend that there are preordained patterns or rhythms to design work. Yes, sure, there are some broad common steps: ideation, prototyping, testing, and so on. But the squiggle with its intentional, ambiguous simplicity, insists that every student project needs to respond to the world more than the parameters of a classroom model. And that sounds to me like exactly the kind of situation that I seek for my rhetoric students.

DIY approaches often raise questions about novice students’ abilities to work on their own. Indeed, DIY methods may heighten teachers’ concerns about “chaos” in the postpedagogical classroom, as we underscored in the Introduction. However, it is important to recognize that students are not starting from scratch or only working on their own. DIY approaches rely on the fact that students have already acquired what Jenny Rice calls “para-expertise,” which she defines as “the experiential, embodied, tacit knowledge that does not translate into the vocabulary or skills of disciplinary expertise” (119). DIY depends on the knowledge students have accumulated from lived experiences and encourages them to leverage or articulate that knowledge—to put it into practice. In other words, “para-expertise” is the engine of DIY; it is the reason why DIY approaches can work. All students bring previous learning, life experiences, and unique skills to any new situation. The sum total of students’ prior knowledge, experience, and skills commingles with the new disciplinary knowledge of a class, as well as the affordances and constraints of particular design challenges and interactions with teammates, faculty, and jurors.

In the studios we observed, students experienced DIY primarily through experimentation and productive failure. Additionally, students themselves determine to a great degree how they move between these experiences. We want to stress that DIY learning is not only about students conducting conceptual research or fact-finding missions on their own. Rather, it is an embodied practice in which students tinker with materials—in both digital and analog contexts—in order to try out different possibilities for their projects. In other words, as Dhillon puts it, the work of design is not always abstract:

Arjun Dhillon: “It’s not always abstract. A lot of times you have to work through an artifact, modeling stuff out. So a lot of times you’re bouncing between the very abstract and the very concrete and detailed.”

When an idea or prototype fails during the experimentation process, students learn what does not work in order to get closer to what does work (hence, productive failure). Students often struggle, at least at first, with embracing failure in this way. For instance, Rothman elaborates on his students’ emotional reaction to their failure during the process of creating a prototype:

Neil Rothman: “We talk about prototypes we give them a lot of latitude in terms of what’s really a prototype. It doesn’t mean it has to be 3-D printed. It could be anything. A CAD model is a prototype, an analysis is a prototype, something made with, you know, cardboard and duct tape is a prototype. It’s something that reduces risk. It allows you to demonstrate this works or this doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s better that this doesn’t work, um, and that’s actually one of their first concepts is they built this computer model, they sent it to Kirk and he said this isn’t gonna work. It interferes with this and it can’t tune and it can’t do this and I can’t do that and he said they were all upset and I go ‘Why are you guys upset? You guys just found out that this direction that you were going isn’t gonna work. Now you know not to do that. Now figure out what will work.’”

Over time, however, students can become accustomed to and even appreciate failure in design studio models. Here is LEEDlab student Joanna on her experiences with failure:

Joanna: “If you are continually failing at something, you have to continually find a better answer and you’re always pushing yourself. And that’s something that I really appreciate. And having to show all your work on the wall; it’s kind of, ‘This is me putting myself there.’”

We find Joanna’s response particularly instructive. She describes the designer’s failure as requiring two kinds of responses, both of which we began to think of in terms of DIY: acquiring new knowledge for improving prototypes and the affective resilience to keep trying. While an instructor’s scaffolding still plays a crucial but circumscribed role in design-oriented classrooms, bouncing back from failure ultimately depends on how students decide to respond. As Dhillon describes in this clip, “[Y]ou don’t try to move them through it. They have to move through it themselves”:

Pavesich: “Could you say little bit more about a couple of examples of how you move students through the scaffolding. You know, you’re talking about trying to move students through as much of this [the squiggle] as you can, but at least for now we’re still talking about working within the constraints of one semester.” Arjun Dhillon: “Yeah.” Pavesich: “And how do you bring into those fourteen weeks some version of the kind of work that professionals can do in huge teams over months and months and months?” Arjun Dhillon: “Um, you don’t try to move them through it. They have to move through it themselves. Like, you don’t give a vehicle; you have to just give scaffolding. I think that’s an important point. A scaffolding that demands or motivates them to drive themselves through it. Because, it is, there’s nothing, like I don’t know what path they are going to take. I’m always, like every semester at least, surprised, probably with every team, I’m surprised at least with one, like deeply surprised at what they’ve come up with—both bad and good. But also, but all good, I guess, or all immensely creative and like unexpected by them and by us. This is the common thing I hear every semester and from many students, of like how, a bunch of different stuff that’s evidence of kind of a common theme, of students being also surprised by their ability. And then every semester I see students just start to get it at some point. Different students differently; usually it happens quickly with everybody within a team. And kind of everyone gets it enough to operate on it, like to use a common language, and to be able to, to be accustomed to it at least. And a lot of people get it on an even deeper level; I can’t explain it. And the scaffolding just has to be motivating work; there is no route and there is no path—other than what they create for themselves. If you move someone through it or try to direct them, orchestrate it, or propel them in any way, they’re not going to be engaged, they’re not going to be doing studio work. And it’ll be a problem. You have to let them do it—to let them struggle and fail. The critique is part of the scaffolding that works as a pulling force. In practical terms it's a deadline, an expected delivery in an intense public format. It is like hugely motivating to students.”

While students’ independence is central to DIY learning, the teacher is not absent from this approach. Instead of providing constant direction and authority, however, the role of the teacher is to guide from a distance and collaborate, to zoom in and back out depending on the moment. Teachers often point students to resources or research, or check in on the progress of developing projects without telling students the “right” way to do things—in part because the right way to complete these projects does not yet exist in the world, if it ever could. Here are Martin and Joanna discussing how this sometimes frustrating method of teaching (from their point of view) forces students to become resourceful.

Pavesich: “A lot of this sounds to me, from what I heard today, like, you guys going out and finding out what you need to know and then finding that information, too.” Martin: “You have to become resourceful, and it, it can be . . . I’m sure Joanna will back me up on this.” Joanna: [laughs] Martin: “It can be unbelievably frustrating because sometimes you’ll go for advice to a professor, and you’ll say well is it this or this, and the answer will be, ‘yes.’” Joanna: [laughs again]: “Or, ‘What do you think?’” Martin: “Or there’s an alternative question they’ll turn back on you, and you start mumbling obscenities under your breath. But what it’s teaching you to do is it’s teaching you to be resourceful and to try and find the answers.”

Students are also expected to give reasons for why they make particular decisions—a practice akin to the “Statement of Goals and Choices” that Jody Shipka outlines in Toward a Composition Made Whole (113). But as Martin and Joanna explain, that can be a difficult task when the community of respondents broadens through crits. Students have to do-it-themselves in part because jurors rarely if ever agree on the best path forward; students have to make a choice about how to proceed with the project in order for it to continue. Operating among a community of emerging practitioners and current experts means navigating dissent, making one’s own choices, and having reasons for those choices, as Joanna and Martin describe here:

Martin: “More often than not, people will disagree.” Joanna: “Yeah.” [All laugh] Martin: “ . . . about the path you should be taking, so you have to filter all that information and decide, ‘Well, I’m going to take this path because at the end of the day it’s my project.’” Pavesich: “It’s up to you.” Joanna: “And in school, they’re teaching us how to develop our own design skills, so we are in charge of it. They’re just there for advice, and sometimes you need to be pushed more than other times, but you know you’re supposed to be making your own decisions and conclusions from your own design feelings and things like that. A lot of times, students are like, ‘Hmmm . . . I’m gonna go this way, but you need a reason for that and I think developing— ‘“ Martin: “You need to substantiate it.” Joanna: “A reason is also, we can’t just disagree with them, and they say, ‘Okay.’ They expect you to defend what you’re doing.” Martin: “And that’s a big part of it.”

We want to be clear that DIY does not diminish the value of expert knowledge. In fact, we observed the opposite in every studio we entered. The value of expert knowledge only seems to be heightened by designers working on projects that are high impact, collaborative, DIY, and ecological. Sometimes expert knowledge emerges in mini-lectures or just-in-time instruction, and sometimes it appears in the form of a teacher’s ability to design meaningful learning environments and experiences. This is something Rothman emphasized when he distinguished between “teaching” and what we might call “facilitating learning”:

Neil Rothman: "And when you come in and say, ‘no, what you have to do . . . you have to go home and you have to watch this video,’ right, ‘and you have to do these problems and you’re gonna come into class and we’re gonna work problems in class and I’m gonna answer your questions,’ like they go ‘Whoa wait a minute . . . that means, like, I’m responsible for learning. And I go, exactly. You are responsible for learning. I don’t teach anymore, I’m helping you learn.’”

DIY approaches, then, offer something analogous to an apprenticeship in which teachers design guided opportunities for students to learn on their own through prior and new forms of knowledge. Incorporating DIY approaches into our pedagogies is especially important right now considering that technologies have transformed (and will continue to transform) our everyday lives, including the workforce that students will be entering after college. Cathy Davidson repeatedly states that a focus on “learning how to learn” is “the single most important skill anyone can master” (14). She writes, “Learning how to learn equips students to become independent and demanding researchers who can use an array of creative, critical, and computational methods to solve problems, wherever they face them” (14-15). In all of the design studio settings we observed, students recognized the value of DIY practices in both their individual and collaborative learning processes. Indeed, their individual success, and the potential impact of their work in the world, depended on such recognition.