Gretchen Schneider, August’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, taught architecture at Smith College before opening her own practice in Boston.

When was the last time you really looked around during your daily routine?

I’ll start this blog with a few thoughts on design literacy. “Bo-ring,” you say. Or maybe you say, “Huh?” By “design literacy,” I really just mean being conscious of the built world that we live in. Design literacy (at least by my definition) means seeing relationships among rooms and buildings and landscapes, and understanding the connections among how we move through them, how we use them, and how we enjoy them (or not). We should understand that design at all scales—whether it’s the shape of a countertop or the siting of a road—is the result of a whole bunch of people making a whole bunch of decisions. Put another way, we all share an opportunity to improve our built world.

I’ve just finished directing a summer program for high-school students that introduced 70 kids to architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design. When the students began, “design” to them meant a look, an aesthetic, a style. Design was something that might be bought. Right?

Wrong. Mass media plays into this misperception: Target showcases “design,” whereas Wal-Mart does not. A Frank Gehry building—the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center—is the result of “design,” whereas our regular homes and offices and classrooms are not. Or at least that’s what many of these students believed.

Our first step with the high-school students—as with any introductory architecture students—is to encourage them to step back and take a long, slow look at the world around them. We ask them to become conscious of their daily routine and the spaces and places in it, and then to recognize what things define these experiences: materials, textures, patterns; roofs, walls, trees. We remind them that at some point, someone made a decision to place each one of those things there.

The second step requires an attitude shift. Students come full of preconceived notions about what chairs, houses, parks, or neighborhoods should be—notions grounded in their experience of their own worlds. This direct experience makes design literacy both fantastically easy and enormously difficult to study and teach. While we ask students to observe their surroundings carefully, we also ask them to challenge what they know, and imagine a world they can’t yet see. Thinking about the built world from a designer’s perspective forces one to ask, “Why is this house“—or this park or this chair—“this way?” Then one must describe how else it might be. That’s an open-ended question, of course. Many students struggle with questions that are open-ended, because so much of their education is not.

In step three, the students dive in and design chairs, houses, and landscapes. In each project, students have “clients” with their own needs and personalities; the students also wrestle with materials, time, structure, technical skill, and other team members (many projects are collaborative projects) as they attempt to create designs that will improve and inspire.

These kids have been surrounded by buildings, interiors, and landscapes their entire lives, yet most never have noticed the inherent design of them. It never ceases to amaze me how much we all blindly move through the built world and never really notice it. This isn’t a generational thing—I’ve worked with 60-year-olds as well as 16-year-olds, tenured professors as well as high-school students. When students really begin to look, it’s like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of black and white and into Technicolor.—Gretchen Schneider