In Melissa Butler's kindergarten class at Pittsburgh Allegheny K–5 school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, students spend a whole class period focused on one screw. With their small hands, each child holds it, examines it, sketches it, turns it around, and sketches it some more. The children rotate the screw to get different perspectives and see new angles. Each student feels the screw's intricacies, discusses its complexities, and notices that their neighbors' screws look slightly different than their own. For 25 minutes the students are focused and curious. At no point do they say that they are done with their screw or wonder what to look at next; as Melissa noted in a conversation following the class, they understand that “there's always more to see.”

Why spend an entire class period looking at a screw? Because in that 25 minutes of quiet exploration, two important shifts happen. First, students begin to understand that objects as seemingly simple as screws are actually remarkably complex. Second, they learn that the way one child sees a screw is not necessarily the way another child may see it. In Chapter Three we suggested that students' everyday environments often do not cue them to notice design. Exercises like this one—exercises that allow and value the time and space needed to sit with and reflect on an object—can help alert young people to the designed dimensions of their worlds.

Students in Melissa's class have been participating in the Children's Innovation Project. Cofounded by Melissa Butler and Jeremy Boyle in 2010, the Children's Innovation Project brings technology and circuitry into early childhood and elementary education. Children learn how electricity works and come to understand its language and symbolic systems. Yet the goal of these classroom visits is not merely for students to acquire inert knowledge about electricity. Instead, technology is introduced as a material through which young people can explore and interact with the world and recognize where and how they might be able to shape it. The exercise of looking at a screw is a starting point, laying important groundwork for young learners to recognize a world of design—a world of parts, wholes, sequences, and interactions. Whether looking at an object like a screw or exploring an entire electronic system, the experiences that the Children's Innovation Project offers are about encouraging curiosity and stimulating a desire to understand and engage with the world (Figure 4.1).

For Melissa and Jeremy, opportunities to look closely and explore the complexity of objects and systems are necessary to build a cohort of young people who are critical thinkers. Their work with the Children's Innovation Project provides a visible link between noticing design and fostering a sense of maker empowerment in their students. To attain this sense of maker empowerment it is critical for Melissa and Jeremy's students to be deeply curious about their environments. To understand a single screw is to spend ample time looking at it, exploring its parts, thinking about how other people might experience the screw, and situating the screw in the many systems it is a part of. As Jeremy noted, to understand a single screw is for a student to realize that “something like a screw is not just one thing, and the way that I may see it isn't necessarily the way it is.” As Jeremy described, understanding the multidimensionality of simple objects—and viewing them from multiple perspectives—helps students to “appreciate how other people see things.” Jeremy underscores the value for students in becoming aware “that everything is constructed, that every single thing around you is made and can be viewed from different perspectives. We would like the children we work with to know that all of the things around them have been constructed.” In this chapter we name the understanding of the constructed nature of the world that the Children's Innovation Project aims to support as having a sensitivity to design.

Developing a Sensitivity to Design in a Consumer-Driven World

The previous chapter posed the question: How might we help young people become sensitive to opportunities to activate their sense of maker empowerment? In other words, how can young people be encouraged to notice opportunities to build, tinker, hack, or re/design the objects and systems in their worlds? One answer is to encourage young people to see that their worlds are largely composed of objects and systems that have been designed, and that these designs can be tinkered with or entirely reimagined. This may seem easy to do. After all, young people engage with human-conceived and human-made objects and systems every day, so it seems natural that they would reflect on their form and function to some degree. But young people live within the same cultural climate that adults do—a climate that often seems to support consumer passivity and a disengagement from design. Many of the objects people use each day prevent them from understanding how they work; technological devices and programs think for us; the economy and efficiency of manufacturing inspires a throwaway, consumable relationship to stuff. Moreover, the fast-paced and fully scheduled nature of day-to-day life in the early 2000s leaves many of us with little time to look at the screw in the way that Jeremy and Melissa's students do. The result? A growing culture of consumerism that is becoming increasingly more distanced from the made dimensions of our worlds. Two factors that contribute to this distancing include the functional inaccessibility of contemporary gadgets and gizmos and a growing acceptance of life within a throwaway culture.

