Ben Shapiro gives examples of bridges between design and education and gives some first looks at what happens when these two spheres come together. The conclusion? Design and education need each other and are both better for it. Check out the full talk below.

Way to go Ben!

DFA Vanderbilt is excited to provide updates on our development, projects, event highlights, and accomplishments of a highly successful inaugural year!  What began last year as a few students passionate about bringing design to a campus without a traditional design school has developed into a core studio of 20 undergraduate and graduate students and a ‘skills team’ of many other students from across Vanderbilt.  Moreover, faculty mentors from across the University including from Vanderbilt’s schools of engineering, education, business and medicine have demonstrated strong support for our passion and vision while our studio projects have allowed us to meet, connect and work with multiple community partners.

Our new studio leaders for next year are Matt Cooley, Kara Sherrer, Eunice Jun, Gerti Bernstein, Lucy Rahner, Nathan Chan, Clare Healy and Harvey Burrell.  Additionally, we are excited that leaders emeritus Ben Shapiro, Guy Kopsombut, Allyson Patterson, Haley Nesmith and Taylor Dickinson will continue to provide additional support on campus and in the Nashville community.

2012-2013 Event Highlights

• DFA Vandy hosts SparkTruck
• DFA Vandy participates in Nashville’s Parking Day
• DFA pre-screens the film Extreme by Design
• DFA Sustainability Team winner of Vanderbilt Green Fund, $15,000
• DFA Vandy hosts Vanderbilt Innovation Center Design Workshop
• DFA Vandy participates in Nashville’s Creator Workday
• Future DFA leader Kara Sherrer featured in USA Today College
• DFA leader Ben Shapiro presents at TEDx Furman on behalf of DFA
• DFA Vandy featured in an international partnership with the University of Melbourne (Australia) on the Design of Learning Spaces.
• DFA students help with DFA faculty advisor David Owen’s Massive Online Course (MOOC), Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations.
• DFA creates first 3D banner for the Vanderbilt Homecoming Banner Competition

2012-2013 Project List 

Sustainability on Campus (Continuing next year)

Members: Taylor Dickinson, Matt Cooley, Drew Martin, Julie Schnur, Nathan Chan

The Sustainability team observed numerous students and activities to identify an array of ‘problem areas’ pertaining to energy usage, recycling and overall sustainability on campus.  They were awarded $15,000 from the Vanderbilt Green Fund to implement some of their strategies next year at Vanderbilt.

Access to Instruments (Continuing next year)

Members: Ben Shapiro, Drew Martin, Matt Cooley, Lucy Rahner, Julie Schnur, Syndey Waitz-Kudla

Through multiple interviews, personal experiences, and user observation, the Access to Instruments team realized that despite Nashville’s tremendous music community and efforts to promote music in schools, many students do not have access to instruments and opportunities to practice and improve their skills. The team is currently working on a number of guitar prototypes to provide students with a portable and engaging way to practice music on the move, at home, or on school buses. The team is attempting to connect their design prototypes with learning theory and is partnering with Vanderbilt’s Peabody School of Education to develop novel ways to approach guitar and music learning.

Classroom Experience Team (Continuing next year)

Members: Allyson Patterson, Gerti Bernstein, Eunice Jun, Ruoquin Wang, Hui Liu, Wenjing Luo, Belinda Chen, Patricia Twilley

The Classroom Experience team focused on the physical learning environments of college students. They surveyed and observed many Vanderbilt students from all disciplines to analyze and prototype new ideas for physical classroom environments.

International Student Transition to Campus

Members: Xiao Wang, Joy Cheng, Hui Liu, Suzy Wang

This team, comprised of many international students, focused on international students’ transition to U.S. college campuses.  They identified that ordering food was an extremely difficult process for many international students entering college campuses and reimagined support systems to help these students better understand the process of ordering and buying food in the U.S.

Arts Education (Continuing next year)

Members: Guy Kopsombut, Kara Sherrer, Dana Zemel, Justine Ker

This team is exploring improved professional development programs for students interested in creative careers. Two arts education teams will continue work on connecting the strong Nashville arts community with arts education on the Vanderbilt campus.

Recycling

Members: Haley Nesmith, Ashley Kimery, Eliz Ayaydin

The DFA Recycling team designed a new recycling container for Vanderbily residence halls to increase students’ recycling rates. Currently, they are working to secure funding to build and implement their designs on campus.

