The other day, my supervisor sent me an article from Andrew McAfee’s blog (http://bit.ly/1iPv0r) called ‘How Beautiful it is, and How easily it can be broken.’ It had a profound effect on how I think about teaching design and what I wrote about earlier in my reflection. McAfee discusses an Enterprise 2.0 conference where two presenters from Lockheed Martin detailed their successes in the employment of Enterprise 2.0 in the company structure. Mr. McAfee goes on to say that the presentation was ‘articulate and clear and well-informed,’ and the presenters gave the impression that social software platforms are now part of major sectors of the company. He (McAfee) then states how this situation is very rare and most of the time it takes a certain amount of key success factors to be achieved in unison, in order for this change to occur. This made me start to think about my current situation in design teaching and my research. Surprisingly, the situation is very similar.
As the author suggested in his case, that ‘…rare that situation really is… and that even with great presentations and advocates that have this knowledge to give, it takes ‘the right place and the right time…’ as well as a list of success factors to be followed. This is quite surprisingly the same in what I have been dealing with in education. What this article made me realise is that I need to chill out a bit with my ‘evangelistic preaching’ and perhaps to find other ways to engage those ‘factors of success’ in order to achieve what I am looking to do in some private institutes. Just as the author stated that if any of these success factors were not in place, the overall effort would be damaged. I think this is again similar to effectively introducing the aligned curricula in private design institutions. If some factors are not in place, for example, management perceptions of the learning environment, then being able to create a deep teaching and learning environment becomes very, very difficult if not impossible. I spoke about this briefly in my exegesis but I guess I never really understood its implications to degree of experiencing it right now. Amazing.
I think what I should do is take a closer look at this aligned curricula and perhaps pin-point and develop new success factors for private design institutions. Perhaps I will need to think of these key factors where the structure can be integrated into different teaching contexts and goals in order to keep flexibility and translation. It would be good continuation in any case of my research.