Design Thinking & Creativity

Spring 2024 & Spring 2025 | Woods College of Advancing Studies

Course Description

This course seeks to introduce Design Thinking as an action-oriented creative process for engaging deeply with the problems that matter to you. The course is designed to help you: develop habits of mind and tools for thinking to make creativity a reliable resource in your life; cultivate empathy for both others and yourself as the starting point for creative problem-solving; think flexibility by reframing problems and finding ways to move beyond your first good ideas; and adopt an experimental mindset that allows you to try test out your ideas and collaborate with others. The course will take a learn-by-doing approach combined with ample opportunity for reflection. The goal is to integrate Design Thinking with the rest of your liberal arts studies, so you leave the course with a broad-based, personalized creative toolkit for tackling problems in your life and in the world.

Deliverables

  • Course Foundations

    Course Syllabus Quiz: You’ll take a quiz on Canvas that covers the content of the course syllabus. You must pass this quiz before moving forward in the course. You’ll have unlimited attempts.

    Getting to Know You Letter: You’ll write a letter that helps us build a strong classroom community by introducing yourself and beginning to establish your relationship with me, your professor.

    Course Completion Plan: You’ll develop an individualized Course Completion Plan that outlines your personal goals and explains how those goals align with the expectations of the course.

  • Design Foundations

    Multimodal Identity Kit: You’ll create and share a multimodal identity kit that uses multiple modes (text, images, video, audio, etc.) to reflect on the assets you bring to a team, the values that guide your work, and the group relationships that shape your perspective as a designer.

    Design Thinking Crash Course: You’ll explore Stanford’s d.school Design Thinking Bootleg on Perusall. Full instructions are available in the Perusall assignment on Canvas.

    Reading Collaboration: You’ll use Perusall to engage with classmates in a collaborative, text-based discussion of the assigned reading.

  • Journaling Practice

    You’ll design a journaling plan—either a “good-time journal” or a creative journal to complete over the course of a month. You’ll also complete the d.school assignments “Love-Play-Work-Health Balance Dashboard” and “Workview/Lifeview.”

  • Creativity Interview

    You’ll conduct a creativity interview with someone in your life, exploring how design thinking and creativity connect to their experiences. This assignment also gives you the chance to practice empathy, one of our key course themes, and to engage in interviewing—a core skill in the design thinking process.

  • Your Choice

    You’ll choose from one of the following:

    Individual Design Challenge: You’ll carry out the design thinking process for an individual challenge of your own choosing.

    Dig Deeper: You’ll select a book or video related to course themes, engage deeply with it, reflect on how it connects to your own life, and make a plan for sharing your insights with others (inside or beyond our classroom community).

    Odyssey Plan: You’ll create three different five-year plans, share them with others, and reflect on the experience.

  • Final Portfolio

    You’ll assemble a final portfolio that showcases your work across the course and reflects on your growth as a thinker and designer.