Designing on a Deadline

Inspired by the British game show Taskmaster, Upper School students in the Innovation & Design elective applied their creative problem-solving skills to a series of open-ended challenges this term. Like the game show, where comedians compete in wacky tasks like painting a picture of a horse while riding a horse, Design Teacher Andrew Shirley devised challenges that had little in common with one another and where the solution and task were open to broad interpretation. The tasks gave students plenty of opportunities to get comfortable with discomfort. “A lot of designers want to edit their ideas while they are brainstorming, and these kinds of tasks force you out of that habit,” says Andrew. “You have to get something done in a short amount of time, so there’s not a lot of opportunity to second guess your choices.”

The students’ first task was to design and produce a better clothes hanger. Students went in various creative directions. Some made wider hangers, while others made hangers that could hold multiple garments or fold in half to take up less space in a closet. Their next task was to make as many paper airplanes as possible out of one sheet of paper that could fly over two large worktables in the CC&D. They had five minutes and no constraints in their first design, leading to some cheeky workarounds such as wadded paper balls. Then, they decided how to define an airplane as a group and tried the design task again, incorporating what they had learned and the new parameters. While the Fay School Design Process encourages improvement through iteration, the tasks also impose strict time limits to replicate real-world problem-solving scenarios. The students’ third project was to create a marble run device designed to dispense a marble at just the right speed to stop closest to a pin. Each team had three attempts with multiple disqualifying constraints. 

Recently, Innovation & Design students worked in teams to create popsicle stick bridges that could hold as much weight as possible. They had twenty-five popsicle sticks, three rubber bands, and a stick of hot glue. After their first attempt, where the strongest bridge held 10 lbs, students spent a class learning about bridge design. They incorporated some of what they had learned into their second attempt, where they were given forty popsicle sticks, six rubber bands, two lengths of string, and one hot glue stick. The winning bridge held over 60 lbs! Their final task of the term will be to create a device that can pop bubble wrap.

Andrew has seen his students’ technical construction skills grow with each subsequent project, as well as their ability to work outside their comfort zones. “These projects focused on creative problem-solving and how to think within the parameters of a design brief while still pushing those boundaries as much as you can.”