On the sixth episode of Season VIII: Polarity - IU Edition, Carolyn Hadlock and IU students Ravana, Kendyl, and Jack welcome Jonathan Racek, Professor and Program Director of Comprehensive Design in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. His work has spanned architecture, furniture design and fabrication, public art, sculpture, landscape design, and playspaces.

"I think I talk about play a lot. I think about play a lot, and it's a really problematic word because we associate it with children. And if you were to change that word, we talk about innovation now. I mean design, play, innovation, they're all kind of the same thing." - Jonathan Racek.

Carolyn Hadlock:
Today, we are talking with Jonathan Racek, a professor and program director of Comprehensive Design at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design at Indiana University. Welcome to the show, Jon.

Jonathan Racek:
Thanks for having me.

Kendyl Brown:
We wanted to start off by talking a little bit about you and some of the experiences that have shaped you and led you to where you are today. We've done some research on the two organizations you launched—MyMachine USA and Play360. Could you first talk a bit about those experiences, how they got started, and what it’s like to be part of those organizations?

Jonathan Racek:
So, I was an architect in Boston and Los Angeles for years, and I eventually grew a little disenchanted with the kind of work I was doing. I was choosing really expensive tile for people’s bathrooms, and I was looking down the barrel of a long career potentially doing just that.
I had an early midlife crisis around age 24 or 25, and I decided to sell my business, sell my house, and move my family—including my two young kids—to rural Thailand. It sounds insane as I say it aloud, but that’s exactly what I did.
Once in Thailand, I met an Australian man who was building playgrounds, and I started joining him. For about six months, we built playgrounds in Mae Sot, Thailand, which is along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. We were serving a population of Burmese migrants who were crossing the border. Thailand allowed them to stay, but wouldn’t fund any of their schools or resources.
So, we built playgrounds using found objects—tires, logs, and similar materials—to support education in the region.
After about six months, I returned to the U.S. and continued the work. We've now been doing this for about 15 years, and to date, we’ve built over 200 playgrounds in 20 countries.

Kendyl Brown:

We just wanted to talk a little bit about where you've traveled to study and teach around the world.

Jonathan Racek:

I've been lucky to travel a lot. A lot of my work through Play 360 has allowed me to go to some pretty interesting places. We do a lot of work in Africa right now. We've done work in Central America, we've done work in Southeast Asia and I've also been able to live abroad. I lived most recently in Sri Lanka doing a Fulbright there for about four months until the country sort of imploded, which is a different story. But anyway, travel is hugely important to my life and my family's life. We were in Japan this summer and I just think that there's no better education for myself and my kids than travel. It's just core to who I am as a person.

Kendyl Brown:

That kind of takes us into our next section, which is Teach for America and Fulbright Scholar. So do you want to tell us a little bit about why you were chosen for the Fulbright Scholar Award?

Jonathan Racek:

I think it does tie into some of my other work. I graduated undergrad and I was in Teacher America. I was accepted. It was early back then, I think I was in the second or third year. And Teacher America is a great organization. They're incredibly organized. They were less so then. And so I was put into a bilingual second grade classroom where everyone spoke Spanish. They were all first generation Mexican migrants, mostly central American people who'd moved to Los Angeles. And I was in Compton at the time. And the problem was that I didn't speak Spanish, I only spoke German, and basically I was the only guy who was willing to take on the job. And so I decided that I would give this a shot and it was foundational for me. I felt like after I had taught 32 second graders in Compton in Spanish, when I didn't speak Spanish after that experience, I could do anything. Could go anywhere, I could do anything, and I was unstoppable. Now, those kids didn't learn anything that whole year, but I sort of accomplished it. I didn't quit and it was a great group of kids. So I felt like at the end of that, I did accomplish something. So that sort of set the tone, my interest in working with kids that sort of was foundational to that. My work in playgrounds was foundational to my teaching experience and was foundational to a lot of things that have come after.

