Forget all the Jargon, Let's Innovate

The global pandemic, the U.S. unemployment, and the movement to fight racism, has shown us that the world can rapidly change, and when it does that organizations and people that innovate thrive. Design thinking, innovation, agile and many other approaches to problem solving have never been more important. But, often these methods are only accessible to an exclusive club of people who are certified in a methodology and "allowed" to practice design and innovation. In this class, we believe in radical access to design and innovation. We believe that for design and innovation to change the world for the better it has to be inclusive, human centered, and accessible to everyone everywhere. In this course, students learn how to become "innovation-ish", and leverage the foundational mindsets and abilities of design thinking and innovation.We create radical access. We start with the students bringing the problem solving methods they already use and together we create the connections, reframe and refine them as design methods. Then we explore many design methods and highlight the similar elements. We distill these elements and co-create categories to classify the design methods. Then we connect these methods to abilities and embark on a design project in partnership with real world organizations.