Bre Pattis from MakerBot and Kio Stark gave themselves 20 minutes to capture everything they knew about bringing a creative vision to life – the result is The Done Manifesto – 13 Rules for Realising Your Creative Vision (Beautifully illustrated by James Provost)
“These maxims are really a super concise and clear way of restating one of the founding tenets of so-called design thinking: The idea of creating prototypes as soon as you can, and failing as fast as possible so you can evolve your way to something great. ”
My favourite of the statements has to be this one:
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
This type of outlook on the creative process is pretty commonplace for start-ups and other such industries, but failure is rarely fully embraced in a school or education environment. In my opinion if we were to consider the curriculum design as a start-up industry – not the whole school – just the creative process of designing engaging, enriching, meaningful experiences for children – then it has to rank as one of the most creative industries of them all.
I always enjoyed seeing roughly where we were heading and immersing myself in better understanding the topic, research and the options for learning that was available. Creating implementations of a standard curriculum is a hugely creative process. All too often the workshop classroom is all about getting it right, rather than getting it wrong.
I think this is misguided and developing an ethos of mistake leadership in our classes is key to creating meaningful experiences for children in school.
“So do mistakes.”
Hi Tom,
I am living this, figuring out what works and doesn’t work, and it’s a puzzle that I’m slowly piecing together. One of my favorite things when I was in the classroom was designing curriculum and letting the kids have a go at it. Now, my classroom is just larger since it’s the district and my “curriculum” is professional development. I sure am learning and realizing that to be any good, it’s not just the curriculum design or professional development design, it’s in the follow through that the magic happens and transformation begins. Those more experienced might think “duh, of course”… but for me, I’m just figuring it out. I have to keep remembering what worked in the classroom applies to professional development… and it’s learning from the fails that helps as much as learning from the wins.
Thanks for this post!
Kind regards,
Tracy Watanabe