Current Progress – Page 2 – Senior Design Challenge

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02/09: 18W Week 6 – Team Bonding is Important

April 2, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Our week started off with a lot of excitement as we invited Brian Kunz and Lindsay Putnam from Dartmouth Outdoor activities to lead two hours team bonding activities, which were an incredible success. We had a variety of very interactive games that challenged students to think about the importance of team dynamics, trust, values, and communication in work environments. The activities were also great for bringing the class together through physical challenges, and also build greater rapport amongst team members. 10/10 would recommend other classes, especially those in which professors may want students to build rapport with each other, to contact Brian & Lindsay!

Another exciting event this week was students Insights presentations, which gave our teaching team a first ‘sneak-peak’ into what students fieldwork has been like, and what their most exciting stories and findings from these have been. Marking a great first milestone for the SDC projects!

02/02: 18W Week 5 – Work like Rihanna

April 2, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This week projects started steaming ahead, and in order to give students time to prepare for this much of our class time was dedicated to work sessions. This week also market the last of our “design thinking bootcamp sessions,” in which students with no prior design thinking experience were introduced to prototyping concepts through the spaghetti tower challenge.

01/26 18W Week 4: Business in HCD

This week had a lot of very diverse yet equally exciting happenings.

On Tuesday, students met with their client partners for the first time. The conversations lasted the majority of our two hour period, and from the looks of it could’ve probably gone for an even longer time.

On Wednesday, we had a very exciting alumni, Jennifer Lopez ’08, come speak to our class about her own experience from being a geography major to becoming the head of Innovation at Capital One Labs. A few of our students were also invited to attend dinner at Pine with her later that evening to get more 1:1 time with her. With all the geography majors in our class, this was definitely a very inspiring and enlightening talk for our students!

Finally, on Thursday we had Daniella Reichstetter come as a guest lecturer to our course, to introduce some basic “business” elements and thinking of human centered design, especially through her lean canvas model, which students then practiced their own projects in. Overall students were fairly engaged and it was a topic that many of them had had limited exposure to.

We left them for the weekend with the key task of starting out their research by going into the field and finding users to interview!

01/19 18W Week 3: Kickstarting the Projects

January 22, 2018 / / 0 Comments

We kickstarted this week with a great talk with a guest speaker from the anthropology department, Elizabeth Carpenter-Song. Elizabeth not only talked about ethnographic research’s methods and value, but also related her talk to her own experiences as a researcher in the Upper Valley, which students really appreciated, especially as so many of their own projects will occur in similar environments. Although some students in the class have taken ethnographic coursework, the experience was a good refresher for them, and a solid introduction to students being first introduced to ethnography.

From a team perspective though, most of our week was occupied by figuring out and finalizing project teams for the next two terms. These were introduced to the class on Thursday, after mini project #2 presentations. Overall, it felt like a very worthwhile endeavor to have put so much time into forming these teams as student satisfaction over project and/or team was pretty high. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens next week when project work actually begins!

01/12 18W Week 2: Becoming a Class

January 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

We started this week at a fast pace as teams were deep into their first design mini-project, and used the energy in class to make everybody get to know each other a little better. On Tuesday we had a brief mini-project check in where different teams shared and discussed their progress, and then we dove into some team bonding activities. We played “All My Neighbors” and did a few iterations of human knots. These activities were great for getting students more comfortable with each other and “breaking the ice” so to speak. That day we also introduced our long awaited SDC Projects. We showed students a total of 14 potential projects, talked about them a little and gave them room to discuss and think about their different options. We’ll be expecting student team & project choices to be finalized by the end of next week.

On Thursday we got to see the first small great milestone of the class, as students presented their first mini-projects. The results were fantastic and far beyond what we expected. Students really dove deep into the experience, and amidst the joys and frustrations of the design process, delivered outstanding results for a 1-week project about how to improve the dining experience at Dartmouth. We can’t wait to see what they come up with on mini-project #2!

01/05 18W Week 1: Welcome to the SDC!

January 9, 2018 / / 0 Comments

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!

11/24 – Week 10: Turkey Break

November 27, 2017 / / 0 Comments

A short lived week, yet we maximized our time and had several very interesting meetings. We met with Professor Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, who will be an amazing ally for guiding our class through the field of ethnography (which is core to the design thinking process!), Dan Fang ’15 who gave us some insights on his experience doing project management & client outreach for ideo.org (so cool or what?!), and President emeritus Jim Wright, who was excited for our project and gave us some great tips for thinking about possible projects centered around veterans (which we’re super eager to pursue). In between we continued to play with curricular development, and took a first step into exploring the ocean of design thinking instructional resources that are out there…

We’re heading off for the long weekend ready to take advantage of the few days of quiet to prepare for an upcoming week of productivity!

11/10 – Week 9: Time to Design

November 27, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Now that all the main logistical pillars are in order (student recruitment & partner outreach), we’ve started turning inwards and focusing on course & curricular design. The majority of this week was spent working on laying out our syllabus and all the curricular components of the course: setting up the stage for a design bootcamp, making arrangements with potential (super cool) guest speakers during the course, and identifying opportunities for student growth beyond the classroom (alumni panels, visitors, etc). We’d like to give a special shoutout to Daniella Reichstetter (who’s been spearheading entrepreneurship at Tuck) and was an invaluable resource this week. Partnerships like these make our team excited for the growth and scalability potential of the SDC!

Some other points of focus and achievements this week included:

Got a few more last minute community partners reaching out to express interest
Started project scoping documents
Selected reading list & core concepts for design bootcamp
Started crafting mini-projects for when the term starts
Met some of our students in an informal “open office hours” we hosted at the office

11/10 – Week 8: Making Deals

November 10, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Another exciting week for the SDC team as we made some significant advances in the project sourcing side of “the business.” We spoke with several very interested organizations and started having definitive partners for the SDC. Our current potential projects include clients like DHMC, Burton Snowboards, the Upper Valley Trails Alliance, and Positive Tracks. We’re very excited to continue conversations with other potential partners, especially ones who may be interested in long-term relationships with the Senior Design Challenge.

On another note, the registrar finished processing student course enrollments for the winter and we got back a roster of the students who enrolled in our course – they’re awesome! Definitely one unexpected challenge we’ve faced this week though has been learning how to deal with student logistics and coming to terms with the fact that it will always be impossible to have a course that can fit everybody’s schedule’s due to how varied different Dartmouth student’s academic and extracurricular commitments are.

We also had some great conversations with DCAL and other design thinking enthusiasts – its great to discover growing support for design thinking and initiatives like ours around campus!

11/03 – Week 7: We have students!

November 6, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This was an extremely exciting week for the SDC team. Our student application deadline was due on Tuesday evening and we spent the entirety of the following day selecting students for the course! We were thrilled to receive 38 applications: this number made us decide to increase the SDC class enrollment from 18 to 21-24. We accepted 24 students and waitlisted a few others. What was even more exciting was the diversity of backgrounds and academic fields that our student applicants came from. From the students we ultimately selected alone we had over 12 different majors represented, with a tied majority of 4 CS, SART and Geography majors. Other popular majors included economics, psychology and anthropology. The students background and experience with human-centered-design also had a wide range, and we ultimately (unknowingly at the time) ended up with a 50/50 student split between those who have taken design thinking/HCD coursework and those who haven’t.

Throughout the week we also had some great conversations with:

Lisa Baldez, to think of what is the “big picture” that the SDC fits in
Daniella Reichstatter who leads entrepreneurship at Tuck to discuss building partnerships and collaborating in the course
Dr. Rosen from DHMC to think of potential projects and faculty at the hospital with whom we can collaborate