The Hidden Mechanics of Stuff

Many of the objects that people use today lack transparency. The slick shells of many of our favorite devices do not invite one to see how the parts hidden beneath them work. Consider the difference between typing on a contemporary laptop computer and using a traditional typewriter. On a typewriter, one can observe the process of hitting a key and watching a lever engage another lever to push a type hammer through a ribbon and strike a paper rolled around a platen, leaving a black letter in its wake (Figure 4.2). The carriage moves one space to the left, ensuring a fresh place on the paper on which to type. A screwdriver might be needed to remove the top shell of a typewriter in order to watch this happen, but the opportunity is made evident thanks to the use of standard screws. A laptop computer is another story. Not only is it difficult to discern how striking a keyboard results in letters appearing on a screen, but there is also no invitation to take a laptop apart. In other words, there is no obvious opportunity for one to get inside a computer to better understand how it works.

Of course, sometimes a smooth outer shell is part of the aesthetic design of an object—a choice intended to make it more visually appealing or pleasing to touch. And at other times an outer shell is in place for safety purposes—to protect curious fingers from the quick-moving mechanical parts inside. But when the means to peer underneath the shell of an object are intentionally obscured, an object can seem to be designed to keep the curious at bay. The technology company Apple has come under fire for this for years. With their smooth, seemingly impenetrable outer surfaces, Apple laptops, tablets, and smartphones have been called out for their intentionally designed lack of hackability. In fact, in 2014 Kyle Wiens, the cofounder and CEO of iFixit, an online repair community, noted that the newly released MacBook Pro with retina display was the “least repairable laptop we've ever taken apart.” He explained:

Not only is it difficult to engage with the internal workings of Apple products, but once inside it is also not an encouraging place for a novice to tinker, hack, or otherwise poke around to see how things work. To be fair, Apple often responds to the demands of the market. And in many cases, as Wiens later explained, the market's demand for the light, portable MacBook Air series (on which much of this book has been written) superseded consumers' interests in having access to the insides of their devices. As a result, the hidden inner workings of one's technological devices may squelch one's inclination to understand how gadgets and gizmos work.

But these obstacles to understanding the inner mechanics of things are not restricted to technology; they prevail with less tech-oriented objects as well. An example of the distant relationship many of us have with the inner workings of the stuff in our lives can be found in a 2013 TEDx talk conducted by Jennifer Oxman Ryan, a researcher on the Agency by Design team.² During Jennifer's talk she asked how many people in the audience had used a doorknob that day. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone had. Also not surprisingly, most had never asked themselves how a doorknob really works: How do the parts mesh together? What internal mechanisms allow the knob to turn and the latch assembly and tumbler to function properly? A doorknob is something many of us use several times a day, yet very few people take the time to look closely at the doorknobs in their worlds to better understand how they work.

Living in the Throes of a Throwaway Culture

Culturally, many of us have come to accept that electronics are consumable products with limited life spans rather than objects that invite tinkering or hacking. Swept up in a system of constantly changing accessories and ports (and new software releases that require more computing power), consumers are encouraged to replace their devices altogether rather than fix them or buy replacement parts when they crash or require increased capacity.

On a less technological level, even the mechanical products in our lives have become increasingly less hackable—and therefore less fixable. Rivets have replaced screws in household objects such as eggbeaters and stepladders, necessitating their replacement—in lieu of their repair—when they break. It is no surprise then, that two of the popular mantras associated with the maker movement are “Screws, not glues!” and “If you can't open it you don't own it, it owns you.”

In Things Come Apart, Todd McLellan's photography book celebrating the careful dissection of everyday objects, contributor Kyle Wiens called into question life within a throwaway culture. He argued that, rather than repair objects when they fail, the developed world tends to discard them. For Wiens, this move ends up “squandering the years of work and thought and mining and manufacturing that went into them.”³ Not trying to fix a thing by taking it apart precludes the people who use it from discovering how it was put together in the first place. Wiens continued by asking, “What happens when we do not know how things work? We are cut off, trapped in a modern wasteland where we can only try to solve problems with our credit cards rather than with our hands and brains.”⁴

Imagine the learning that would take place if one tried to fix a broken doorknob? One would have to take each piece apart, thereby revealing the interactions between the knob, tumbler, and latch. Although it may be easier to simply call a locksmith to do the work,⁵ there is much to learn by engaging in this process.

