Change Forward 2021-22

CHANGE FORWARD

Visions and Voices of Higher Education’s Future

CHANGE FORWARD

and Voices of Higher Education’s Future

Illustrated by Cha Pornea

designed by Laurie Moore

Welcome

by the University Innovation Fellows team

STUDENT LEARNING

Project

Transdisciplinarity and the Future by Nicholas C. Zingale, Julieta Matos-Castaño, Abigail Poeske and Anouk Geenen Cleveland State University and the University of Twente

Society 5.0 (S5)

Nicholas Zingale and Kelle DeBoth Foust, Cleveland State University

Responsible Futuring by Julieta Matos-Castaño and Cristina Zaga, University of Twente

Discover “Who Do You Want to Grow Into?” Before Thinking “What Do You Want to Be?” by Stephane Yu Matsushita, Tohoku University

Reading Books With Your Ears by Daniel Flores Bueno, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

Crossing “Major” Boundaries to Co-Create the Future by Aaron Bradley, University of Cincinnati

COMMUNITIES

Project

CONNECTIONS

Project

Recursive Impact for Indonesia Digital Archipelago by Nurrizky Imani, Universitas Gadjah Mada

U-Life

by Silvana Balarezo, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

EVENTS

Project updates 44

Strangers Are Just Friends Waiting to Happen by Janette Kaspar, FH Salzburg (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences) 50

Soaring Into STEM by Maya Hamer, Christopher Lawson & Dr. Siobahn Day Grady, North Carolina Central University 52

Diseña Tu Vida Universitaria by Valeria Aguayo, Danae Chipoco Haro & Diego Muñoz, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología 54

Innovation Day by Magdalena Arraztoa, Azul Lizana, Dominga Mandiola & Florencia Ramírez, Universidad de los Andes 56

Design Venture by Haindavi Ghanta, Vinay Manukonda, Madan Mohan Chunduri, Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Jyothirmai Reddybathuni & Jayanth Upthala, Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology 58

OPERATIONS & STUDENT LIFE

Project

Earning

by Erica Hernandez, Bowie State University

Establishing

by Takeshi Kato, Tohoku University

Emancipated

by Nurrizky Imani, Vincent Junition Ungu, Elan Yudhoprakoso & Fajar Kenichi Kusumah Putra Universitas Gadjah Mada

SPACES

Project

A Common

by Aditya Shasank PSKPVS,

Building

by Maria Fernanda Sagastume, Florida Institute of Technology

PERSPECTIVES

Trailblazing by La Selene Dommu, Aditya College of Engineering & Technology 80

Is an Impactful Work Life Possible? by Zişan Özdemir, Boğaziçi University 81

Just Breathe by Navya Chelluboyina, Kakinada Institute of Engineering and Technology 82

Re-Futuring Starts From Campus by Magdalena Ionescu, Sophia University 84

Finding a Great Team by Macarena Oyague, Marcela Yeckle, Mia Townsend & Mirella Rivas Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología 86

Obstacles to Accessing Quality Education by Marcela Yeckle, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología 87

Not All Those Who Wonder Are Lost by Romina Dominzain, Universidad de Montevideo 88

Fill in the Blank by Rodrigo López Techera, Universidad de Montevideo 90 How Might Education Change to Prepare for the Future? by Harrison Kellick, University of Technology Sydney 91 What We Learned to Create a Longer Impact by Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Madan Mohan Chunduri, Jayanth Upthala, Jyothirmai Reddybathuni, Vinay Manukonda & Haindavi Ghanta Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology 92

Visions of Change by Isaiah Freeman & LaQuawne DePriest, Virginia State University 93

INDEX BY

ABOUT US

The University Innovation Fellows program empowers students and faculty to become leaders of change in higher education. Members of our global community are leading a movement to ensure that all students gain the attitudes, skills and knowledge required to navigate a complex world.

The University Innovation Fellows is a program of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).

Learn more at universityinnovationfellows.org.

