“To know much and taste nothing-
of what use is that?”
St. Bonaventure
Hi, I'm Matt!
After graduating from the Division of Industrial Design (DID) in the National University of Singapore (NUS), Matt spent a couple of years serving as an in-house strategist in a healthcare start-up (with a focus in bridging gaps in the spheres of private and chronic healthcare).
In this time, he led the small team in the 'zero to one' development of its flagship product, HealthKeypers (telemonitoring app providing accessible care to vulnerable patient groups), and contributed to the organization's development through Design Thinking education.
Though a fruitful experience, Matt left the design industry to pursue his interest in design education instead. Today, he is a Teaching Assistant in in the Design Thinking (DTK) module in NUS: a large-scale general education pillar for students from diverse faculties and majors. He has been with the DTK Team since Dec 2023.
In his short but eventful time as an educator so far, Matt has found a sense of excitement in crafting engaging yet meaningful Design Thinking workshops. Right from the get-go, he has explored a number of creative approaches to impart DT mentalities: observing peers prepare and eat cup noodles in class as an empathy exercise; juicing oranges to evaluate tools and elicit human needs; designing biscuit packaging for a fictitious start-up CEO to understand prototyping communication; and so on - his endeavours in classroom experimentation aim not only to facilitate an experience for students, but to also carve out a tacit grounding in creative pedagogy.
Outside of class, Matt enjoys connecting with his students through consultations. He sees, in these casual conversations, an opportunity to mentor students and to bring out their personal voice in their work and in their interpretations of the world around them.
Today, Matt seeks to deepen his expertise in the domain of creative education and to coach dutifully each student under his charge.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My teaching philosophy emphasizes self-discovery, learning through visceral experiences, and exercising agency in the interpretation of these experiences:
- Self-Discovery
To thoughtfully design activities that are exciting; stimulating; and framed in a manner as to cultivate an appetite for discovery. - Learning through Visceral Experiences
To identify and capture moments that call for attention to detail, such that the impact of an activity or work done is viscerally felt and self-evident (in other words, an 'aha!' moment). - Exercising Agency in Interpretation of Experiences
To facilitate conversations and raise open-ended questions for learners to interpret their own experiences, and to widen their horizons through peer exchange of ideas.
APPROACH
In order to create a 'felt' visceral experience, each workshop's core activity needs to be sufficiently rich in hands-on engagement (such as designing and pitching a biscuit packaging for a unique target demographic; conducting live observations of peers preparing and consuming cup noodles; and juicing oranges using various tools to elicit human needs and contexts).
This slant of 'learning by way of experience and appreciation', rather than by theory-first, aligns with my outlook on experiential learning: "To know much and taste nothing - of what use is that?" (St. Bonaventure).
Discussions in class permute between pairs, small groups (3-4 pax), large groups (5-8 pax), and class-level - according to the structural demands of the activity or class persona. These variations aim to surface opportunities for peer learning as the primary mode of insight synthesis.