Hasta La Ideas

Images via Wikimedia Commons / Daniel Case

All around the world, children are going back to school, and I cannot help but think that if Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, 1870–1952) were alive today, designers would be among her top teaching recruits for their skills in observation and empathy.

After years of alternating between user-experience projects in San Francisco and on-call teaching assignments at a Bay Area Montessori school, I’m inspired to share the revelation that they are parallel—yet oddly independent—universes unto each other. In both universes there is an enormous emphasis on design problem solving, disciplined observation and innate empathy, not to mention findings reports.

Underlying both environments is also a fundamental principle of human dignity, with a modest lack of assumption about an individual’s truth; under observation, user testers navigate our prepared prototypes and reveal where our designs match or fail human intuition. Children navigate a Montessori ‘prepared environment’ and reveal their individual selves.

First-time observers of a Montessori prepared environment often witness its effects upon children with jaw-dropping disbelief. It’s not unlike observing a person interact with a fully resolved design. The effect is deepened, however, as we often underestimate the children’s learning ability, when in fact it is greater than that of most adults. Dr. Montessori referred often used the term ‘absorbent mind’ when discussing children’s abiliy to learn.

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