FREQUENTLY USED TERMS

University Innovation Fellows

Students who are trained to analyze opportunities for change at their schools and create activities, spaces, classes and more

Faculty Champions

Faculty, staff and program leaders who serve as mentors of University Innovation Fellows

Faculty Innovation Fellows

A community of Faculty Champions who are taking part in a two-year journey to design and implement change projects

letter from the team

Each year, we are amazed and humbled by the students and educators who make up our University Innovation Fellows community. You are passionate and driven — you work hard and constantly challenge yourselves to improve the lives of others. You are empathetic and respectful — you care deeply about the people for and with whom you are designing. You are insightful and forward-thinking — you are addressing issues that may not have existed even last year. The best part is, in addition to all of these things, you care about one another — you ask for feedback from those who have already experienced obstacles and you mentor others who have just started their journey as change agents.

In this second edition of our journal, we celebrate the work that our community members are doing to help our schools navigate the ambiguity of these times and imagine the future of learning. These pages contain detailed goals and plans re lated to the challenges identified by our student University Innovation Fellows, Faculty Champi ons and Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates. They’re grouped in broad categories for the sake of easy reading, but many projects serve several purposes.

By the time you read this, some of these projects will have evolved, some will have been imple mented, and new projects will be in progress. All of this content represents valuable effort, learning and growth on the part of the students and faculty. We hope this publication also serves to highlight the state of higher education today: what students need, and what we are doing to ensure that all learners are prepared to shape the future.

Thank you to our #uifamily for making this publication possible, and for giving us the best reason to do the work that we do.

The University Innovation Fellows Team

Leticia Britos Cavagnaro

Humera Fasihuddin

Lupe Makasyuk

Laurie Moore

Ghanashyam S

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school)

Stanford University

student learning

The world is changing quickly, and so are the skills and mindsets our students need to thrive after they leave school. Fellows and Faculty Champions are applying their experimental mindsets to reimagine what and how students learn in the classroom and beyond.

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

Bryson Davis, Cameron LaMack, Abigail Poeske

Our team is designing innovative pedagogy for what we call the “Society 5.0 Certifi cate” — a curriculum of graduate courses to develop leaders and change makers who are thinking critically about the impact of advanced technologies in society. We hope this project shakes up the way teaching and learning happens at CSU as well as provides a framework for transdisciplinary teaching and learning for the university.

COLORADO SCHOOL OF MINES

Ashley Dunivan (2020), Adam Schwartz (2021), Indiana Sjahputera (2020)

We are working on putting a spotlight for a learning track in Renewable Energy. We’re hoping to host a kick off event to spur more interest and energy surrounding UIF and our projects. At this moment, this project is on a holding pattern, especially since any type of curriculum building will need to be supported by a program/department. But we maintain close ties with faculty who are interested in this development. We also inspired the career center to invite more companies that are in the Renewable Energy space to come to our career fair.

DIAN NUSWANTORO UNIVERSITY

Kevin Maulana Afriyanto, Yunia Nur Anisa, Rosa Paramitha

The program that we will create is called Dinus Training Course (DTC). This program aims to improve the quality of the curricu lum at Dian Nuswantoro University. With a series of events, there are material presen tations, workshops, to the final certification which is held after the workshop which will be obtained by students. This program has a scope with the target of active students at Dian Nuswantoro University who have an interest in certain subjects. Our program is expected to help solve problems experi enced by students. The problem is, the curriculum taught on campus is still not up to date compared to other universities. This program is expected to improve the quality of education and the quality of students at Dian Nuswantoro University.

ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM

Teodora Comanescu, Nick Tennekes, Anisha de Vries

GEORGE FOX UNIVERSITY

Jesse Bartel, Sierra Hinds, Luke Roderick

As a result of UIF training, our team collaborated with the campus’ Industrial Enterprise in creating an introductory course for a vertically integrated program that the Enterprise wishes to create in the coming years. Mirroring that of an honors program, but geared towards solving problems, teams of different majors would be assigned to a transdis ciplinary project over the duration of academic career that would be categorized by a real world problem.

For the team’s UIF work, we designed an introductory course frame work that would give students an opportunity to preview the projects and what it would be like to be on a team (before fully committing), as well as checking off a general education requirement from the class in the scenario they decide they don’t want to pursue the program. As a conceptual design, the course would aim to stretch students through working on interdisciplinary teams, helping them develop teamwork and cross-cultural communication skills, and provide a space to devel op technical skills such as taking meeting notes, producing technical emails, and ultimately interviewing to enter the program.

