Failing in Order to See: Failure in Other-Oriented Design and the Cultivation of Perspective-Taking

• In Event: 35.028 - Failure in the Learning Process: How Learners Experience and Overcome Obstacles Through Resources and Supports

Abstract

The rising interest in failure in recent years has mainly focused on failure as a vehicle towards academic learning. We wish to build on this strand of research, and explore one aspect that merits more attention – the importance of failure in the development of perspective taking (PT), defined as “the active consideration of others’ mental states and subjective experiences” (Todd & Galinsky, 2014, p. 374).

Existing educational research on PT mostly focuses on promoting students’ capacity to better appreciate a specific perspective foreign to their own, be it from another historical era or from a different social group. The educational aims of such interventions are usually to increase understanding of- and reduce prejudice towards that social group (Belman & Flanagan, 2010; Nilsen, 2016; Van der Graaff et al., 2014). While valuable, such educational interventions are aligned with the dominant models of learning, according to which students learn by progressing towards a predetermined perspective – that of the teacher (Brennan, 2016). However, beyond PT’s important role in attenuating intergroup biases, the more general capacity and inclination to consider how situations are viewed from other perspectives is both a vital interpersonal skill, and a key component of shared living in a diverse society (Epley, 2014; Gehlbach, 2017).

As research has shown, PT is an iterative process in which individuals gauge the differences between their failed initial assessment of other’s perspective, and situational cues that help them arrive at a more precise understanding of that perspective (Epley et al., 2004). Accordingly, we outline a constructionist approach to cultivating PT, which situates this process within a concrete context where students are positioned as designers of products intended for the use of others. We suggest that the combination of an emphasis on the experiences of future users with an iterative design process, that includes receiving feedback from actual users, could indirectly support the cultivation of PT. This is the case because iterative design entails translating abstract insights concerning users’ experiences to concrete design changes, thus functioning as what Papert (1980) termed an “object-to-think-with” in the case of PT. More specifically, it is exactly designers’ “failure” to account for the perspective of future users, which serves as an opportunity to learn how their project is viewed from the perspective of others.

To illustrate the role of failure in practicing PT, we introduce vignettes from a series of game-making workshop we designed and conducted with high school freshmen, who in small groups designed digitally augmented versions of carnival games using Scratch and MaKey-MaKey. We focus on the interaction between designers’ assessment of their game as a “success” or “failure”, and the opportunities afforded to view their game from the perspective of players. We illustrate that a sense of failure was central for stimulating more in-depth reflection on players’ perspective, and hence, engaging in PT. We conclude by pointing out more general directions for examining the role of failure in practicing PT, and its role in facilitating dialogue across difference more broadly.

Authors

• Gideon Dishon, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania