The Aesthetic Design of "Teaching That Sticks" by Chip and Dan Heath

When thinking about effective design for ideas in the classroom, I highly recommend this article "Teaching That Sticks" by Chip and Dan Heath. This article echoes these statements in the 2008 article "If Ideas Were Fashion" by Wong, E.D. and Henriksen, D: "The experience of fashion is often characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought....Whether trying on a new outfit or designing a science project, the fashion experience evokes anticipating, hoping, dreaming, wishing, desiring, and becoming." One of the great ideas in the "Teaching That Sticks" article is the educational process of creating a satisfying "aha" moment that follows an motivational "huh?" moment. This "huh?" moment is the curiosity aroused by the "knowledge gap" engineered by the teacher. Instead of presenting students with concrete information, the teacher creates a mystery or a problem to be solved. For example, in a journalism class described by the writer Nora Ephron, "every assignment had a secret--a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story." In my "Work of Art" project, I am studying the graphic artist Chris Jordan who designs large-scale images to illustrate a specific statistic. For example, the 44"x 82" image above is composed of 50,000 plastic bags, which represents the estimated average number of floating plastic trash pieces in every square mile of the world's oceans. By integrating these 50,000 plastic bags into a large-scale, memorable and beautiful close-up of a whale, Chris Jordan has fashioned a "sticky idea" for his viewers. People who view this image are more likely to be motivated to take action on the issue of plastic trash in our oceans. Jordan's goal for his artwork is for people to increase their awareness of their negative collective environmental impact, then take actions on a personal level to reduce this impact.

These examples relate to the way in which the "fashion experience" evokes the mental and emotional processes of "anticipating, hoping, dreaming, wishing, desiring, and becoming." In the article, "Teaching That Sticks", the authors claim that "everyone speaks Sticky....The grammar of stickiness--simplicity, storytelling, learning through the senses--enables anyone to understand the ideas being communicated." When designing images that teach scientific concepts or illustrate statistics, the designer can use the "grammar of stickiness" to create these simple images that tell a story.