Kendyl Brown:

So we wanted to know what brought you here to IU and what's it like to have founded different centers and programs in the Eskenazi School ?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah, what brought me to IU was it was a Chance. I think I was living in Thailand before I came here to iu, and there are some family reasons for me to be here. I was living in Los Angeles, in Vermont, and I have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law, brother-in-law actually works for the media school. He was here with his family and we would come visit and Bloomington seemed like a great place to be. We'd go to the farmer's market, we'd love that, but I would always leave and being like, I am never moving to Bloomington. I am never moving to Indiana. Are you kidding me? I grew up in Boston, I lived in Los Angeles, I live all these places, and I was like, I am never moving to Bloomington, so be careful what you wish for because I ended up here and I love it. It's a great, I love iu. I love being here in Bloomington. It's a great place to be. Awesome. Yeah, be careful what you say.

Carolyn Hadlock:

Kendyl mentioned that you've started a couple of the comprehensive design track and then also a couple other things. Do you mind just speaking to that real quick before we shift?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah. So Comprehensive Design was a program I was lucky enough to kind of start it from scratch. And as I mentioned, I worked as an architect and my architectural education was incredible. But I had learned through my experiences in Teach for America and my experiences building playgrounds that the education that I had received was really not focused on people. It was not really focused on architects. Sometimes they like to include people in renderings, but sometimes they forget about them in the actual design work. So when I was asked to design this program, comprehensive design, I really wanted to put people and problem solving for people at the center of it. So we follow a methodology called human-centered design, which is employee empathy and employees deal with being okay with ambiguity, which I think maybe relates to some of the topics of our conversation here. So comprehensive design is, we say it's human-centered design at multiple scales. So students will learn how to become great creative problem solvers using the design process, and they will work at the scale of the object. They'll work at the scale of spaces and they'll work at the scale of systems. And so we take on, a lot of work comes out of the program that is very, very different and has a really wide breadth of form. We have some students who are building furniture. We have some students who are building an installation. We have students who are building, doing urban projects and architecture projects. So it's a little bit all over the map, but fundamentally it's about problem solving.

Ravana Gumm:

We wanted to dig more into my machine USA and Play 360. First with My Machine We saw that it is a global organization and you kind of brought it into the United States. We were just wondering what the process was for that and what inspired you to bring that program here?

Jonathan Racek:

So my machine is, it was started in Belgium and there are chapters all around the world except here in the us. So we reached out to the folks in Belgium and we asked if we could start a chapter. What my machine is is this really amazing innovative program where you pair primary school kids, college level students, and high school mostly vocational programs. The primary school kids are given a prompt saying if you could make any sort of machine, what would your dream machine be? And that set of drawings or those ideas, which are typically all over the place, are handed off to my students and my students here at the university. They have to create a working prototype. That working prototype is then handed off to a vocational program, and they have to make a full scale version of that prototype.

Carolyn Hadlock:

So it goes from elementary to college to high school.

Jonathan Racek:

That's right. It's a great program. It is a real challenge for my students. Oftentimes, it's hard to find really interesting problems for my students to solve, but when you're given a homework machine robot that shoots lasers and can fly, if that's the prompt that you have to make, that's a challenge. And these clients, these primary school kids, they're typically second graders. They are ruthless. They are ruthless. So my students will come up with, they will figure out how the robot works and the mechanics of it, and they're really proud of it. And they will show it to the students, the primary school kids, and they will say, great, but where are the lasers? Why doesn't it fly? So I mean, don't get me wrong, my students love the work, but they are tough clients. And so that's what I love about my machine project. When we first started doing it, we've done it for three years, four years. When we first started doing it, we worked with fourth graders and that was the wrong age to work with. They were pretty pragmatic. They came up with great ideas, but they were pretty pragmatic. They were trying to solve problems, which is funny that I'm saying that that's a problem because I just talked about how my whole program is about solving problems. But anyway, what we found was the primary school kids, they needed to be about second grade, but they would, at that age, they were coming up with really wild ideas, and we needed really wild ideas to really have this program work. So yeah, it has been a lot of fun. It's been a great set of learning objectives for all levels, and it's just a great collaborative project.

