Lots of exciting things in class this week as we transitioned back to our more traditional lecture/work session class time model.

To start of the week though, we had Hannah Hoyt, a D’13 and ENGS12 alum currently studying architecture at GSD come speak with the class about her own experiences with human-centered-design in her post-Dartmouth trajectory. Hannah gave a very insightful talk that students thoroughly absorbed as many of them stayed after class to ask questions. It was an absolute pleasure to get to have her come in person.

On Tuesday, we had yet another guest speaker come as Daniella Reichstetter from Tuck visited our class again to talk briefly on implementation practices and tips. Daniella formatted her presentation to become more of a Q&A after a few minutes of lecturing so she could help teams with specific implementation and negotiation techniques — a strategy that was deeply appreciated by several teams who took advantage of this great chance to pick the brains of such an awesome Tuck professor!

We rounded of Thursday with a traditional lecture + work session structure so teams could huddle and prepare for their second midpoint presentations due next Tuesday!

This week we got the very exciting news that our class will be able to run again next year – so, as you may imagine, we’re thrilled!

In terms of course activities, we continued the co-working sessions work model for this week as they were so effective the prior week. Most of this weeks sessions only required 45min check-ins instead of an hour, so this was a useful learning from iterating. This is a model that we’ll definitely be integrating more continuously next year, especially during the spring term.

We were also delighted to help out at the DCAL ExFest event that happened on Thursday April 26th, where we had a booth and got to share the SDC with guests that popped by!

In the spirit of prototyping and constantly striving for new, better work models this week we switched things up and instead of having regular class we set up 1 hour meetings with each team during the week. These sessions, which we dubbed co-working sessions were actually a great opportunity for our instructional team to delve into each project in-depth and help the students think through to their logical next steps, etc.

This weeks work was so effective that we’ve decided to repeat it again next week!

This week we got a first (awesome) insight into what teams have been up to so far with the first midpoint presentations of the term. Isn’t it crazy to think 1/3 of the term is already over?! Teams presented everything from potential final ideas to walkthroughs of existing prototypes/mockups to even new primary and secondary research they’ve been uncovering. Due to how vastly different each presentation was, we gave students certain leeway in helping them determine what aspects of their own presentations should be the focus of evaluation.

In addition, we had the fantastic surprise of having one of the original ENGS12 SDC creators, Brendan Barth, come visit and help evaluate the presentations!

As students get back into the rhythm of project work, we decided to dedicate time this week to checking in with students from the class at an individual basis in order to assess what individual satisfaction and concerns were. These meetings have been a great opportunity to better understand the motivations and pain points of all students in the class, and get to know everyone a little better. We’ll be continuing them through next week as well!

After working as hard as santa’s elves this holiday season, our first class came to life this week. It was very exciting to see all the students see new and old faces in the classroom. We kicked things off doing a classic introductory gift-giving exercise so that students with no previous exposure to design thinking could get a general hands-on grasp of the process, and before the end of class we introduced their first mini project 1-week assignment: redesign the Dartmouth campus dining experience. Exciting things to come next week as we’ll introduce students to their SDC projects and see the results of this first mini project come to life!