We are working on a “learning how to learn” program, created for students to focus on a more learning-driven way of studying rather than a performance-driven technique. As a start to this program, we have an afternoon program planned for which we have invited speakers with a lot of knowledge in soft skills (and how to train those). During this speaker-session there will also be ample time for interaction with the audience and we will actively be looking for student feedback on how to best set up such a “learning how to learn” pro gram and how to best create a space for it within the university experience (i.e. we are exploring ways for this program to be taken up in the curriculum, or possibly during a minor program to make it accessible to all).

FOOTHILL COLLEGE & MENLO COLLEGE

Georgina Fakoukaki (Foothill), Tatiana Fakoukaki (Foothill), Lina LakoczkyTorres (Menlo)

We are collaborating on a product innova tion course for a local high school in the Bay Area. We are working to support expe riential learning to the next generation of changemakers so they can be best equipped to dive into any endeavor they choose.

MADANAPALLE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

Sangeetha Malle, Nitish Sine

The priority we are working on is “MITS Code.” This is an online platform that helps students to develop their coding skills and during their place ments time. As we know in this digital era, students need to develop their coding skills. MITS Code provides practice questions on Python, C, C++, along with an online compiler, where students can run their code online itself, which develops a grip on those concepts. In MITS Code we also provided a chat box, where students can ask their doubts. We are also providing video tutorials on python, C, and Data structure and algorithms. In this way, we want to give an impetus to the coding skills in the campus. We will post the same in the WhatsApp groups on cam pus. This website will reach all the students of MITS and the news shall be published in MITS Flash, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Visit the website at mitscode.godaddysites.com.

HOLLINS UNIVERSITY Zahin Mahbuba

The primary project that I am working on involves our first-year seminar students and faculty members associated with the classes. The first-year seminar that I am the student success leader for is called “Ask not what your community can do for youSustainability and Social Innovation.” The seminar is utilizing the Stanford Design Thinking Model and partnering with local businesses and non-profit organizations to ideate and implement ideas for the Hollins and wider Roanoke community. So far my first-year seminar has collaborated with four other first-year seminars to come up with an exhibition that was held at the end of last semester regarding their projects. Moreover, each of the projects addressing different issues within the community (from educa tional accessibility to female period poverty) received grant funding to implement their projects. This is the first time my commu nity has embarked on implementing such projects, and the projects are being further continued over j-term and spring term 2022.

The other projects I am working on are centered around faculty involvement in entrepreneurial thinking and experiential learning. I am working with our career center to increase the range of experiential learning opportunities for students of all disciplines and majors.

ROWAN UNIVERSITY

Kenyon Burgess, Aatish Gupta

HAMBURG UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Malte Krohn (Faculty Innovation Fellow)

Following up on publishing my book The Mindful Startup, I decided to take my idea forward, and I launched my website mind fulstartup.school. I believe that we need to teach changemakers the right skillsets and mindsets to navigate volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) – which is unavoidable in driving change through innovation and entrepreneurship. Here’s a little twist: Often, we think about VUCA as something that challenges our ideas, solu tions, and business models. Yes, and… I believe that it also fundamentally

determines our emotional journey as changemakers – we need to learn how to navigate VUCA within! This is what I now advocate in workshops, courses, lectures, keynotes, and panel discussions. In my approach, I combine traditional Eastern meditation practice with modern Western science to deliver mindfulness-based expe riences to ambitious founders, wholeheart ed changemakers, creative leaders, and bold innovators. Together with universities, accelerators, startups, and established businesses, I explore how to lead change more mindfully. We meditate, we talk about well-being, about stress, about belonging, and we hone our self-care mindset.

We are in the process of spinning out some of the student solutions developed during Rowan Innovation Weekend (with the creators’ permission of course). One of the idea was a “Wellness 101” Course that would teach students the basics of mental well-be ing. This idea got a lot of positive feedback from our panel of experts and resonated with me [Aatish] a lot personally. Some thing similar was done at Yale by Dr. Laurie Santos called the Science of Wellbeing. It is a course now available in an online format and has sparked an enormous following and even a podcast with the same title. I think that a stress-free, for-credit course required for graduation would help students immensely with managing the stress of higher education. I would have to develop this idea more and speak to students and staff about whether it is something that they want and what they would want out of it, but I think it has enormous potential, especially as it was created by Rowan students going through mental health struggles them selves. Additionally, Kenyon and I will be forming an engineering capstone project to facilitate Design thinking amongst Rowan Students. We will have the backing of ExEEd in this endeavor and are still fleshing out the details of what we will try to achieve with this project.

