Lessons from SXSWedu & SCUP: Be a Maverick of Design Thinking

UNL Innovation Lab, Image © Gensler

Epistemological agility is a term that Luis Rico-Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Design at Iowa State University, defines as the ability to frame questions from different experiential points of view. This agility is something that he hopes the campus’s future Student Innovation Center will promote – helping all disciplines to rediscover design as a vehicle for solving problems.

As a champion of design thinking, Luis has counterparts across an increasing number of institutions who are infusing academia with this culture that promotes innovation, leverages entrepreneurial skills, and simply tries to connect smart minds with some of the world’s toughest problems.

This spring, I’ve had the privilege to engage with several of these leaders to better understand the real drivers that define what it is exactly that they’re trying to achieve and how they’ve actually done it successfully. Common across all of the institutions these leaders represent is a recognition of a strong culture that is already in place around design thinking and innovation and a subsequent move towards building facilities and expanding the curriculum to better support that culture.

So how do these leaders define and utilize design thinking, and how are they harnessing this tool to drive bigger initiatives at their institutions?

At SXSWedu in March, David Schonthal joined our workshop team, led by myself and Patricia Nobre, in a session on design thinking and its impact on the design of learning spaces. He defines this cyclical process as such:

• Learn about the world.
• Have some ideas.
• Make the ideas real.

And he employs this method in multiple contexts across his work – as a business design leader at IDEO, as part of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and as one of the co-founders of the med-tech incubator here in Chicago called MATTER. This process he describes seems fairly simple, and yet it requires a set of tasks that can seem counterintuitive and uncomfortable: “Learn about the world” really means empathize with the perspective of someone else; “Have some ideas” requires deferring judgment on those ideas; and “Make the ideas real” pares down the prototype to be something that simply solves a defined problem.

The key takeaway here is that design thinking is a method that can be employed by anyone, given the right context and support systems. So how can this method – this epistemological agility – be applied more broadly as a tool for learning?

To underscore this breadth of design thinking, we led an exercise as part of our SXSWedu workshop that asked each group - primarily comprised of educators - to design a school from scratch in 30 minutes. Seemingly a tall order, the teams not only applied these design thinking principles to the task at hand, but the results presented by each team also revealed ideas that utilized design thinking as a learning tool: learning by doing, challenge-based exercises, utilizing the broader community as a resource. Education is clearly ripe to embrace this method, but finding ways to genuinely embody these principles takes a great deal of discipline and a willingness to unwittingly advocate for them.

The Garage at Northwestern, Image: Garrett Rowland.

As an engineering faculty member at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Shane Farritor is employing these themes, both in his teaching and in leading the Nebraska Innovation Studio on the campus. It’s an environment that embodies the cyclical process of design thinking that David describes, and Shane especially underscores the importance of the pared-down prototype. One of his recent students developed the “Potbot”’ – intended for those people who wish to leave the tiresome task of stirring pasta to a bowl with a robotic arm. Whether or not this particular idea is a good one isn’t all that important, but it is tremendously important that students have this place where they can test out that idea and understand whether it works.

Shane was part of a panel* I moderated at a recent SCUP symposium along with Luis Rico-Gutierrez, Kevin Truman of UMKC, and Tom Pensabene from Metro Community College (MCC). The panel focused on how each of them has championed facilities that support a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation on their respective campuses – a culture that employs design thinking at its core.

As much as these phenomena have been lauded as the way of the future in education, it is striking to see what a Herculean undertaking it is to integrate design-thinking systemically. In an institutional environment that isn’t necessarily risk-averse but risk-aware, successful implementation requires that a leader be cognizant of the systems that are in place while finding new ways to utilize them to bolster initiatives and build new facilities.

Kevin spoke about his goal to “slather innovation and entrepreneurship across the campus,” helping to bring together siloed groups and reach out to the already robust surrounding KC community of artists, entrepreneurs, researchers, and civic organizations to form partnerships and alliances. To that end, Kevin’s previous work in building innovative programs on UMKC’s campus has buttressed his efforts to bring together myriad stakeholders to support the future Free Enterprise Center. And engaging these stakeholders will be key to achieving the diversity and vibrancy of the activities that take place in this new facility.

The operational model for MCC’s Center for Advanced Learning & Technology that Tom leads relies heavily on outside entities – primarily corporate companies – for the programming while providing the necessary support system that would appeal to large corporations. Essentially, the facility, into which Tom says ‘you can drive a Mac truck’, provides a shell for companies to use for a period of time to do workforce training for students to the point that they are hirable. This model allows for a continual cycle of new equipment and knowledgeable staff to operate within the facility, which in turn cuts down on the risks associated with rapid obsolescence in technology, maintenance, and skill sets.

As a champion of these facilities, “you have to be somewhat of a maverick,” Tom says, identifying how to harness existing systems to effect change. “When you break from old processes, you are creating new risks.”

So what can we learn from these leaders in driving this culture? While its evolution on campuses has been primarily bottom-up, those people who possess a real understanding of the culture, along with the wherewithal to implement it systemically can be the mavericks - the carefully-calibrated disruptors who can gradually make this culture mainstream in education. And to take it one step further, we as designers can be co-disruptors to make this change possible through the design of space. So whether you are an educator, a designer, a student, an entrepreneur, maybe each of us can find the maverick in ourselves. We need more of them.

*Full panelist titles from the North Central Regional SCUP Symposium held April 27th 2016 at the University of Nebraska-Omaha: Luis Rico-Gutierrez, Dean, College of Design, Iowa State University; Shane Farritor, PhD, Professor, College of Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Kevin Truman, PhD, F.ASCE, Vice Provost, University of Missouri-Kansas City and Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering, and Thomas Pensabene, Executive Director of the Workforce Innovation Division at Metropolitan Community College.

Meghan is a senior associate in Gensler's Chicago office. She has a broad range of experience across the country and overseas in every phase of the architecture and construction process, and she draws on this experience when thinking about new and inventive ways for buildings to broaden the lives of the end-users. Contact her at meghan_webster@gensler.com.