2012-2013 Key DFA Supporting Faculty

• Professor David Owens
  • DFA Faculty Advisor, Professor for the Practice of Management and Innovation, Faculty Director, VU Accelerator-Summer Business Institute
• Professor Doug Fisher
  • Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Associate Professor of Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
• Professor Rogers Hall
  • Professor and Chair, Dept. of Teaching & Learning 
• Pratim Sengupta
  • Assistant Professor, Dept. of Teaching & Learning, Director – Mind, Media & Matter Lab 
• Karen Weikert
  • User Experience and Information Architect Strategist and Educator 
• Elizabeth Lingo
  • Director, Creative Campus Initiative and the Curb Programs in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership 
• Andrea Jacobs
  • Oasis Center

More to come as we wrap up our year and prepare for what looks to be a fantastic year for DFA and DFA Vanderbilt in 2013-2014!

All the best,

DFA Vandy

This fall, we were lucky enough to host fellow DFA rockstars from RISD/Brown, Cornell, Barnard/Columbia and Virginia Tech for the East Coast Meet-Up! Projects were shared, friendships were formed, and mockup-tionary was played for three straight days. It was an incredible experience to see this sprawling, abstract DFA network turn into a real, living community where we can share ideas and get to know each other. Every studio has a different take on the design process, and hearing it reinterpreted in the context of each school changed how many of us look at design.

In other news, we also have three new studio leads!

Meet Paul Singer, all the way from Connecticut. Paul is our resident Econ major and clarinet-bro extraordinaire. We could write a whole separate post about Paul’s many talents, but suffice to say that squash is first and foremost.

Next-up, we have Amy Ho, representing New Jersey.  Amy is a Chemical Engineering major with an interest in Energy Policy. She’s also in an Indian a cappella group and is known to make cat noises when provoked.

Last but not least is Ben Weiner, brining some Midwestern charm from Cincinnati. Ben is studying Physics, and is so dedicated to design that he watched the whole Helvetica documentary over spring break. He also writes about start-ups, labor unions, and China for a campus political magazine.

Without further ado, the moment you’ve all been waiting for – here are our fabulous projects:

Battery Recycling: “How can we encourage people to recycle their batteries?”

We are currently working on two initiatives: an easy-to-use and elegant battery-collection device that sorts and stores used batteries until they are shipped to recycling facilities, and an educational video that takes viewers through the process of battery recycling and its environmental impact.

Bike Team: “How can we create a sustainable biking culture at Yale?”

The Bike Team is working to promote a safe and sustainable biking culture at Yale and in New Haven. Our current project is a partnership with the Creative Arts Workshop and local businesses creating bike racks to be placed around the city. 

BluSense: “How can we make users more aware of the resources they are using?”

Our project aims to use a data-driven psychological approach to integrate personal and social awareness into a program for modifying behavior. We’re building a device to provide users with instantaneous feedback about water usage in order to change the way they think about resource consumption.

Urban Environment:  “How can make New Haven Residents proud of their city and improve the atmosphere of the city?”

The DFA Yale Urban Environment Team is looking to integrate agriculture and greenery in New Haven’s overwhelmingly gray atmosphere. In doing so, the team hopes to make New Haven residents more self-sufficient and more proud of their city.

Ergonomics: “How can we promote healthier posture in on-campus laptop use?”

The Ergonomic Team identified laptops as a key contact point for improving posture and preventing chronic health problems. In keeping with the spirit of creating the biggest impact with the smallest change, we started a lapdesk loaner program at our library and are currently working to promote it and increase awareness of the issue.

It hasn’t all been action-packed meet-ups and glamorous lapdesks, though; design isn’t easy, and neither is managing a bunch of designers. We hope that by sharing our pitfalls, other people can learn from them (or at least be able to commiserate).

Lessons Learned:

1)     Fail early and often! I think this is pretty standard DFA fare, but we didn’t commit to it as fully as we could have. We structured the year so that most of first semester was spent doing research and scoping, which is great, but a lot of the teams lost steam by the time we got into second semester. Next year, we’re going to push people to prototype and test their ideas earlier.

2)     Know thineself (and thine jobs)! We had issues delegating tasks efficiently this year, so we want to make the job descriptions of our leadership board more concrete and specific. Communicating with other members of the leadership team is essential, and it’s much easier when everyone understands what they’re supposed to be doing.

3)     Consistency is key! We spent a lot of time moving meetings around this year, which made it difficult to get all of our members out to events consistently. Starting next year, we’re doing a weekly meeting at the same time and place so that people always know what to expect and can plan accordingly.

After experimenting with a few different models, we’ve finally settled on the idea of Saturday Studio Time.  We want to create a high-energy, collaborative environment, and bringing all the teams together in one space has been the best way to do this for us. It also fosters more of a studio-wide culture and keeps teams apprised of each other’s progress, two areas we’re trying to improve.

All that being said, it’s been a truly phenomenal year, and we’re looking forward to one-upping it in the fall! We’re excited to be part of DFAmily, and looking forward to hearing from everyone else.

This is DFA Yale, signing out.

Could you share with us a little about yourself as a filmmaker?