UNIVERSITAS BRAWIJAYA

Nurafifah Alya Farahisya, Angel Anggina Nasution, Marsellino Prawiro Halim, Dzakiyyah Rosyadi

We are planning to offer a startup curricu lum to our campus. Through this curricu lum, we want to increase students’ interest and ability in entrepreneurship, especially in the field of technopreneurship. So it is hoped that Brawijaya University graduates can be motivated to build startups and already have the knowledge and experience while participating in learning through the startup development curriculum. We are planning to develop a curriculum with learning outcomes, including understand ing the basics of entrepreneurship in the field of technology, having the mentality/ character of an entrepreneur in the digital era, identifying business opportunities in the rise of technology and digital devel opment, planning and development of technology-based businesses. Considering that some of us will be graduating soon, Fellows that will be working on this project haven’t decided yet.

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Yulia Martinez, Jonathan Raj, Haley Rich, Lily Stewart

Initially, we developed an Innovation Passport, a system that introduced students to the Cincinnati innovation ecosystem. After testing our concept with administra tors and over 100 students while teaching design thinking classes, we received feedback that inspired us to pivot. Although administrators were enthusiastic about our idea, we realized that it did not serve our most important stakeholders: students. We rethought the Passport, identifying its pos itives and negatives, and incorporated both our original research and new feedback. The result was a six-week social innova tion project structure that incorporated students’ top priorities like earning service hours and engaging in impactful work. We returned to the classroom with new design thinking modules and encouraged students to participate in our project with a local nonprofit; they generated over 300 service hours. The scalability and sustainability of this project will allow us to continue engaging students in innovation by leading our modules each semester.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE Antonina Johnston

I am a Music Education and Nonprofit Management Major and I have found through my graduate and career experience that the arts can be very isolated from the rest of the University. My main focus and goal has been to break down the silos and attempt collaborations between our Peck School of the Arts and the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I have two projects currently going. The first was a Speaking Event discussing Music Business titled “How to Grow Your Music Career by Treating it as a Startup Business” with special guest Jared Judge on February 8, 2022. I wrote for a grant through Wisconsin NATS and received $400 to be able to provide Mr. Judge’s book to 40 guests.

My second project is to create a new Graduate Certificate and Graduate Program that integrates music and entrepreneurship. We applied for an Innovation Curriculum Grant and received $10,000. The Dean of the School approved our plan to create a Master in Music in Integrated Vo cal Pedagogy and Entrepreneurship. The program will launch in Fall of 2023 and will already be in front of the Graduate Committee for approv al this Spring. I am so excited to introduce design thinking, innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking to music students on campus.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMILWAUKEE

Allyn Lottouzee

I am working on a project to bring a sustainability degree program (both un dergraduate and post graduate) to UWM. Coursework completely dedicated to sustainability is extremely difficult to find. I met with the UW system’s vice regent in April with a university mentor to address the Sustainability Coursework Initiative.

Manuel Garmendez, Antonina Johnston, Allyn Lottouzee, Rudi Marciniak

We hope to make Entrepreneurship a grad uate level program and/or undergraduate program, rather than just the certificate that it is now. We call it the Entrepreneur ship Course Extension.

Transdisciplinarity and the Future

CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE

by Nicholas C. Zingale, Julieta Matos-Castaño, Abigail Poeske and Anouk Geenen Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates

Cleveland State University and the DesignLab at University of Twente

Living in society inevitably gives rise to controversy. Throughout history, we have witnessed how the way we deal with conflicts between different interests and values determines the course of events. Around the world, polit ical conversations routinely reach an impasse around so cietal challenges, from climate change, poverty, housing, and COVID-19 to other public health crises exacerbating inequality and hampering quality of life improvements. Today, and perhaps more than ever before, the pace of technological advances is rapidly transforming society and giving rise to seemingly insurmountable challenges and unpredictable controversies that society seems un prepared to properly address. These new issues become difficult to untangle from present-day wicked problems. The inability to imagine innovative ways forward often impedes constructive civil discourse as residual tensions from previous and current issues spill over to new and potentially future challenges.

