December 2019 - The Innovation Hub

Little Papers, Big Ideas

By Darren Clift, Writer

Journey mapping with the Transforming the Instructional Landscape team

Playing with sticky notes isn’t just for kindergarten classrooms. For universities and colleges who practise design thinking, these little pieces of paper serve as creative tools, and a wall covered in rainbow-coloured sticky notes can lead to big ideas. The Innovation Hub’s Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) team experienced this earlier this semester, when we collaborated with our project partners at Academic + Campus Events (ACE) in a Journey Mapping session.

View from the Inside: To Teach and Delight

For the final View from the Inside post of this semester, Sharon Lam reflects on how we share our insights at the Innovation Hub. To read more reflections from Sharon, click here.

One of the final stages of Innovation Hub projects is reporting on our findings. This may be in the form of written reports, but can also include presentations and visualisations. Depending on the project, the audience of partners and stakeholders receiving our insights differs, but in each case, we want to clearly convey our insights, so our partners can use them to ideate and prototype. We do this in the form of “Design Principles”—aspirational themes to inspire and guide our partners as they develop solutions. While reports, presentations, and design principles need to be accurate, they also need to be memorable and moving.

Alternative Reading Week: Art and Design with the Innovation Hub

Art created by a student at the Innovation Hub’s ARW program // Photographs by Zhaoyu Li & Julia Smeed for the Innovation Hub

Gabriele Simmons, Senior Project Assistant

For Alternative Reading Week (ARW) last month, the Innovation Hub worked for three days with a group of students interested in design thinking, discussing design thinking principles, working through collaborative data analysis, and creating art to represent the themes we uncovered.

The I-Think Initiative x The Innovation Hub: Reframing Education from Kindergarten to Higher Ed

By Eddie Huang and Charis Lam

Solving the problems of an increasingly complex world requires the education of critical and creative thinkers. Empowering educators to develop students’ integrative thinking skills—to help students “face … the tension of opposing ideas and … generate a creative resolution … in the form of a new idea [that] … is superior to each”¹—is essential to developing the next generation of students. The I-Think Initiative works with K-12 students and educators to teach integrative thinking practices and explicit thinking techniques, which participants use to tackle real-world problems. Similarly, at the university level, the Innovation Hub gives students the tools of design thinking to tackle issues in campus life. Together, we see a need to reframe education at all levels to reflect the challenges of the modern world.

Month: December 2019