Dave Dawkins is a design lead at the innovation firm IDEO’s non-profit arm IDEO.org. I invited him to share his experience applying design thinking to diverse social challenges. His animated and energized presentation of some of his work inspired the students to think about what we’re doing in the Design Thinking for Social Change course at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR)  in a bigger frame. It didn’t surprise me that Dave would inspire the students as much as he had inspired me on our first meeting. 

What did surprised me though was Dave’s own history with theological thinking and the stimulus, insight and wisdom he brought to our ongoing conversation about design consciousness. 

Picking up with conversations “towards a theology of creative praxis” in Spring 2023 I invited Dr. Deena Aranoff to share some thoughts with the Spring 2023 cohort of the course I teach at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in Berkeley. 

She drew on recent writing she is doing about “The Maternal Divine” in particular “locating the maternal valence of the key Hebrew term for steadfast faithfulness: a,m,n.”, which is the root of the affirmative blessing “amen” as well as of  “oman”, “ as a reference to a craftsman”. 

Dr. Aranoff is assistant professor of medieval Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. Her interests include rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. Deena is also a community educator and teaches Bible, rabbinics, and Jewish mysticism in a variety of adult education programs.

In the Spring semester of 2022 I began a series of conversation at the intersection of design (creative praxis) and theology.  This was an accompaniment to the  Design Thinking for Social Change course that I teach at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR),

To begin, I invited the president of the Pacific School of Religion, Dr. David Vasquez Levy, to address theological implications of each step of the design thinking process framework. His presentation is inserted below in three segments:

1. The “inspire” and “define” steps.

2. The Ideate and Prototype Steps

3. The Test and Reflect Steps

The best part of teaching is learning what it is that students gain from the course that you’ve offered, and where they have encountered obstacles that could be removed in future iterations. 

I have just finished teaching a new course in innovation by design under the title Design Thinking for Social Change. It was new to me in pointing the frame of innovation towards “social change” rather than the commercial opportunities presented by emerging technologies and markets. The student body was also new to me – rather than the design, engineering and business majors I have encountered in the past, this time I met a group of students enrolled in a two year Master of Divinity (M.Div) program at the Pacific School of Religion here in Berkeley. 

The third difference from “traditional” design thinking coursework was the content I introducted under the heading of “design consciousness”. I’ve offered some of this material before, but aplified it into the intersection between “social change” and “divinity”. 

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The Hebrew word for “teaching” is “torah”. It is also the name that is given to the most sacred of Jewish texts, what is known as the five books of Moses, the Bible, or the old testament. The inference is that all wisdom about living in the world is to be found in the dramatic and often strange stories of the Torah. 

Jewish ritual includes the wonderful practice of studying a section – a portion, or in Hebrew “parashah” – of the Torah each week. We take it in the order that it is read, beginning with Genesis 1:1 when we find the world being created in its entirety in 6 days – and ending with Deuteronomy 34 as Moses looks over the promised land from the heights of Mount Nebo, but is unable to enter. 

Part of the tradition is an offering of commentary on the portion of the week. Last week was the portion that concerns the building of the Tabernacle, the holy sanctuary that in Hebrew is called the Mishkan. The long story – covering a total of 15 chapters of the Torah – includes a detailed description that God delivers to Moses of the design of the Mishkan that is to be a sacred place where God can dwell amongh their people. So detailed that drawings have been made and models constructed with remarkable similarity regardless of when it was done or by whom.

I was given the honor of making this offering at my community service, which through Covid has been happening via Zoom. It was the perfect account to draw out the “torah of design” – what the Torah has to teach us. To reach that teaching, I looked at it through the lens of design consciousness – our awareness that the world of material culture is a world of our own making, and so we are learning how to make every kind of artifact in it by design; with clear intention and with exacting skill. By design we make things work the way they’re supposed to and beautiful so we can live with them. 

(continue to see the 14 minute video of my “drash”)

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