Ravana Gumm:

That's amazing. A little bit more into that, when we were looking at how you founded My machine USA, we saw that you had a partner from IU who works in STEM education, and we were wondering how playing with STEM and humanities and bringing it together made the program stronger. Oftentimes people do see STEM and humanities being opposite things, but they actually work really well hand in hand. So I was wondering how that showed in the final product?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah, that's a great question. My collaborator is Adam Maltese from the School of Ed. Adam teaches, he teaches a lot about making and the process of how making equals learning. So a lot of hands-on education. He's training people around the world. He's an amazing collaborator. He's training people around the world about how to use the act of making how it ties into a stem.

Carolyn Hadlock:

It's interesting because a sidebar of the course is beautiful thinking principles. So through all of my interviews, I've crafted nine principles, and these guys have been given portfolios and they have an assignment and they have to do everything by hand because I think that is just, it accesses something different in your brain.

Jonathan Racek:

The idea of hands-on learning is pretty core to most designers, I think. I mean, we've kind of moved away from that. We've really sort of, I think, jumped a little bit too far into digital work, but it's actually interesting. There are trends now where it's kind of circling back. There's opportunities to bridge the digital with the physical with VR and AR and 3D, 3D printing. And so that has been the means by which I have started to push my students to get more physical.

Ravana Gumm:

We were talking before the interview about how children don't seem held to the bounds of polarity like adults do. We talk about how children are very honest, they don't really care what you think, they're going to say exactly how they feel. And I thought that was interesting how you said fourth grade seemed a little too old to participate in that. And we were thinking about, in your opinion, since you work with children and college age students, when would you say there's a shift?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah, I've actually read some books on this. That shift. That's a real thing. I think it is about that 7, 8, 5, 6, 7 age, where if you look at children's drawings from when they're five versus when they're in fifth or sixth grade, the drawings from a five-year-old are very, very different. They're very abstract, and there's a lot going on. You have some marks on the page, but there's a narrative, there's a story that's happening in that drawing. It's not just, oh, this is a tiger. The tiger is running through the woods and he's chasing. It's like you just go on and on, and anyone who's had a five-year-old could attest to this. So I think there is a big shift that happens between that age group. I talk about play a lot. I think about play a lot, and it's a really problematic word because we associate it with children. And if you were to change that word, we talk about innovation now. I mean, design, play, innovation, they're all kind of the same thing. And a lot of my work is about, particularly with playgrounds, and while I work with kids, ultimately what I'm really doing is I'm working with teachers who are building to build playgrounds. I'm working with community members, and a lot of what I do is give them permission to play or to be creative, particularly in some parts of the developing world, there's a sort of strict line of what your lane is. I guess some people are, they're teachers, and so their job is to teach. And so if you ask them to do something outside of that, there is a resistance. So what I do with when I'm building a playground with the community is I give them permission to play, to have fun, to be creative, to come up with their own ideas. As a white male showing up in an African village, there is a power dynamic there. And I'm always trying to diffuse that. I always come in saying, yes, I know how to put a playground together, but I'm not an expert in any of this. I'm not an expert in your language. I'm not an expert in your ideas of education, your community. So we always work with a partner on the ground who helps us navigate all of that. And they're usually someone who's sort of embedded in the community

Ravana Gumm:

In our research about you. And just through our conversation right now, we see that a lot of your work does deal with young children, and there's a magic in that.

Jonathan Racek:

Magic is kind of what we're talking about. There's honesty, there's a lack of inhibition. The idea of play and design are so closely related in my life that it's hard to unravel it.