A recent example of this is evident in the United States. On May 24, 2022, an American teenager entered a Texas elementary school and murdered 19 children and two teachers, just ten days after another American teenager killed ten Sunday morning shoppers at a New York gro cery store. Despite such devastating attacks on innocent lives, the United States has been unable to reach a policy solution to address this complex problem at the inter section of Constitutional rights, mental health, racism, political funding, and educational reform. The political divisiveness finds itself within an array of other hotly contested issues such as welfare reform, climate change, healthcare, and infrastructure funding. This case highlights that new approaches are needed to explore

innovative and constructive ways to address present and future controversies, designed to expand understanding while co-shaping present conditions and futures we want to live in.

When confronted with these controversial and complex “wicked” problems, which are tightly interconnected with one another1, solutionist, unilateral, and monodis ciplinary approaches are insufficient. A new way for ward is to create space (a third space) from which new ideas and ways of understanding can emerge. Transdis ciplinarity is a hopeful and emergent means to transcend traditional silos – whether those be organizational, political, disciplinary, or other. It requires creating a third space designed to generate new understandings and work toward solutions while accepting the evolu tionary nature of society and the persistent challenges and opportunities this creates.

Transdisciplinarity allows reframing problems2 and in tegrating knowledge and experience in ways that move beyond the Aristotelian binary A or non-A3 that have stymied academics, business leaders, and politicians. At the core of transdisciplinary collaboration is convening academic and non-academic actors such as government, industry, knowledge institutions and civil society (also known as quadruple helix) to address societal challeng es4. Transdisciplinarity consists of learning to think dif ferently, being open and able to include multiple voices and perspectives. It helps to conceptualize problems in new ways and calls for developing and experimenting with innovative approaches that draw upon existing organizational and collaborative traditions.

1 Rittel, H.W. J. & Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4:2. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730

2 Pearce, B. J., & Ejderyan, O. (2020). Joint problem framing as reflexive practice: Honing a transdisciplinary skill. Sustainability Science, 15(3), 683–698.

3 Nicolescu, B. (Ed.). (2008). Transdisciplinary theory and practice. Cresskill: Hampton Press.

4 Arnkil, R., Järvensivu, A., Koski, P., & Piirainen, T. (2010). Exploring quadruple helix outlining user-oriented innovation models. In Final Report on Quadruple Helix Research for the CLIQ project. Tampere: University of Tampere.

The following projects, Society 5.0 and Responsible Fu turing, complement the existing body of knowledge and practice on transdisciplinarity by providing mindsets, tools and techniques to transcend disciplines and tribal positions. Both projects look forward into the potential futures of society, including those where technology becomes integrated and embodied deeply in our lives, calling for critical yet constructive reflection on the societal impact this abundance of technology carries. Each project offers ways to sharpen our transdisci plinary skill sets, develop ‘futures ready’ mindsets, and practical ways to have productive, civil conversations around often controversial topics. These skills are critical, not only to start approaching the challenges of today but also to prepare for the difficult conversations on the horizon.

Stanford’s Faculty Innovation Fellowship sparked collaboration between Cleveland State University and the University of Twente as they began conversations around how to prepare future and present leaders for human-machine and technologically-embodied fu tures. In our discussions, we have created that third space that we advocate for by sharing insights and exchanging ideas related to our research projects around human-technology interactions, smart city futures, and controversies. We are pleased to present Society 5.0 and Responsible Futuring in the following sections, and we invite others to embrace transdisciplinary approaches and constructive controversing in their own curricula as tools to foster innovative collaboration around the wicked problems of today and of tomorrow.

Society 5.0 (S5) is a transdisciplinary initiative and grad uate curriculum developed at Cleveland State University. S5 catalyzes conversations to prepare current and future leaders for an existential era of society that is deeply

infused with advanced technologies which shape and re-shape our understanding of reality and what it means to be human.

Responsible Futuring is a design approach developed at the DesignLab of the University of Twente. Responsible Futuring equips societal stakeholders with tools and techniques to co-shape desirable futures by embracing transdisciplinarity and stimulating ethical reflection and moral imagination.

Together, these initiatives are playing around with in novative transdisciplinary approaches by sharing ideas, resources, and encouragement. It is our hope that the following pieces will inspire you to do the same.

