How might improv, talking to strangers, and framing problems from the point of view of a squirrel prepare students to tackle Grand Challenges? This semester, Academy team members Christina Hnatov and Erica Estrada-Liou have been working with Gerald Suárez, Martha Wang and the Xperience Program to teach its inaugural course, XPER433, inviting students to come together across disciplines to innovate as they tackle Grand Challenges.
The interdisciplinary cohort of 30 students from majors ranging from Computer Science to Public Health to History, has been building their design and innovation skills, practicing interdisciplinary collaboration, and stepping out of their comfort zones to try on new mindsets and approaches to creative problem-solving. Among other things, they’ve spent the semester:
- practicing improv…in order to build innovation behaviors like building on each other’s ideas, quieting our judgemental inner voice, and sharing “unfinished” work
- brainstorming ways to help park visitors spot cool birds…in order to get really good at out-of-the-box brainstorming
- framing and reframing problems (including from the perspective of a squirrel!)...in order to think about big problems from many different points of view, contexts, and scales
- talking to strangers…in order to seek out new perspectives and stay human-centered in their work
Since coming back from Spring Break, the XPER433 students have been hard at work applying all that they’ve learned in class so far to the Xperience challenge topic, digging into the complex problem space of increasing school safety. They’ve been immersing themselves in this issue, interviewing a wide array of stakeholders to understand their perspectives, and beginning to frame specific problems their teams are interested – and excited – to tackle.
Last week, teams completed their first Design Review, showcasing their work-in-progress and getting feedback from their classmates and the teaching team. They are off to a great start and we are looking forward to seeing how they continue to dive into this challenge!
Check out this video to hear Christina and other xFoundry collaborators talk about Xperience.