Back to the Future

The aesthetic is muted, in deference to the design work. “The idea was that the interior space would not compete with student projects at all,” Trupiano says. “We provided a lot of good lighting and white walls. The concrete floors were ground down to expose more of the aggregate, and then they were simply sealed and polished.” While the layout succeeds on its malleability, it fails on its acoustics. On busy days, all those hard surfaces create a cacophony, so lecture-heavy classes and design studios are held at different times. (“We’re still working out the scheduling,” Rogers concedes.)

Kahn and Associates worked to integrate HFA into the building by creating a porous interior where different activities might overlap. When walls are used, they are predominantly of glass. Students from the college and the charter school can see one another working, and shared public spaces make each feel like they’re a part of the other institution. That kind of physical interaction is a cornerstone of the academy’s educational model: “public school in a public space.” The goal is to expose students to professionals and experiences to expand their worldviews. “There is a lot of intangible learning that goes on simply by being in a location that doesn’t look like school all the time,” says Deborah Parizek, the executive director of the Henry Ford Learning Institute.

The idea of putting a public school in a public space was first born in 1997, when an experimental school called the Henry Ford Academy opened in Dearborn, Michigan. The Ford Motor Company and the Henry Ford Museum teamed up with nonprofits and businesses to develop a school at the museum to prepare students for college and professional life. It set its sights high, and has a 90 percent graduation rate, with 90 percent of graduating students going on to higher education.

In 2003, the Henry Ford Learning Institute was formed to expand the Dearborn model and create a national network of small, community-supported schools. When it came time to develop the curricula for these new schools, Parizek asked business leaders what they thought the most important skills would be in the future. Two words kept coming up: creativity and innovation. So how do you create a public-school education that fosters innovators? Parizek went to IDEO for help. “We came on board and started asking what a framework might mean for an innovation-based school,” says Sandy Speicher, a leader of IDEO’s Transformation practice. “When you’re looking at new models of education, the first question is: How much do you want to stick to the paradigm, and how much do you want to break it?”

Parizek didn’t want to totally jettison traditional, discipline-based courses, but she did want to empower students to believe they could learn and become future leaders in the community. Stanford’s d.school joined IDEO in developing an innovation-focused curriculum that featured a quarterly design challenge. Every few months, students in each grade level work in teams to tackle a different design problem.

The first-quarter challenge for sixth graders, for example, is to create a better work-study space for a partner. First, there is the research phase. Students talk to chair designers about ergonomics; they interview one another about what is distracting and what helps them focus; and they tour many kinds of work spaces to see how different people structure their environments. Then students go through the design process, brainstorming, developing, and testing rough prototypes for their “clients.” The classes—science, language arts, social studies—feed into this design challenge. In math, for instance, students learn about square footage and proportion. In social studies and English, they learn how to become adept at research. “All of their courses weave together around that design challenge, giving them an anchor to attach their new knowledge,” Parizek says.

Classes are regularly postponed for “Stop, Drop, and Design” days, when students engage in special activities in school and out in the community. Design challenges are the same for every HFA school, but teachers have the freedom to adapt them to their own cities, bringing in outside expertise and addressing specific issues relevant to students. After opening new schools in Detroit, Chicago, and San Antonio in the last two years, the Henry Ford Learning Institute has plans to expand into new cities. It will also work to integrate its design-focused curriculum into existing schools.

The ultimate goal of the schools’ model is not to graduate a cadre of future designers but to educate the next generation of innovators and community leaders. “The first wave of these design-based programs were magnet schools that taught architecture and design,” Speicher says. “This new wave of schools looks at how we can use design as the basis of learning. What I love about that is it introduces the career path of design, but it also introduces the career paths of chemists, physicists, lawyers. You’re not only being introduced to design thinking; you’re getting the ability to think critically, and that can apply to any career.”

Pausing outside a classroom, Deshon Mumford considers his own future. Ask him what kind of a career he envisions, and you’ll get a long list: poet, graphic designer, social worker, to name a few. “It’s hard, because there’s so much I want to do, and I don’t know how to pick,” he says. When told that perhaps he doesn’t have to pick, that he could incorporate his interest in design and social work into one career, his eyes widen. “I didn’t know you could do that.”