charislam, Author at The Innovation Hub

Project Primer: Data Analysis

Danielle Baillargeon, Data Analysis Team Lead

What happens to all the interviews and data that the Innovation Hub collects? Over the past three years, over 450 students and staff have shared their experiences with our teams. We are honoured that so many were willing to entrust us with their stories and experiences, which helped us identify their needs, suggest and prototype services and supports, and contribute to substantive changes at U of T through over a dozen collaborative projects. The interviews and feedback we receive are the basis from which we advocate for change in all our collaborations, including the New College Dining Hall redesign, the Family Care Office projects, and the classroom redesign under the Transforming the Instructional Landscape Project.

The Innovation Hub is Hiring!

Julia Smeed, Innovation Hub Project Leader

As we look forward to the new school year, the Innovation Hub is excited to assemble a team for our upcoming and continuing projects. We want to offer our potential team members the opportunity to both contribute to the university and learn new skills: we’re looking for dedicated students who are interested in improving campus life by focusing on student needs, and we’re also offering those students training and hands-on practice in human-centred design. We hope to put together a diverse team that enjoys the challenges of our work!

Read below for job descriptions, and go to the Career & Co-Curricular Learning Network work study job board to learn more and apply.

Hearing the Voices of Student Parents and Creating a Family-Friendly U of T

“What simple things could U of T do to be more family-friendly?” We asked this question at our participatory action event last month, in which we sought the voices of student parents and their solutions to the challenges they face at U of T.

Project Primer: Transforming the Instructional Landscape

In the Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) project, we try to understand what makes a classroom work as a productive learning environment. As this work has progressed, it has expanded to include many perspectives: we started by focusing on the student experience, but came to realize that student experiences are entangled with the experiences of other people who spend time in and around classrooms, and with the spaces and things that promote learning.

Project Primer: Family Care

Shirin Gerami, Design Research Team Lead

Student parents are a growing group of students at the University of Toronto, and they face unique challenges that are invisible to those who do not share their experiences. These challenges create emotional and mental pressures which are exasperated by the limited support available for their practical needs.

To capture these challenges and the overall experiences of student parents at the university, the Innovation Hub partnered with the Family Care Office last year. Through that partnership, we showed that student parents are often unable to find a sense of belonging during their time at U of T. A sense of belonging is important for forming meaningful interpersonal connections, better coping with school and life challenges, and deriving comfort from the knowledge that one is not alone.

Project Primer: Accessibility at Convocation

In the Project Primer series, we’ll be introducing the design projects our team members are tackling this summer. Stay turned to learn about our work in five different areas! First up: Accessibility at Convocation…

Written by Alex, Rhea Makund, Natasha Cuneo, and Kate Welsh

Did you attend your convocation? For increasing numbers of University of Toronto graduates, the answer is yes. In the past five years, the number of graduates participating in their convocation ceremony has risen by 20 %.

Thus, creating an inclusive community for graduating students is becoming increasingly important.

#DisplayYourPride: Celebrating Individuality, Creating Connectedness

At the Innovation Hub, we were excited to participate in #DisplayYourPride at the University of Toronto, so we could show our support for the LGBTQ+ community. Pride Month at U of T, with its vision of making every student at this university feel safe, accepted, and heard, aligns with our own goal at the Innovation Hub of improving student experiences through empathy-based research that inspires social justice and social change. Thus, #DisplayYourPride was the perfect opportunity to create an installation that celebrates individuality and connectedness, and that rededicates us to our own efforts to create an environment that includes all students.

We centred our installation around the question, “What does Pride mean to you?”

Meet the Team—Summer 2019

How can we make Convocation more accessible? What makes a classroom great? What support do student parents need? How can staff and students work together to create effective programs?

These are some of the questions driving this summer’s Innovation Hub team. We’ll answer them by listening to the stories of students and staff, shining a searchlight on how they interact with the university—in lecture, at Convocation, at work—and how the university can reach out in response.

Author: charislam (page 4)