Carolyn Hadlock:

That's a good design that we were just talking about yesterday. You can tell when people have played, when they've been making something, it shows. Do you feel like you have to kind of retrain your college to sort of unlearn? Yes. Yeah. How do you do that?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah. I say that I am unteaching a lot of bad habits from high school. So the idea, this is an important topic that I think relates to the conversation. I am trying to teach my students all the time to be comfortable with ambiguity, to understand that two things can be true at the same time, and that there is not one answer. And I think that this is my rant about how we teach right now, but not here mostly in high school and primary school, that we are constantly pushing students to think about the one correct answer. And I think that that does a disservice to students because in the complex world that we live in, a lot of things can be true, and we have to be okay with not having a clear answer. So I'm always talking about being okay with gray being okay, just sort of holding off on a solution. That's another thing that I talk a lot in my studio about is holding off on trying to come up with a solution until we really understand the problem well, and then only then do we try to really solve it. So we spend a lot of time talking about defining the problem, well, understanding the problem, having an empathetic understanding of the user. And once we have that, then we're in a better position to solve the problem.

Carolyn Hadlock:

That's really interesting. I mean, people come here for learning, but actually your biggest value is that they're unlearning.

Ravana Gumm:

I thought it was really interesting how we're talking about imagination and play and how that should be a thing in every age group, and it kind of seems like it's more of a childish thing when it really shouldn't be and it should be embraced. If you had any advice on how to get older people who have been trained to not use that imagination, how to break out of that and tune into your imagination more, what would you say to that?

Jonathan Racek:

For adults?

Ravana Gumm:

Yeah

Jonathan Racek:

So since Covid noticed that, well, there's two trends that are happening, and everyone knows this. Since Covid, there's this withdrawing, social withdrawing that's happening. I noticed it with my students as well as the phone, this powerful thing that we all carry around. And so I have since Covid had to do a couple things in my classroom that I never had to do before. First of all, the first thing we do is we learn each other's names in our studio. How can you talk to someone? How can you become friends with them if you don't know who they are, if you don't know what to call them? So we do a lot. It's funny because again, it ties back to my time as a second grade teacher, but we do a lot about learning each other's names, and then we do a lot of these icebreakers, and I hate that term, but these sort of icebreaker things. And if I do that, if I spend one or two classes or parts of the first couple of weeks doing this kind of work, it makes a dramatic change in the outcomes of the studio. We get so much further with the work when students start to feel more comfortable with each other. There's that connection, particularly with freshmen, and I don’t know if any of you guys are freshmen. I think the internal narrative for the first eight weeks of the class, am I cool? Am I cool? Am I cool? And if I can say, yes, you're cool, and this is a welcoming space, then they feel that the anxiety goes down and the work gets better. I also bring in my dog and then also helps.

Ravana Gumm:

I think we didn't touch too much on the whole play 360. I kind of wanted to go back to that. I know we talked about my machine a lot. I thought the Play 360 concept was just very interesting to me. And that one you did find that from the ground up, correct?

Jonathan Racek:

I did. Yeah.

Ravana Gumm:

Yeah, I think that's so interesting. I know it's been highly successful. I saw there's been over 200 playgrounds built all around the world. What are the further goals with that program?

Jonathan Racek:

Sure, So I look at these things that I start, and in some ways they are design projects for me. So I try something out, I see if it works, and I incorporate the things that work and I get rid of the stuff that doesn't work. So it's been this sort of constant evolution of an idea or an organizational model. Right now, the way the organization is working is that since Covid when we couldn't travel anymore, what we have done is we recorded sort of our knowledge. It had been about 10 years since we'd been doing the playgrounds. We sort of recorded and documented all the knowledge that we had had up to that point. We made courses out of it online, and we started putting those courses out in the world. And so we call them Playmakers. And so people who are interested in building a playground, whether it's a teacher or a community member or a parent, they can take these courses. And the courses are about how do you get consensus with your community? How do you define a vision? How do you organize the build? How do you organize people and equipment, all that stuff? So they go through these courses, they learn how to design a playground, and then they make a proposal to us and they send the proposal to us. And if we think they've done the work and they're ready for it, we give them a pot of money. And so what's been great about it is it's taken the model from, again, the white guy showing up in an African village, trying to tell people how to build a playground into empowering community leaders to build playgrounds.

Ravana Gumm:

That's amazing. I'll pass it off to you now, Jack.

Jack McKiernan:

I was just going to ask you about the kind of impacts that the playgrounds have shown on these communities?