Credit: Christine Ayo

5.0 (S5)

PREPARING THE NEXT GENERATION FOR THE UNREAL

by Nicholas Zingale and Kelle DeBoth Foust Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates Cleveland State University

HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACES AND FUTURE OF LIFE

Three doctoral students participating in the University Innovation Fellows Program pondered the question of whether society is entering a new stage of existence. They wrestled with age-old questions: If I exist, where do I exist and how? These questions were prompted by an experience that involved watching a person with limb loss operate a prosthetic hand with tactile sensa tion located in another room and separate from the rest of the body. If we can send human sensation to material objects, does it become possible to transfer human ex perience to other things and perhaps other worlds?

Advances in human-machine interface technologies are rapidly developing. Are we prepared for an existence that might take place at the confluence of real and virtual worlds? What will life look and feel like if we can be almost anywhere at any time and embody inani mate things? Will it matter if a thing appears alive or conscious if we cannot determine the difference? What kind of governmental systems, marketing enterprises, future work, and social structures will be necessary? What does a sylicarbon future consisting of artificial intelligence, multi-sensory transfer, and augmented/vir tual reality environs mean to the future of life?

The students and a small group of faculty from several Northeast Ohio universities began pondering these questions as a part of three larger initiatives: (1) The Internet of Things Collaboration (IOTC); (2) Public Information Technology University Network (PIT-UN); (3) Human Fusions Initiative (HFI). A subgroup quick ly formed into a diverse team of students, faculty and other professionals to form a think tank called HELPPS (Human, Ethical, Legal, Phenomenological, Psycholog ical and Societal impacts of advanced technology) to be gin a conversation on the impact of a sylicarbon future.

It was clear that advances in technology were setting the stage to propel humanity into a fifth stage of existence –Society 5.0 (S5) and that we needed an approach to begin thinking about the potential societal impacts at the speed of technological innovation. With financial support from the PIT-UN and New America, the team quickly began working on the creation of an S5 graduate certificate. The curriculum consists of four interdisciplinary courses: (1) Transdisciplinary Perspectives and Frameworks of Inqui ry taught out of Urban Studies; (2) Disability, Empathy, and Technology taught out of Engineering; (3) Humanity and Emerging Technologies taught out of Philosophy; and (4) Smart and Sensible Global Cities. The Smart and Sensible Global Cities team will be taught by Cleveland State University faculty and two international partners from the University of Rijeka, Croatia (a PIT-UN affiliate) and the University of Twente, Netherlands who have de veloped cutting edge training tools around concepts such as “Constructive Controversing” and “Future Frictions” to advance “Responsible Futuring.”

S5 has emerged as a topic of intense interest and debate designed to be situated as an ongoing conversation sur rounding what a fifth stage of development might be like. As in the previous four stages of societal development, (1) hunter-gathering; (2) agrarian; (3) industrial, and (4) informational, the role of technology shaped everyday experience as well as aspirational hopes for a better and more prosperous, fair, and equitable future. S5 will continue to push at the limits of our understanding of hu man experience, reality, intelligence, and consciousness, while confronting the future of work, travel, relation ships, governmental systems, legal applications, health care, education, access, equity, and life in general. It will raise substantial questions concerning human-machine interfaces, knowledge formation, privacy, security, and what constitutes life and the living. S5 will usher in a new society centered around questions of existence.

Imagine a typical day in S5 that might begin with holo graphic and/or avatar inhabited meetings in the NOW (Not Other World – think present world). The NOW is where our Earthly selves reside, and we inhabit our existing physical presence. NOW functions in similar ways as present day only with enhanced ability to be in multiple places with a click of a button. Therefore, a work meeting in Denmark is followed by another in Cleveland and then lunch with favorite friends and food while socially gathering on a remote ocean side table. Existing technologies supporting the NOW have already led to advances in prosthetics and other mus cular-neurological-skeletal disabilities. What was once considered disabled, such as limb loss or muscular-skel etal degeneration, are reconfigured to expand human capability. So much so that there is policy debate on the degree of human-machine enhancement.