Of course, the flip side of this argument is that it is more efficient to go about one's daily business interacting with objects and systems that one may not fully understand. Sure, many of us may have a superficial understanding of how turning a knob on the stove can heat a burner, but how many of us really need to understand the ignition system at work inside? Does one really need to know how a vacuum cleaner works, or the physics involved in using a spray bottle? If one can successfully get through the day without having to understand how everything works, what is the problem? For Wiens, “Understanding the things we own allows us to do what we do best: solve problems.”⁶ Wiens's comment underscores the theory of maker empowerment: To understand how the designed components of the world work, and who and what they impact, is to be able to activate a sense of agency, to assert control over the environment so that one may assume an active rather than a passive role in life.

Having this sense of agency, of course, requires noticing design in the first place. Like adults, young people have no lack of opportunity to engage with design: From the sneakers they wear each day to lunch boxes they carry to school, and from the books they use in the classroom to the cell phones they use to text and chat, students are surrounded by human-designed stuff. But unless young people are provided with opportunities to notice and think about these designs, they may not become alert to the complexity of the made dimensions of their worlds (Figure 4.3).

What Is a Sensitivity to Design?

So what does it mean to develop a sensitivity to design? Perhaps the first place to start is to define the word design. On the surface, the term is straightforward: This book has used the word numerous times so far, and chances are you have always known what is meant. A laptop, a chair, a doorknob, a cell phone—these are all recognizably designed objects. But what makes them so?

Our Project Zero colleague David Perkins has thought deeply about this question, and in his book, Knowledge as Design, he explained design this way:

This explanation of design is elegant in both its expansiveness and precision. It accommodates designs intended for one purpose and created by one person, as well as designs whose structures are brought into being by many people and whose purposes are emergent rather than intentional. Although Perkins did not spell it out in the previous excerpt, elsewhere in the book he makes it clear that designs often have many purposes, just as they often have many parts and many authors. The core characteristic that unites the huge range of objects and systems that qualify as design is that they all have at least some non-random element that has been shaped to serve a purpose. As Perkins points out, a design is not  “a regular pattern that serves no particular purpose, as in ripples on sand dunes.”⁸ His example refers to the aesthetically pleasing features that occur in the world by chance, but the point extends to any features that occur without purpose. Like the ripples on a sand dune, a random heap of trash is not a design, though many of the items within the heap may well be.

With David Perkins's definition of design as a backdrop, we return again to the question of what it means to have a sensitivity to design. We offer the following definition:

There are two parts to this definition, and each deserves explanation. The first part, being attuned to the designed dimension of objects and systems, builds on Perkins's definition of design to suggest that a sensitivity to design means noticing the made aspect of things—how the parts and pieces of things fit together and are adapted to serve certain purposes. The second part of the definition, understanding that the designed world is malleable, emphasizes the importance of being aware that it is possible for designs to be reimagined or repurposed to be different than they are. This last point is especially important in the context of maker-centered learning because it connects to the sense of agency that maker educators are so keen to develop in their students: Understanding that a design is malleable means that it is possible to envision changing it.

Throughout contemporary Western culture, designs are in plain sight everywhere one looks—from the dwellings we live in to the form of government we live under to the clothes we wear. So even if one were to acknowledge that a sensitivity to design is a good thing to have, it is reasonable to ask why it is necessary to cultivate it: Doesn't a sensitivity to design just come about as a matter of course? Part of the answer to this question has already been suggested earlier in this chapter. Precisely because designs are so ubiquitous, they often seem invisible. In the fast pace of everyday life many of us rarely stop to notice the designs we use, let alone consider how they work or how they are made. Moreover, the slick outer surfaces of some contemporary designs are often intended to keep the curious from probing their inner workings. And our consumer culture, with its throwaway approach to goods, discourages us from fixing things when they are broken and thus learning about design through tinkering and repair.

Still, it is possible to argue that maker-centered learning addresses this problem because students' attention is directed to design through the very act of making. Building a chair, mending a knapsack, creating a book distribution system—these are all activities that require attention to design. But while it is true that maker activities require students to pay attention to design in the moment, it is less clear that they encourage students to transfer this sensitivity to new contexts.