I spent most of my career as a print journalist and worked with several national magazines and was with the Wall Street Journal for ten years. My interest in filmmaking took off through my concern about climate change, as I felt that journalists and scientists weren’t truly getting through with the issues at hand. I quit journalism and went on to attend film school.

Through Extreme by Design, I hope to help spark the design movement and broaden it to embrace social enterprise, the engineering profession, and anybody who is interested in science, technology, and art.

How did you get involved in this project?

I made educational films at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While working there, I heard about the course called Design for Extreme Affordability and saw the potential for a great documentary. The prototypes are visual, the students travel overseas, and the design thinking process was something totally new and fascinating to me. I audited the six-month-long course cycle at Stanford and was with students from various disciplines including studies of science, medicine, business, design, and more.

By the end of the course, I was smitten by the design process and drawn into the spirit and fearlessness of those students as they work as designers and social entrepreneurs. I would personally consider them heroes in what they do.

How did you get connected to Design for America?

The Stanford d.school (Institute of Design at Stanford) has helped me to connect to student populations, and one of the organizations that they thought was particularly good was DFA. My initial goal was to have as many screenings of Extreme by Design as possible to people who might already interested in the subject matter. I proposed this idea to Liz Gerber and Sami Nerenberg of DFA and it was immediately embraced – we planned to organize screenings with all of the DFA studios at various universities.

With each screening, the film has been streamed online via Vimeo, and I would engage in a Q and A session through Skype at the end. That’s been a lot of fun. It has also been like market testing for me with friendly focus groups through DFA.

What’s been some of the response towards the film?

I have heard that the film helps to explain this broader concept of design, especially to the many people who are not familiar with it or those who thought of it as limited to just industrial design. Many at the DFA studios feel that it is a helpful intro or method of recruitment to new people; it propels them into thinking about what they might like to do with design. Overall, people report that they feel inspired by the film and by the strong, relatable characters.

What plans do you have moving forward?

PBS will broadcast the film later this year, which is very exciting.

In order to reach people from ages 12-25, we’ve created what we call the Watch + Design workshop – we developed with educational partners at the Stanford d.school. So far, we’ve run various versions of the workshop a dozen times for 350 students, parents and teachers in the Bay Area, Atlanta and Portland.

The Watch + Design workshop uses the film cut into three parts, and there are four design thinking steps (Frame, Imagine, Make, Test) in between the sections. By the end of it, the participants not only have the role models from the film but also have a prototype that they can hold in their hands from the design challenge. The idea is that the film-viewing enhances the design engagement and vice versa. The workshop seems to be working very well, and we want to continue and test it for ages ranging from 6th grade to the university level.

All in all, I’m excited about everything that is happening with Extreme by Design, and I feel that the film can be a lever to help get more of this design process into schools.

Design for America had the honor of winning an

Our very own fellows, Thea Klein-Mayer and Kayla Matheus, attended the 2013 event to accept the award on behalf of DFA. Check out their presentation here!

Thea and Kayla, pictured here with Bill Drayton and Ron Cordes.

Design for America was recently recognized as 2013 Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Awards winner. Forbes is featuring a series highlighting some of the most high-impact and replicable innovations in social entrepreneurship education. DFA is honored to be included in this so we are reposting the article below! 

Check out the original article here. 

When we think about social innovation, we tend to focus on the outcomes—assistive technology for the blind, work for the underemployed, housing for the homeless. But it’s people who work day after day to come up with new ideas and realize better solutions to social challenges. What are these changemakers doing on a day-to-day basis, when not receiving MacArthur Genius Grants for their work? And could you be doing the same?

Over the last four years, my colleagues at Design for America and I have worked with more than 2,000 social innovators of all ages—health workers tackling obesity, educators confronting illiteracy, and much more. We found that no matter what the domain, social innovators have similar habits. Despite being busy people and often earning little money for their important work, they always make time to…

1) Read
Social innovators read the news—local, national and global. They are informed. Yes, some sit down with their coffee in the morning to read the New York Times cover to cover. Most don’t have the time to do that, but they still skim the articles, follow the Times on Twitter, and check the RSS feed in email on their morning commute.

Consider the habits of Jeff Bigham, who designed VizWiz, a tool that lets blind people take a picture of anything and get a real-time answer for what is in front of them. Jeff checks Twitter every hour. Why? He follows 731 people—some are blind Twitter users who write about their daily experiences, some are computer scientists who write about the latest technology, and others are journalists covering new technology. Reading Twitter allows Jeff to quickly identify problems and imagine potential solutions. To be effective, Jeff needs to know what’s going on in the world.

Jeff’s approach is consistent with Stanford’s management researcher Bob Sutton’s work on innovation. People who stay informed about the world are more likely to innovate because they bring information to bear from one domain to another—they’re able to connect the dots. Jeff used social computing technology to assist blind people, but to do so, he had to know about both domains.

