This past December I drove my family from Paris to Saint Brieuc, a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwestern France. We were staying with friends hosting a small New Year’s Eve party (La Saint-Sylvestre, in French). The drive takes about 4-6 hours depending on traffic. My wife has not been able to drive since her brain injury the week before Thanksgiving 2018. A year of driving in Paris has made me an “expert” at driving manually, navigating the treacherous round-abouts full of towering trucks, weaving motorbikes and speeding cars. My wife, on the other hand, was dealing with the fact that she was no longer in control of her ability to gauge distances quickly enough. Everything appears closer than you think. Prior to her injury, she did about 80% of the driving, because, well… the shoe was on the other foot. “These French drivers are maniacs!” as they flew at warp speed of 110 km/hour past me. I would push the pedal, switching grinding into 4th gear to keep up, to my wife’s horror. “Slow down!” “I can’t. I’m a guy!”
In March we spent a week completing our FIT distance learning training. That week I experienced what my wife was feeling about depth perception, not being in control and someone else taking over the driving. I made it through three “round-abouts” of tutorials, and a BlackBoard Collaborate Ultra Interior Design faculty meeting. In Design Thinking you have to suspend your perception of “you” being the expert, so you can be led by the design thinking strategist/ facilitator. Often, we as experts in our field, don’t allow others to have an opinion or suggest another way of doing things. We create tools, services and experiences in a vacuum, never immersing ourselves in the needs of the end user. We can’t and won’t give up control to see if there is a more innovative way of creating a user experience. The result: we lag behind the speeding traffic/our competition.
The tutorial sessions were quite telling, sometimes frustrating, watching faculty not remembering that they were live, as they drove with the left blinker on for two hours. One had the camera positioned just above their forehead the entire session. Jose, our tutor, in an effort to remove the echo from the session, announced that he was muting everyone’s mic. If you wanted to speak, you would tap the “raise your hand” icon, and when he calls out your name, turn your mic on and ask your question. Otherwise, write something in the chat box. “Jose, I have a question…Jose…I have a question. Jose…Jose…Can you hear me (Major Tom)?” At one point I typed in the chat box to the faculty member, giving her instructions on how to communicate, but she wouldn’t look up at the screen to see the message on what to do. I know this because she was visible to us in a small box on the screen. This went on for an hour over-top of Jose continuing to speak because he had our mics muted and couldn’t hear us. Her frustration peaked. “I’m outta here.” we heard her declare, as she logged off. Or maybe not. I bet if I had logged back onto the session the next morning, I’d see her coming out of the shower pinning up her hair.
The rest—all 58 of us—took it in our stride. You have to set up the rules of the sessions at the beginning or you will lose your class. Luckily our students are Millennials. This stuff is second nature to them. One faculty member in the Interior Design session said he hopes we get back to normalcy soon because he needs a haircut every three weeks. “Hahaha!” I immediately typed into the chat box. “Me too. Me too.”
The tools we learn and the experiences we gain in a time of crisis, even with social distancing, hopefully can be used long after we return to some form of normalcy. Engaging with students online can be difficult without practice. Our Dean complimented the Interior Design Department’s ability to do in five days what takes an entire semester of training. Yes, you need to ride a bike before you can drive a car, but now we’re being given the car keys at age 8 and told, “You drive, since we’re not getting home fast enough to play with your friends!” There are new challenges every week. The model of car keeps changing with every turn: the gear shift in a new place every time. I’m not sure how I can keep up, but I have to keep drive.
I’ll keep you posted and together we’ll see how this new experience guides us through the unknown.
