Design Revolution: the students are not the problem.

I don't know what it says about me that I'm reading books recommended by comedic soccer podcasters... but I'm reading User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang, as recommended on the Men In Blazers Bald Mart.

The book's thesis isn't novel to me, but the anecdotes within are.  The opening chapter is an account of the Three Mile Island incident that killed the American nuclear industry.  Kuang doesn't see operator error, though highly trained, expert operators did make errors.  He sees design error.  No reasonable person, trained or not, could possibly make sense of the 1979-era control panels with multicolored lights (different colors meaning many different things), buttons which lit when pressed even if the function ascribed to the button didn't occur, gauges in inaccessible spots requiring contortions to read.  

Similarly, Kuang delved into World War 2 plane crashes, most of which were attributed to "pilot error."  Once again, he takes issue with design, not with the people using the design.  For example, why would levers for landing gear and wing flaps be essentially indistinguishable?  Kuang cited over 400 B-17 crashes that occurred because pilots failed to deploy landing gear in an otherwise unremarkable runway approach - they twiddled the wrong identical lever, and didn't notice the mistake until it was too late.

In these and other cases, designers - and those executives making big-picture decisions about designs - exhibited what to me borders on criminal arrogance.  Why can't the idiot pilots just remember which lever to pull?  The plant operators need to RTFM.*  Let's schedule another mandatory monthly 6-hour training session so they'll stop screwing up.

* Read The Fission Manual, I think.

Does this attitude sound familiar?  If not, head down to a faculty table in the lunchroom.  Or, just as disturbingly, listen in on a meeting of school administrators discussing the failings of teachers.

Kuang's thesis is that the most useful advances in technology have come when designers have considered the humanity of the end users: not treating people as they should be, but treating people as they are.  People don't read the manual.  People push random buttons accidentally, or out of panic.  People don't remember important details in the critical moment - when in a hurry or stressed, their recall grows worse.  People react illogically and emotionally even to logical and dispassionate stiumli.

What innovations have you made in your classroom to adapt to teenagers as they are, not as we want them to be?

I've spent a quarter-century adapting my teaching to the end user, doing what seems to work rather than just what everyone says should work.  Yes, learning physics requires significant effort and engagement on the part of the student.  It's my job to help the student figure out just what sorts of effort and engagement lead to success.  It's my job to create a class culture and atmosphere that encourages useful kinds of effort and engagement.  

If Kuang is right, it's my job to optimize the design of my class for students who can and will be inconsistently attentive, emotionally prickly, unlikely to read directions... in other words, to optimize for my teenaged students, in all their humanity.  That takes enormous effort on my part.  It requires trial and error.  It requires me to be my own worst critic, asking myself regularly: is there a better way?

The next several posts will discuss adapting teaching to the humanity of the end user.  I'll tell stories of design ideas that worked or didn't work.  

My purpose is to revolutionize physics teachers' thinking, in the same way that the iphone revolutionized the entire technology design industry.  

(Oh, and the design revolution I have in mind extends as well to educational administration.  I am called to design and re-design my classes round what is in actuality effective for my non-ideal students.  Administrators should feel similarly called to design faculty meetings, development/evaluation programs, and all administration-teacher relationships around what is most effective for supporting teachers - in all their human foibles.)