Systems have become complex and hard to navigate. As a result, we tend not to scratch below the surface, but instead work on top of them. As systems around us continue to become more complex, it’s more important than ever to understand how they work. This is for one simple reason: if you don’t understand how a system works, then you can’t truly participate in it, and its development. To address this problem, we’ve come up with useful constructs like systems thinking to help us deconstruct and understand what’s happening around us.
Systems thinking gives an individual insight into the system they’re engaging with in order to best take advantage of its components. However, while systems thinking is useful for understanding components, it’s not useful for questioning their validity. What if the components are broken? Extraneous? What if an entire system is experiencing disruptive change that requires a shift in thinking? In order to truly understand a system, then, we must go a step further than being able to describe its model; we need to engage with it through the process of making, as advocated in Papert’s constructionism. Meaningful engagement with a system must come from playing with its components: taking them apart, tinkering with them, and putting them back together. Through this process of inventing and re-mixing, we can engage students in “making as a way of knowing.”
Facilitated by Jayson Margalus (College of Computing and Digital Media).
Friday, October 5, 2018 at 12:00pm to 2:00pm
Daley Building, Idea Realization Lab (Room 310)
Free
No recent activity