In this respect, maker-centered classroom activities are not all that different from other school-based activities. Recall the notion of maker empowerment put forth in the previous chapter. It proposed that maker empowerment is an important goal of maker-centered learning and that it is a dispositional goal, in that it emphasizes a way of seeing and being in the world rather than a discrete set of skills. The chapter discussed the concept of maker empowerment in the context of a larger theory of dispositional behavior that described dispositions as being activated by the coalescence of three factors: the ability to act in a certain way, the inclination to do so, and the sensitivity to occasions when such actions are called for.

The chapter further pointed out that the reason sensitivity is a special challenge in educational contexts is because classroom activities tend to function as a substitute for sensitivity. For example, consider an in-school maker-centered learning class in which students are learning to make soft circuitry clothing—scarves and hats and shirts that glimmer with LED lights and emit sounds as they move. With a bit of instruction and the right materials, students will easily be able to make these things (ability). And they will probably enjoy the work and be motivated to engage in it (inclination). But the very fact that the class exists and that the activity has been explicitly offered up to students as a learning opportunity removes the need for students to find the opportunity on their own.

This is perfectly natural in a school setting. To an extent, it is one of the main purposes of school—to engage students in learning activities that they might not naturally engage in otherwise. But it means that attention to sensitivity does not necessarily get addressed in school. The counterargument, of course, is that it does not need to be addressed, because as long as school does a good job of teaching (and testing) students' ability to do certain things—calculate the volume of a cube, interpret a poem, build a chair—students will naturally see opportunities to transfer these abilities on their own, right?

Well, maybe. But not reliably, which is what the research on dispositions has shown: Students often have both the ability to use certain skills and the inclination to do so, but simply do not notice occasions to do so. These findings are consistent with a larger body of educational research on the transfer of knowledge that shows that people transfer knowledge from one context to another far less frequently than might be expected.⁹ This is one of the reasons that students may perform well on tests but do not necessarily think to use their test-cued knowledge in the flow of everyday life.

To sum up, the argument for why we as educators should pay attention to cultivating students' sensitivity to design is, first, that maker empowerment, which is a broad goal of maker-centered learning, is a dispositional outcome. Second, like any disposition, it is activated when three elements coalesce—ability, inclination, and sensitivity. Third, sensitivity to design is the specific brand of sensitivity that is relevant to maker empowerment. In other words, to feel empowered to change the world through making, one has to first notice that the objects and systems of daily life are designs—that is, that they are structures adapted to purposes—and that because they are designs, they could possibly be made differently. Fourth, formal instructional settings tend to stand in for sensitivity, so students do not necessarily learn how to notice occasions to activate their abilities outside of specialized contexts. To be sure, maker activities are often vivid, fun, and intrinsically engaging. And because they may be more memorable than drier school subjects, they may do a better job of cuing students to transfer their maker abilities to new contexts. But everything we know about dispositional behavior suggests that we ought not to count on students developing a sensitivity to design as a matter of course without taking a closer look.

How Are Students Sensitive (or Not) to Design?

An interesting fact about cultivating a sensitivity to anything—design included—is that a lot can be accomplished by simply asking people to be alert to things they may otherwise not notice. For example, suppose someone challenged you to notice all the insects that crossed your path on your daily walk to work. Just by shifting your attention a little bit you would almost certainly notice lots of ants and flies and spiders you had not seen before. In this spirit, the Agency by Design research team wanted to know what students would simply notice on their own if they were explicitly asked to notice the designs around them.

To explore this question, in 2012 our research team collaborated with a group of educators in Oakland, California. The goal of this particular strand of inquiry was to better understand what students noticed, and also what they did not notice, about the designed dimensions of their worlds. To find out, our teacher partners asked their students to go on a design hunt in and around their schools. They framed the task like this: Write down anything you notice that has been designed by people. You may write a list or describe what you see or draw a picture.

Of course this was a very open-ended task: As one student noted, “That's going to be everything, like a million things, everywhere.” And in fact, students noticed many, many designed objects: trash cans, staplers, coffee mugs, backpacks, glasses, lunchboxes, gardens, sneakers. This may seem like a simple, if not obvious, finding. But it was interesting to note what students' lists did not include. During the design hunt, almost no one wrote about or drew the lunch line, the sidewalk they used to get to school, the arrival or dismissal process, or the fire drill system. Students easily noticed designed objects, but they did not seem to notice designed systems.