In the NOW, society will wrestle with how to improve education and access to advanced technologies. There will be questions on what constitutes work and em ployment. Concerns of lewd acts at the boundaries of morally acceptable behaviors will be commonplace. The news will report online crimes, such as virtual rapes, cryptocurrency robberies, and erasing murders in which online existences are wiped out by criminal viruses. Simultaneously, there will be significant breakthroughs on health improvements, AI genetics and miracle cures, the ability to connect with others like never before, and hyper-efficient computer processing and energy use. There will be commercials for the VOW (Virtual Other Worlds) within the NOW. Within the VOW, you can be almost anything (imagine being fully immersed as, say, a dolphin for a day), anyone, or anywhere with a fully immersive multi-sensory experience for a price. These worlds will be created by commercial and open-source users, limited access, and dark worlds will proliferate the marketplace.

SOUNDS LIKE SCIENCE FICTION?

After all, weren’t we supposed to be flying cars by now and Star Trekking the universe? There is no doubt that we may not be able to fully achieve the degree of S5 existence described above, but there is substantial evidence that we are on our way. NASA recently sent a holograph of a surgeon to the International Space Sta tion. Robotics are commonplace in surgery. Technology developed to transfer the sensation of touch over the internet are used in advanced prosthetics and are shap ing human-machine interaction. Markets already exist for virtual experience software including haptic devices that emulate touch. Professional American football players have been using VR during training for many years. Furthermore, the National Football League is releasing in Fall 2022 the NFL PRO ERA virtual gaming technology for the fans. Artificial intelligence has been deployed in business planning and finance. It is also in use for cancer research, genetics, and pharmaceuticals. Trading bots have been at work for over 10-years on the stock exchange. Governments have been using AI and self-learning autonomous software for domestic, military, and international issues. Synthetic forms of life have been created at the molecular level (Xenobots) and have shown the ability to self-replicate.

WHO IS PUSHING THIS

Substantial public and private funding is driving syli carbon future technologies. Facebook purchased the Oculus VR business in 2014 and is investing around $10 billion into its Reality Labs division and metaverse. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent over $2 billion on advanced AI technologies over the past 5 years and plans to spend nearly half of their requested $4.119 billion FY 2023 budget on advanced technology development. According to the

Diagram courtesy of the authors

Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021 the three fastest grow ing industries in America are health care, energy, and technology and data science — all industries which are increasingly incorporating advanced technologies. As we move rapidly towards Society 5.0, advanced technolo gy is becoming more ubiquitous across most sectors and prevalent in almost all aspects of our world.

In the 2016 report “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence”2 by the Obama administration’s National Science and Technology Council Committee on Tech nology, the first recommendation encourages public and private institutions “to examine whether and how they can responsibly leverage AI and machine learn ing in ways that will benefit society.” In 2018, the Ford Foundation3 blogged about public interest technology as “a growing field you should know about,” and pointed out that there is an increasing number of organiza tions seeking tech expertise. A 2019 piece by the World Economic Forum4 pleaded for greater collaboration between policy and technology, and to educate more public-interest technologists. Also in 2019, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace5 argued, “Techno logical innovation is largely taking place beyond the purview of governments. In many cases, the rate of innovation is outpacing states’ ability to keep abreast of the latest developments and their potential societal impacts… A greater number and variety of actors must be involved to initiate, shape, and implement both tech

nical and normative solutions. Yet, like governments, many of these other actors do not have (or simply do not invest in) the means to consider the broader, cross-bor der societal implications of their investments, research, and innovations.”

Therefore, it is critical for higher education to prepare students to develop, manage, understand, and lead not only the technologies, but also to conceptualize the broader, societal implications. We must prepare our technologists, engineers, data scientists, and computer scientists, to think beyond the technology they are cre ating. At the same time, we must prepare our public ad ministrators, policy makers, business leaders, educators, and healthcare workers to understand the role these technologies are and will play in our work and lives. Universities should be leading this charge and doing so by applying transdisciplinary approaches.

WHAT IS TRANSDISCIPLINARITY?

Transdisciplinarity is an approach to inquiry and knowl edge which is designed to transcend disciplinary boundar ies and extend beyond the walls of the university, into the world. It appreciates that lived experience is as necessary as traditional forms of knowledge. It “is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. Its goal is the understanding of the

1 Zingale, N.C. (June, 2019). Transdisciplinary perspectives for smart governments, regions and cities [conference session], International Economics for Digital Transforma tions Annual Conference, University of Rijeka, Croatia.

