Stanford University Innovation Fellows.

Bringing applicable design thinking skills to underfunded highschool students.

Role

Design Fellow

Duration

Fall 2022-Spring 2023

Type

Strategy, Design Thinking, & Education

The Team

The multidisciplinary team is made up of students with different backgrounds and studies. Led by our NIS faculty advisor, Aaron Bradley.
Jamie Dee
Lance Entsuah
Cara Baah-Binney
Dillon Patel
Industrial Design Economics
Mechanical Engineer
Chemical Engineer

University Innovation Fellows

Stanford University's Hasso Planner Institute of Design's program to empower students to become agents of change at their school. Fellows work with peers, faculty and administrations to create new learning opportunities for students at their schools to engage with innovation, entrepreneurship, design thinking and creativity. They have trained 2,910 Fellows at 314 Global Educational Institutes.


Learn more →

NEXT Innovation Scholars

UC's scholarship program spearheaded by President Neville Pinto that aligns with the NEXT Lives Here initiative and institutional innovation goals. The program cultivates a diverse cohort of resilient, forward-thinking problem-solvers who embrace ambiguity with the intellect, curiosity and confidence to drive innovation and lead in a complex world.
They graduate leaders that "create the future rather than react to it."

Learn more →

Schedule

How might we improve students' physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being revolving around innovation andentrepreneurship on your campus?

REFINEMENT IN OUR PROJECT: HOW MIGHT WE QUESTION

Stanford Innovation & Design Thinking Training

In six weeks, we went through multiple rounds of student interviews, brainstorm sessions, innovation canvas, prototype testing and stakeholder interviews. With each round, we expanded and narrowed our topic on how we can create an impact to our student population.

Making it work

We were all on different schedules, either full time internships or school semester. We balanced a mix of in person and virtual meetings. During this semester, I was studying abroad in South Korea, and I worked around American time zone to make meetings work.

Student Interviews

We interviewed multiple students from different colleges across the university to understand the reason for lack of engagement and desires of students in terms of innovative ways to improve their school experience.

"Feels like it's too late to explore, I need to focus on medical school applications."

College of Medicine Student

"They're going to struggle for few years because they don't have enough experience."

College-Conservatory of Music Student

"It's hard to feel engaged...people aren't fully bought in or interactive in classes and student orgs."

Lindner College of Business Student

"5 pages of coop reflection is too much. The last 3 pages is copy and paste...I start to write random stuff."

College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Student

How might we encourage student exploration outside of their majors and industries, and give them the chance to build upon previously gained skills while also learning new skills in design thinking?

OUR FIRST PIVOT: HOW MIGHT WE QUESTION

Brainstorm Sessions

We produced large range of ideas based on the interview insights to test out with students through storytelling the experience they could participate in. We used various ideation techniques to explore different opportunities.

Innovation Landscape Canvas

We looked at the available opportunities connected to University of Cincinnati to understand if the university had areas of improvement to fill or if certain tools were not easily accessible to students.

Prototype Testing

Based on our identified problems and curated how might we question, we came up with a couple solutions to prototype with students. We had students test out our experiences we wanted to integrate and received feedback on how we could improve.

Stakeholder Interviews

We interviewed stakeholders across the university that have an impact on the future decisions that affects the student population. We received feedback on our prototypes and how they view the students' uncertainty on their career and education.

"Students don't know what they don't know."

"Each student values different sources."

"Students need diverse social outlets."

"Make sure that there are next steps for students."

Stakeholder Proposal: NEXTploration Workshop

01 SPRING SEMESTER
We presented our final stakeholder proposal of the NEXTploration Workshop to our stakeholders. We got range of feedback like tightening our How Might We statement and trying to find the true reason of students not exploring. A couple directions they proposed that we could continue with was creating an "Innovation And ...(your major)..." event to reignite student's passion for their career, create more student awareness around the Cincinnati Innovation District (CID), or work closely with specific department and create tailored workshops that help students in XYZ major see how they can take advantage of the CID as a way to explore different aspects of their major.

Link to the full presentation →

We found that we needed to get to the root of the problem (college students losing passion for their major and lacking exploration options) and go further back to high school students.

We want to make design thinking accessible to all high school students, and encourage them to use design thinking when creating their career and future whether it's design thinking related or not.

ANOTHER PIVOT: OUR PROJECT REFRAMED

Schedule

Leading students

Throughout the spring semester, we led a team of our peers to help us create the workshop prototypes and present the event. We took the knowledge that we gained from UIF training in the fall semester and created opportunities for students around us to participate and have a chance to impact the community around them.

Design Thinking Process

We had them interview students from education majors and professors on teaching strategies, tips on activity creation and note down the main insights. From those main insights, we color coded similar points that students were highlighting.

We did multiple brainstorming and "Yes And" sessions to create a large range of ideas for the activities we could do with the St. Xavier High School students to illustrate design thinking. We narrowed down the main ideas and create an outline for the event.

St.Xavier High School Product Design Students

For our first prototype, we led a design thinking workshop event in a product development class from a well-resourced high school. This experience allowed us to dip our toes in on how to communicate effectively with high school students, see how engaging our activities are, and understand how time constraints can help with student focus. While it was an insightful event, we realized that there were structural parts and content we would have to tweak as we moved forward with an audience that wasn’t familiar with the design thinking process.

Stanford Learnings:
Break up the information

During Stanford UIF Global meetup, we met with various professionals that had experience creating unconventional educational activities or had started non-profits specifically dedicated to unresourced student populations. We realized how we needed to break down the information more and focus on creating various short engaging activities in order to have a higher impact with the underserved students.

This realization led us to the decision of creating a series of workshops about design thinking, so students wouldn’t be given a large chunk of information to digest at once.

Upwards Bound

We applied our new knowledge into our second prototype with students from the local Upward Bounds program, an outreach program that supports low-income Cincinnati high school students through educational tutoring and mentoring. From that second prototype, we found that students genuinely enjoyed being creative and collaborating together. We just had to find the right way to deliver the information.
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