Of course, students did not entirely overlook the designed systems in their environments. One student, for example, identified a computer game as a designed string of data. Nonetheless, despite the rare examples of students noticing designed systems, what we came to understand was that when asked to notice design most students focused their attention on objects.

This curious finding made us wonder what would happen if students were explicitly prompted to notice the systems in their worlds. So, in a second exercise, our teacher partners asked their students to go on another design hunt but this time to choose one designed item they noticed earlier and think about the kinds of systems that it might be a part of. As it turned out, students were very good at thinking about designed systems when prompted to do so. Indeed, some of their observations were quite nuanced. As an example, here is the story of Nala, a twelfth-grade student at Oakland International High School.¹⁰

In her initial design hunt, Nala identified her personal computer as a designed object. In the second activity, she identified her computer as being an object situated within broader systems. Nala described various primary systems such as the Internet, subsystems such as social media platforms, and broader super systems such as networked communication between people, and she did this while recognizing that a computer is a system composed of the various subsystems (e.g., hardware components and software applications) that make it work. Notably, her ideas about systems went beyond unidirectional causality (i.e., A causes B which then causes C, and so on…), which might be expected to be the most common way to think about systems. Rather, simply by being prompted to think about systems, Nala seemed to surface the many layers, complex interactions, and intricacies associated with designed systems.

Though Nala was a senior in high school at the time of this exercise, we also found that even quite young children were able to see and describe the designed dimension of systems. For example, one kindergarten student at Emerson Elementary School described the designed properties of an apple pie and provided a drawn narrative of the systems involved in transforming apples into dessert. Yet another student honed in on the role of a trashcan (a designed object) and told a linear narrative about the trashcan's journey to the dump (a designed system).

This informal experiment, in which students conducted first a design hunt and then followed it up with a systems hunt, suggested to us that students of all ages are able to think about the design of objects and of systems with nuance and depth. We are by no means the first educators to notice this. For instance, veteran systems educator Linda Booth Sweeney has written extensively about this topic, noting that even preschool-aged children can understand the general concept of systems.¹¹ Our work intends to expand on earlier articulations of young people's ability to understand complex systems by first drawing attention to the idea that activating students' capacity to notice the designed dimensions of objects and systems may simply require some explicit provocation, and second by suggesting that learning to notice systems as designs is an important part of developing a sensitivity to design. That systems can be hard to pick out from the flow of everyday life as designs is easy to understand. After all, the objects many of us engage with each day are themselves systems that are composed of subsystems that are also situated within greater supersystems. Nala's experience illustrates this point. A computer is a system composed of subsystems, which is also situated within the greater supersystems that Nala identified. It is hard to put boundaries around a system, but it is well worth trying to do so because of the understanding it yields, as Nala's story illustrates. Helping learners discern systems and explore them as designs has been a rich throughline in the work of Agency by Design, and in the next chapter we offer several examples of what this looks like in practice. But first, a few more words about cultivating a sensitivity to design.

Seeing the Designed World as Malleable

Recall the first part of the definition of sensitivity to design offered earlier, which emphasized the importance of being attuned to the designed dimension of objects and systems. The design hunt and systems hunt described above both speak to this part of the definition by showing what students can notice simply by being asked. This is important because it gives us a baseline by which to think of educational interventions. The second part of the definition emphasized understanding that the designed world is malleable. To bring this aspect of sensitivity to design into relief we take a different tack and offer two examples from the adult world. The first comes from one of Agency by Design's Oakland-based teacher partners; the second comes from the work of the Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza.

When Tatum Omari first joined up with Agency by Design, she was a teacher at the North Oakland Community Charter School. Along with other teacher collaborators in the area, Tatum participated in workshops and did activities with her students that involved noticing, and hacking, the designs of objects and systems. After several months of avid and inspired involvement with the program, Tatum shared the following story—a story of parenting, design awareness, system hacking, and the true value of seeing the world through the lens of maker empowerment.

