The Power of Unsolvable Problems

By

Sue Shellenbarger

Sue Shellenbarger
The Wall Street Journal
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Updated Feb. 23, 2016 11:23 p.m. ET

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The most valuable problems may be the unsolvable ones.

The engineering school at Northwestern University is using the power of problems without clear solutions to prepare freshmen for the ups and downs of college and careers. Aware that some of its academically successful students arrive on campus without ever having failed at anything, the university requires all new engineering majors to take an unusual course featuring challenges they often can’t meet: Working in teams, they must design and build devices to help individuals with disabilities perform simple daily tasks.

Some of the challenges: Equip a stroke survivor to crochet with one hand or a partially paralyzed shooting victim to don tight support stockings. Make workout gear or bottle openers for people with only one working arm. The budget: $100 for each four-student team.

Solving these problems isn’t necessarily impossible, but there can be many solutions and in some cases no solutions at all. Tackling such tasks is an important life skill that is applicable to anyone. It can teach resilience and, when people fail, humility.

University officials say the course, Design Thinking and Communication, meets a need beyond teaching people skills to aspiring engineers. The idea that “you need As, you can’t make any mistakes, you have to be perfect,” has been ingrained in many freshmen by the time they arrive on campus, says Joseph Holtgreive, who as assistant dean of undergraduate engineering counsels students who are having academic or personal problems. Striving for perfection can isolate students and at worst, trigger anxiety or depression.

Wrestling With Tough Tasks

Students charged with designing assistive devices visit patients to test their ideas

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Isabelle Zinghini, 18, an engineering student from Mamaroneck, N.Y., (left, kneeling) explains to Dr. Samraj how to mount a device made from a stress ball onto the legs of patients’ walkers. Ms. Zinghini is one of several students testing “walker-leg gliders”—replacements for the standard rubber walker-leg tips that often annoy patients by squeaking and sticking on the floor. Ms. Zinghini’s team is proposing to replace the tennis balls used by many patients and therapists with stress balls, which are likely to last longer and cushion users’ arms and shoulders against pain. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Northwestern University engineering student Thomas Wu, 18, of St. Charles, Ill., (left) listens to comments from physical therapist Preeti Samraj (center) and patient Gordon Burich about a device Mr. Wu and three other students have designed devices to make hospital walkers easier to use. The students, who are taking an unusual design course required of freshman engineering majors, visited the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago recently to test their ideas for assistive devices. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Former Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago patients Gordon Burich, 65, a Crown Point, Ind., construction-equipment salesman, (seated, left) and Keely Haddad-Null, 31, a graduate student at DePaul University, Chicago (seated, right), watch as sophomore engineering student Janet Chen, 19 (center), of Hong Kong, explains the glider device her team has made. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Mr. Burich, a Crown Point, Ind., construction-equipment salesman who suffered a spinal-cord injury in December, watches Dr. Samraj examine a hard-plastic glider device students designed for the legs of his walker. The device made the legs slide smoothly over the floor, enabling Mr. Burich to move ahead more easily. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Two sets of walker-leg gliders made from rubber stress balls are displayed on a pad showing the Northwestern University mascot. Instructed to make walker-leg tips from inexpensive, durable household materials, students lined the purple stress balls with fabric from a whiteboard eraser. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Northwestern University students Robert Bell, 20, (left) and Kyle LaBrosse, 18, of Glastonbury, Conn., (center) listen as Gordon Burich (right), a former patient at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago who is 6 foot 2, jokes about the challenges tall people face in using a walker. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Kyle LaBrosse shows plastic walker-leg gliders he and teammate Thomas Wu made in a Northwestern University design shop, to slip over the rubber tips of a walker’s back legs. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Northwestern University engineering students (left to right) Isabelle Zinghini, Janet Chen, Jihoon Han, 21, of Pebble Beach, Calif., and Kyle LaBrosse take notes as physical therapist Preeti Samraj sums up the strengths and weaknesses of the assistive devices they tested recently at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

Jihoon Han (left), Robert Bell (seated), Kyle LaBrosse and Thomas Wu watch and take notes and photos as Mr. Burich tests devices they’ve made. Their observations will help them revise their designs before presenting them. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

As engineering student Janet Chen (left) looks on, Dr. Samraj, a physical therapist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, helps patient Gordon Burich step into a walker equipped with leg gliders designed by Ms. Chen’s four-student team at Northwestern University. Ms. Chen says she learned at the product-testing session how important it is to understand users’ experience when designing an assistive device. Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal …

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“That’s what we’re trying to help them transition away from,” Mr. Holtgreive says. “They have to persist and struggle through some really challenging problems.”

In high school, Rachel Hughes’s science projects had clearly defined goals and paths to reaching them, says Ms. Hughes, 18, a freshman from River Forest, Ill. “There’s usually a Point A and a Point B and you have to figure out how to get to Point B.”