2) Reflect
Social innovators reflect daily on what this new information means to them and their world. They pay attention to the little moments that give them goose bumps and think about how that information can affect their mission or business model. For instance, while living in the Bay Area, Jeff Chapin, a design engineer, borrowed his company’s Segway to commute to work. One day, the Segway battery died right next to a homeless man’s bench. The man remarked to Jeff, “It’s a bummer when the basics don’t work.” This made Jeff ask himself, what basics did he take for granted—transportation, shelter? But it was potential answers to sanitation issues that prompted Jeff to move toCambodia to design latrines for the rural poor. His Easy Latrine project has led to the sale of 70,000-plus latrines and the start of more than 50 new businesses in rural Cambodia.

Jeff’s reaction to his interaction with a homeless man in San Francisco is consistent with what innovators do when unexpected things happen—they reflect on the situation. Over her 20-year research career, Harvard’s Amy Edmondson finds that innovators don’t turn away when things don’t go as planned, they ask what they could do differently the next time.

3) Reframe
Social innovators regularly reframe massive social issues as a series of small, solvable problems. For example, Rebecca Onie was a college sophomore when she realized the connection between poverty and poor health: low-income patients lack basic resources such as food and housing, and the lack of such resources often leads to worse health outcomes. She could have been overwhelmed by the problem’s scale. Instead, as a critical thinker, she asked herself what ways she could make even the slightest difference as a college student. Rebecca reached out to Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Chief of Pediatrics atBoston Medical Center. She talked to her classmates about how college students could help. Putting this all together, she asked, “What if doctors could prescribe food, housing and heat in the winter, and students could help the patients find these resources?” She built Health Leads, an elite team of volunteer college students who help patients fill their “prescriptions.” The first team started in Boston where Rebecca lived. They now have teams in six cities, including New York City.

Rebecca’s reframing habit is consistent with University of Michigan’s social theorist Karl Weick’s theory of small wins. He posits that the massive scale of social problems precludes people from taking action because people feel overwhelmed. Reformulating large problems as small problems in a flawed system makes action appear manageable. That framework allows people to see concrete and complete outcomes, and build a track record of success. This track record encourages continued action, attracts supporters, and even deters opponents.

Simply looking at a problem in a different way makes it possible for social innovators to do the work they want to do.

4) Reach out
Social innovators reach out to mentors and friends to test their nascent ideas. They don’t hide until they have perfected the solution; they get feedback and refine as they go. Many social innovators set up shop in the community in which they are working so that they can immerse themselves in the problem and regularly test their hunches to see if their solutions will work.

Anand Kulkarni is the CEO of MobileWorks, a company that connects underemployed people throughout the world to do short-term jobs for Fortune 500 companies. They are paid above market wage and many jobs are able to be completed on mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Anand connects with workers worldwide to test new ideas to make the working experience at MobileWorks better. On a recent call, he asked a MobileWorker from the Philippines if the worker would like the company to help the worker find health care. The worker responded enthusiastically. Now, upon request, MobileWorks helps to deduct health care costs for workers who make their primary living through MobileWorks.

Anand’s approach is consistent with my own research on the quick testing of ideas. An 18-month ethnographic study I conducted of an innovation team for software engineers found that testing ideas allows people to learn and feel a sense of progress in what can sometimes seem like a never-ending stream of failures.

So what does this all mean? If we truly want to change the world in which we live, we must change our daily habits. We need to be mindful of how our everyday actions can sets the stage for invention and, hopefully, lasting change. Take up the four R’s and you can become a better social innovator every single day.

Liz Gerber (@elizgerber) is the Faculty Founder of Design for America, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

Check out the first four entries in the 2013 Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Awards series below: 

• Scouting the Sweet Spot Between Purpose and Profit
• 5 Steps for Transforming Student Passion into Social Action
• 4 Myths That Keep Students From Becoming Social Entrepreneurs
• Clarifying Your Mission: The First Step to Making Social Impact Careers Happen

CLICK HERE to register and vote!

This project revolves around the difficulties of interaction for non-verbal children with autism. It has specifically focused in on how they can engage in an immersive, multi-sensory experience through light, touch, and sound, to play and interact with each other.

The product is a wall-mounted touch surface board, arranged in a grid pattern, that acts as a musical sequencer. The children activate certain squares on the grid, and it plays the corresponding musical notes. All notes on the board are in harmony with each other, so that it’s impossible to play a wrong one. This provides an equal opportunity for everyone to easily make a beautiful phrase of music.  The non-verbal autistic children have a chance in this environment to get creative and become more comfortable with each other as they engage with the sensory wall.

Here is a blog post with more about the team’s design process! They now have a mentor and are looking to revise their project further.  You can also watch their video below.

Again, be sure to check them out on the Dell Social Innovation Challenge page and support by voting! It’ll only take a minute of your time for a great cause.