DESIGNING WITH OLDER ADULTS
Despite its grand name, student teams in the Engineering for Humanity one-semester course I co-teach at Olin College with anthropologist Caitrin Lynch work intimately with one older adult in their community to design something that makes their lives better.
Olin just created a beautiful site to share the complete curriculum, and many short videos, for this course.
Students are invited to use the Compass in five cycles of co-design with their community partner to...
Pick a challenge they want to work on—experimenting early with three potential projects
Play with bits of ideas to address their chosen challenge—how these might work, look, and feel
Prototype a first put-together idea and evolve it
Pilot it—let it live with their partners for a week
Produce (and present) a final reliable, effective, and delightful product to help their partner in their lives
Along the way, students use Compasses to reflect on and evolve their experiences in the class, as a team, and as a designer in society.
In addition to the Compass, we teach with many individual readings on aging or design, and with the book 101 Design Methods (Kumar) and IDEO's Method Deck.
DESIGNING OUR OWN LIVES
If Engineering for Humanity is basically "design for one", "You-Oriented Collaborative Design" (a gentle play on the title of on another course I teach that's taken by the entire sophomore class, called User-Oriented Collaborative Design) is "design for me."
For one hour each week, students come together to use design thinking, via Innovators' Compass, in their lives. The 10 sessions are detailed here, but we had a very simple 4-part curriculum.
1. Micro: students used it on whatever small, spontaneous stuff they want, and help each other: planning a class presentation, decisions they needed to make, roommate and team challenges, and so on. The students below are working on how to squeeze in more time to work on their interests, and a decision on housing for next year.
2. Macro: they used it on big stuff, and helped each other. At left, one student is giving another thoughts (on a mini compass) about her senior project around psychological illness, which she developed over the semester in YOCD. At right a senior's helping a sophomore figure out what her passions are and how to pursue them.
3. Methods: we'd interject design methods just-in-time as was helpful to the students, here using IDEO's Method Deck.
4. Meta: once in awhile we'd reflect on what it was like to design in our lives. Below are their were their observations from our final reflection.