Her project for the freshman design class “is more like a free-for-all,” she says. Her four-student team is designing a gliding base for the back legs of walkers used by patients at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, a nonprofit physical-medicine and rehabilitation hospital and research organization. The device would cover or replace factory-mounted rubber caps that squeal, vibrate and stick to the floor, annoying patients.

Ms. Hughes’s team met last month with a patient with a spinal-cord injury. He said he wanted his walker-leg gliders to slide easily and quietly but still provide stability—and to have shock absorbers to cushion his arms and shoulders when he leaned on the walker. “That’s what we set out to do,” Ms. Hughes says: “to try to make something that doesn’t seem possible.”

Her team prepared two mock-ups, one using plastic foam and material from a sock, and another using the foam and fabric from a whiteboard eraser. Teammates Robert Bell, 20, of Chesterfield, Va., and Jihoon Han, 21, of Pebble Beach, Calif., attended a testing session earlier this month with two different patients at the Rehabilitation Institute.

ENLARGE

Patients’ responses were lukewarm. One patient, Keely Haddad-Null, 31, a graduate student from Chicago who suffered a brain hemorrhage in January, tried the sock device and said it made her walker a little less stable than she liked.

The other patient, Gordon Burich, 65, a construction-equipment salesman from Crown Point, Ind., who suffered a spinal-cord injury last December, raised an issue they hadn’t anticipated. He didn’t think either the sock or eraser material would work well on the various floor surfaces in his home, including carpet, hardwood and tile.

At first, Mr. Han feared his team would have to start over. “This is more difficult than we thought,” he says he thought at the time.

Working together, however, the team figured out a new approach. When they met a few days later, Mr. Han says, Ms. Hughes “brought up a brilliant idea” of trying one of Mr. Bell’s earlier suggestions—halving and hollowing out the center of a billiard ball and attaching it to the walker leg. The ball’s hard, slick plastic material seemed similar to another team’s device that had drawn high ratings from users.

“It’s obviously not a good feeling when people say ‘no, I really don’t like this idea,’ ” Mr. Bell says. “At the same time, I feel like our entire group is pretty good at overcoming those kinds of setbacks. ... We just moved forward with a different part of our plan.”

Learning to ask for help from others is a building-block of resiliency. Some students have bad experiences when their teammates don’t work well together, says Bruce Ankenman, co-director of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern and of the course. As teams try ideas, cast them aside, come up with new ones and start over, “they realize they don’t always have to have the right answer all along.”

The course is a tradition at Northwestern, which has required it for a decade. Students aren’t graded on whether they solve the problem. Instead, they are graded on how well they communicate and work with patients, therapists and teammates, and on how well they execute the design process, approach problems and present their results at an end-of-term design expo.

Students’ brainstorming can give rise to some oddball concepts, from a sock fastened to a walker leg with a hair tie to a rubber stress ball coated with fabric from a whiteboard eraser and encased in plastic. “I try to welcome all ideas,” says Preeti Samraj, a physical therapist at the Rehabilitation Institute who facilitated the testing session with patients. “I don’t actually know the solution.”

Rushing to finish a mock-up before the session, Thomas Wu, of St. Charles, Ill, and his teammate Kyle LaBrosse, 18, of Glastonbury, Conn., grabbed a plastic lid from a razor-blade disposal can in the university workshop, cut it to fit a walker leg and glued it to a Gatorade lid. At the testing session, Dr. Samraj said it was the most successful idea of the evening.

The course is unusual in requiring freshmen to design products for people, says Michael Milligan, executive director of ABET in Baltimore, the accrediting organization for undergraduate engineering schools. Many engineering students don’t take design courses until their junior or senior years, although this is changing. The University of California, Berkeley, which opened a new design institute last year, recently began offering three design courses for freshmen.

Learning to handle failure in small doses equips students for bigger challenges, professors say. Many of the students “have been leaders of this and that, and they’ve had a very high profile. They have to get used to being knocked down a little, not for the sake of knocking them down, but because one of our precepts is that you have to fail. That’s how you learn,” says Deborah Leigh Wood, an adjunct professor of communications who helps teach the course.

A few discover another building-block of resilience—finding purpose and meaning amid setbacks. Joycelyn Dong and her teammates were asked last fall to help a stroke survivor with full use of only one hand to resume her hobby of crocheting. Ms. Dong’s team designed a crochet hook with an enlarged grip, in hopes of making the needle easier for her to grasp. They were discouraged when the woman declared the device useless, says Ms. Dong, 19, of Columbus, Ohio.

Her team reframed the goal toward making a device that would be more broadly helpful, and cobbled together an elevated wheelchair armrest that enabled the woman to prop her weak arm higher, extending her reach. The woman told Ms. Dong the device would enable her not only to wield her crochet hook, but to go grocery shopping and pick products off the shelf unassisted for the first time since her stroke.

“She was so thrilled,” says Dr. Samraj, who oversaw the project.

Ms. Dong gave the woman the device at her team’s final presentation, she says. “It was one of the greatest moments I’ve had so far in engineering.”

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com