Having arrived at her daughter's first day of soccer practice, Tatum noticed that, though she had remembered shin guards and socks, her daughter was wearing sparkly party shoes instead of sneakers. She described the utter feeling of disappointment, aware of the inevitability of having let her daughter down. Rather than abandoning the practice, or running to the nearest store for new kicks, Tatum did a quick on-the-field assessment of her situation: “Maybe the sparkly party shoes are different from most?” she asked herself. “Maybe she could run in them?” A quick test sprint by her daughter told a different story, as “both shoes flew off before she took her third step.” But rather than panic, that is when the systems redesigning began. As Tatum explained:

In this vignette, Tatum was able to quickly solve a problem by slowing down and critically analyzing her situation. At first pass, having her daughter participate in soccer practice wearing sparkly flats that would not stay on seemed a fairly risky endeavor. However, Tatum took the time to explore the design of her daughter's practice clothes. She noticed the details and nuances of each element and also how the components worked together. She paused for looking, reflecting, and gaining an understanding of how she might problem-solve without purchasing new gear or abandoning the situation. Securing the sparkly flats with the strap of the shin guards allowed for a reconceptualized system that would not result in a flyaway shoe.

Tatum tells a playful story, but the message is absolutely on point: Maker empowerment is about seeing the designed world as malleable and not being subject to the constraints of a particular situation. By being attuned to design it is possible to see opportunity to effect change, or in Tatum's case, to solve a problem with a simple hack.

Far removed from Tatum's dilemma with sparkly shoes on the soccer field, Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza's concept of technological disobedience provides a quite different example of what it means to see the designed world as malleable.¹³ Oroza's technological disobedience project offers a curated collection of repurposed objects created in Cuba during a time of economic turmoil. As he has described, beginning in the 1960s the Cuban government became increasingly more isolated from the industrialized world and, as a result of U.S. embargoes, began to experience an immense decline in new technology and equipment entering the island nation. As a result, Cubans needed to find a way to work against a system that was not working for them—and learn to make the vehicles, appliances, and electronics of everyday life by themselves. “From the endless, ongoing restoration of the iconic 1950s Buicks to the creation of baby toys made from milk cans and dried beans,” Oroza explained, “fabricating goods not officially available on the island became an essential skill.”¹⁴

Typical artifacts borne of this time included TV antennas created from aluminum food trays, electric lighters built of pens and light bulbs, shoe polishers and key cutters fashioned from old dryer motors, and battery rechargers constructed from the electronic components stripped from old radios. As Oroza explained:

Cubans became master hackers as they became further independent from the singular purposes and limited life spans of the Western-made devices decaying all around them. In addition to the ingenuity expressed by many Cubans during this time, Oroza also explained that, through the process of becoming master hackers, many Cubans developed a sensitivity to design and a new way of seeing the objects and systems in the world that fueled their maker empowerment:

As ingenious as the Cubans' hacked-together inventions were, it is important to note that the sensitivity to design expressed by Cubans was not only limited to objects. In the wake of the country's revolution and the onset of Fidel Castro's communist regime, Cubans also became sensitive to the design of the government structure which thrust so many of them into poverty. “The technological disobedience—which the revolution promoted as an alternative to the country's stalled productive sector,” Oroza explained, “became the most reliable resource for Cubans to navigate the inefficiencies of the state political system.”¹⁷ In this way, Cubans were hacking not only their old Buicks, lunch trays, and aerosol canisters but also a system of oppression.

It is startling to think how the Cuban practice of technological disobedience contrasts with the concept of planned obsolescence that is so pervasive throughout contemporary Western culture. From early marketing strategies designed to convince consumers of the need to frequently replace objects big and small to product models that are explicitly designed to have a limited life span, the industrialized world's history of consumerism has long devalued the notion of objects having longevity and sustainability. A cultural climate of readily made one-off objects, of disposable goods, of consumerism, of a non–fix-it mentality, work to suppress the inclination to notice, let alone tinker with, the many designed objects and systems so many of us engage with everyday. But as Tatum's soccer kit scenario and the Cuban practice of technological disobedience illustrate, by developing a sensitivity to design and seeing the world as malleable, it is possible to acquire a more maker-empowered worldview.

As we have discussed, the many maker educators and thought leaders we have had the privilege to speak with over the past several years have endeavored to do just that: to help their students see themselves as the makers of their experiences, not just consumers of the objects and systems they interact with on a daily basis; to feel they have the capacity and the right to tinker with the designed dimensions of their worlds.

In this chapter we have made the case that an important part of developing students' overall sense of maker empowerment is cultivating their sensitivity to design. In the next chapter, we offer a practical instructional framework for doing so, a suite of cognitive tools to support the framework's core components, and examples of the framework in action.