Solving Complex Problems

Let's start with some background. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a multicultural household in the small American city of Reno, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe. Perhaps an early sign that I would end up doing something like academia was a video game pastime called The Legend of Zelda--I loved the idea of undertaking a quest that required solving problems. My father's interest in space also attracted me to physics. In addition to a science program called Nova, we often watched Star Trek episodes together and analyzed the plots and their political implications. My favorite character, science officer Mr. Spock, seemed like an exemplar of knowledge and wisdom.

What lead you to your various studies?

I feel incredibly lucky to work in a department like Knowledge Integration because I've always been very curious about just about everything, from music and dance to debate. I tried to read Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time at a young age when it was way above my reading and mathematics level. Nevertheless, the challenge helped me to realize how much I needed to learn about Physics to understand the book, so that became my undergraduate major. To keep up with my dad during political conversations, I studied argumentation starting in grade seven, became a member of my university debate team and added an undergraduate minor in Speech Communications. My Masters is in Environmental Studies from The Evergreen State College, a renowned non-traditional university in Washington state. Finally, my PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University offered a rare combination of training --relatively few programs apply the problem-solving mindsets of science and engineering to problems of public policy.

Your KI profile notes both your research into collective decision-making and your teaching focus on problem-solving. Can you describe a couple of your courses that especially focus on problem-solving?

Sure. The first course that I taught in KI is INTEG 121, which is now called “Collaboration, Design Thinking, and Problem Solving”. The way that I teach that course has affected many other courses that I have taught in KI. For example, when I taught INTEG 251, Creative Thinking, the syllabus included the following list of course objectives:

1. Reliably generate and explore questions, which are the wellspring of creative thinking;

2. Efficiently associate disparate ideas to improve the quality of your creative projects;

3. Determine when to think creatively alone versus thinking creatively in groups;

4. Articulate how innovations were influenced (or made possible) over time by predecessors;

5. Complete a challenging series of creative projects to your own satisfaction. These will be drawn from the visual arts, communications design, design, and the performing arts.

In terms of my pedagogical approach, I find that students:

• are more motivated and learn best when they have a lot of choice in their approaches to the creative challenges I present;

• are eager to share their in-progress projects and get substantial and supportive feedback from peers;

• gain a lot from iterating between non-linear and linear thought processes;

• benefit greatly from metacognition, which is developed through self-reflection. Essentially, when students can name the theories and things they have learned, they are more likely to retain what they learned.

As a pragmatist, I embrace the value of active learning. What skills have students gained or expanded? What actions can they take based on what they have learned? How can students practice a skill or explore an idea in the depth needed to gain real understanding? Can they self-assess and thus identify the strengths in their projects as well as the areas that require further work? Talking about relevant theory or best practices isn't enough: doing a creative challenge and reflecting on how it was experienced is essential.

Maybe you can describe one of the assignments you have found most valuable?

Sure. When I taught the Creative Thinking course, students were introduced to the technique of morphological analysis, which is a structured approach to systematically exploring combinations of associations. Students might use the technique to stimulate their creative thinking to find combinations of ideas that they find curious to pair together and rise to the challenge of figuring out how to present the pairing. For the related assignment, students have presented a variety of artifacts ranging from visual art to musical pieces to comic strips. It has been impressive to see what the students come up with, but what I have enjoyed even more is witnessing the delight and enthusiasm that students share for each other’s presentations of creative expression.

Your INTEG 499A/B is another course that seems distinctive and very much hands-on.

 Yes, in this capstone course (which has previously been called “Real-World Problem Solving”) for the KI Collaborative Design Specialization, students are expected to self-organize to identify, analyze and effectively address a substantial real-world problem, to the satisfaction of a real-world client. Typically, a mix of independent and collaborative work across disciplinary boundaries produces the best results. Projects that students completed with me include:

• In celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary, community outreach for multi-cultural and intergenerational conversations of what it has meant to have the opportunity to immigrate to Canada

• A data needs assessment for victim impact centres and law enforcement battling human trafficking in Ontario

• An introductory online guide to smart contracts and how they might transform practices in the legal sector

This course requires substantial hands-on effort, readiness to embrace ambiguity, a disposition to develop and discard ideas, and the resiliency to learn from false starts en route to success.

Surely students must encounter significant obstacles when working with real clients. What support or advice do you offer to students and to their clients?

Clients have always been supportive of students and their nonlinear problem-solving processes, as the course is oriented toward addressing topics that don’t have straightforward solutions. Support and advice that I offer to students is to remind them to follow the tenets of design thinking: e.g., to love the problem, not their idea for a solution; to explore multiple alternative strategies; to prototype and test alternative ideas for solutions; and to show their work of how they concluded that a particular strategy may be the most promising.

Many higher education institutions in Canada and abroad now recognize the value of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education. What makes KI special?

Typically, when students first learn about knowledge, they assume that disciplinary certainty and expertise is the pinnacle of knowledge. For example, events or behaviours may be observed empirically, data may be gathered and analyzed, a hypothesis may be developed and tested.

However, when it comes to making the future we want, very little is certain. Everything is in motion, important data may be hidden from our view, and judgements about the future are often wrong. The future is something we make, it is not pre-determined: from where we stand today, we can propose and then pursue any number of potential paths forward. The very important decisions we are making today will lead to very different futures in the coming years.

I believe the education KI students receive gives them a broader perspective on the role of knowledge and the fact that it is constructed by both individuals and groups. KI students gain greater confidence in their ability to contribute to knowledge, resilience in the face of ambiguity, and a sense of responsibility. Rather than primarily focusing on the knowledge of the past or the present, KI helps students to create the future.

This interview is part of a project conducted by Dr. Mary Stewart during her two-month fellowship at the University of Waterloo in the fall of 2022. Thank you to Dr. Stewart for her work in highlighting the transdisciplinary nature of the KI program and its community members, and to Fulbright Canada for making this opportunity possible.