Jonathan Racek:

There's a couple different purposes. For the playgrounds. It simply provides a safe place for people to play. It is providing an opportunity for the community to improve things in their community, in their neighborhoods.There is, a lot of the playground equipment has an educational focus to it. So we create a curriculum that pairs with the playground equipment so the teachers can become better teachers and they can teach better. A lot of teachers kind of fall back on call and response type of teaching in some of the places where we work. And so this provides a way for kids to be, again, active learners and use the playground as an educational tool. And then we do other things like we do public health messaging. We always build a hand washing station. If you look at the facts from the UN, by simply washing your hands, you can prevent 40% of diarrhea. And the facts are incredible if you just wash your hands, so everyone out there wash your hands. Yeah, there's a lot of, we see the playground as this vehicle to do lots of different things. And again, that's evolved over time. And the beginning it was just, I'm building swings and I'm building some slides, and then over time, we're trying to address some of these other challenges that we see in these communities.

Jack McKiernan:

Yeah, that's great. How do you see the values of cross-pollination through these various disciplines that you work through?

Jonathan Racek:

Yeah, I'm kind of all over the place in some respects. Yeah, you really do a lot. I do a lot. I'm not sure how well I do them, but I think that the thread between all of it is this idea about using design as a means of problem solving, and that's why I've moved a little bit away from architecture. I find that this sort of human-centered design approach of having empathy for your user and defining the problem or understanding the problem really well, prototyping, testing, and then prototyping. I find that process to be really effective with solving kind of messy problems. Design can't do everything, obviously, but when we take the time and we talk to people and we understand where they're coming from, we have a much better understanding of the problem that we're trying to solve. And when we try little prototypes and tests we learn from those, that process yields great results. And so again, that's become kind of the cornerstone of, I think, everything that I do. All of it sort of ties back to that design process.

Jack McKiernan:

It seems like everything kind of comes back to your second grade teaching model.

Jonathan Racek:

It does. I don't know if I've ever said that aloud, but that being a second grade teacher might be the sort of foundational experience of it all.

Jack McKiernan:

How do you see the relevance or importance of consultancy work within your various fields?

Jonathan Racek:

My work as a consultant has been mostly about teaching the design thinking process in human-centered design. I've done work with companies and nonprofits that is really about advocating for this process. Years ago, I think before people like Steve Jobs design was sort of brought in at the end of a process and was used to make things look better, add some color, make the thing look better. What design thinking is done, in my opinion, is it's brought the design process to the beginning of this process. Whether you're talking about a product, you're talking about a service, you're talking about a system. Designers are now, not in every case, but in a lot of cases they are at the table from the very start. I always think about how much money and time has been wasted solving the wrong problem, because we don't understand the problem. So if we put that time in early, if we start talking to people, having interviews, having conversations like this, then we gain that understanding and we just come up with better solutions. So that's what I always try to try to convey to people I work with.

Ravana Gumm:

Touching back more on the central theme, which is polarity. How do you see polarity in the realm of design thinking and your work, either at Eskenazi or before that in your work with the things that we've discussed previously?

Jonathan Racek:

Sure. I would answer that question a couple of different ways. One, I think design, design thinking is ultimately optimistic. We are trying to solve problems. If you're really trying to solve problems, then you are not going to be entrenched in your own position. And that's where this idea of sort of understanding your user, understanding the problem is really important. This idea of empathy. So I'm in my design practice with my students. I'm asking them to write a statement from the position of the user, and that's all about empathy. So how does this user see the world or see the problem? I think that to me, teaching empathy and practicing empathy is a huge way for us to overcome some of these ideas of entrenched positions and polarity.

Carolyn Hadlock:

Awesome. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. This episode was created and produced at the IU Media School as part of the Beautiful Thinkers Podcast, IU edition. To follow along this season, check out the Beautiful Thinkers on Instagram and LinkedIn. Special thanks to Bella Grimaldi for our music and the students who researched and recorded this episode, Ravana Gumm, Kendyl Brown and Jack McKiernan.