An Immersive Semester in Design Thinking and Social Innovation

This SoTL Spotlight presentation will share the story of the development of an immersive semester program in design thinking and social innovation. Given permission to run the semester program on an experimental, pilot basis, we have many objectives that we’d like to achieve. At the broadest level, we want students to learn about design thinking—what it is, how it works, where it can be applied—and social innovation—ways to use design thinking to attack some of the systemic social problems faced by communities in our county, state, country, even world. At the pedagogic level, we’d like students, for the semester, to forget about concerns over grades; to focus on only one primary assignment instead of many disparate ones; to work in both community and lab environments--but not in a typical classroom; and to focus as much energy on identifying and defining important problems as they normally do on solving them.