2 The White House, Executive Office of the President National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology. (October 2016). “Preparing for the Future of Artifi cial Intelligence.” Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whitehousere_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/preparing_for_the_future_of_ai.pdf.

3 Brennan, Michael. “Public Interest Tech: A growing field you should know.” Ford Foundation. (April 2, 2018). Retrieved from https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-sto ries/stories/posts/public-interest-tech-a-growing-field-you-should-know/

4 Schneier, Bruce. “We must bridge the gap between technology and policymaking. Our future depends on it.” World Economic Forum, Internet Governance. November 12, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/we-must-bridge-the-gap-between-technology-and-policy-our-future-depends-on-it/

5 Kavanagh, Camino. “New Tech, New Threats, and New Governance Challenges: An Opportunity to Craft Smarter Responses?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. August 28, 2019. Retrieved from https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/08/28/new-tech-new-threats-and-new-governance-challenges-opportunity-to-craft-smarter-responsespub-79736

Disciplinary, Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary Approaches. Source: Zingale (2019)1

present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge”6. This integration of knowledge, ideas, and experience includes that of stakeholders beyond the academy, who are equal problem definers, knowledge co-creators, solution finders. In transdisciplinarity, disciplinary epistemologies and ontologies are unified in ways that result in cross fertilization and, consequently, potential for new knowledge7 ,8 .

BUILDING THE NETWORK AND DRIVING THE DIALOGUE

Operationalizing S5 by applying a transdisciplinarity mindset and approach requires engaging in an evolving and interactive network of activity to include internal and external partners. The S5 graduate curriculum and certificate serves as the connective tissue informed by an ever-expanding network of initiatives. These efforts are designed to create ongoing mechanisms for discourse and dialogue to explicitly and implicitly influence the types of research questions asked while shaping the curriculum, pedagogy and learning experience to create a foundation for the next generation of thought leaders — S5 transdisciplinarians.

Internally, this involves the creation of tools and approach es to drive multidisciplinary research collaborations by drawing on existing research centers and interests. Simul taneously, it requires engaging faculty, staff and students internationally and nationally to collaborate with external partners. The result is ever-expanding dialogue that is con tinuously evolving, avoids hierarchical or central control, yet facilitates questions and conversations brought on by Society 5.0 as the new stage of social evolution.

Beginning in Fall 2022, the first courses in the S5 gradu ate certificate will be offered. Several of the courses have been embedded in a National Science Foundation Re search Traineeship Program designed out of engineering and focused on technologies for the disabled community. It involves faculty at Cleveland State University (CSU) as sociated with the Center for Human Machine Systems as well as connected to the Human Fusions Initiative oper ated out of Case Western Reserve University and includes partnerships with UCLA’s robotics labs and University of Colorado’s haptics and neuro-engineering programs and the University of Twente’s design center. An S5 website serves as the central point of capturing and communicat ing activities related to S5. It is supported by an interdis ciplinary center located at Cleveland State University –CSU T.E.C.H. Hub, which has been created out of a 4-year Internet of Things Collaborative (IOTC) funding program from the Cleveland Foundation. An S5 board of advisors meets quarterly to discuss strategies and approaches. In total, there are over 130 faculty, students, and profession als directly involved in S5 across the network.

Over the next 5 years we plan to institute a S5 interdis ciplinary podcast, from which several episodes have already been recorded. CSU will host two discussion forums in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, while continuing to nurture the network partnerships to seed the curric ulum, seek joint research funding, and produce scholar ship for changing forward as we enter Society 5.0.

6 Nicolescu, B. (2014). Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, indisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity: Similarities and differences. RCC Perspectives 2: 19–26.

7 Lang, D.J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P., Swilling, M., & Thomas, C.J. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science (7)1, 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x.

8 McGregor, S.L.T. (2015). Transdisciplinary knowledge creation. In Gibbs, P. (Ed.), Transdisciplinary Professional Learning and Practice (9-24). Springer.

Diagram courtesy of the authors

COMING TOGETHER TO CO-SHAPE THE FUTURE WE WANT TO LIVE IN Responsible Futuring

by Julieta Matos-Castaño and Cristina Zaga Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates DesignLab, University of Twente

“The future is not something waiting for us, hiding be hind the door.” In her book Uncharted: How Uncertainty Can Power Change, Margaret Heffernan urges us to be in charge of our futures. She is not alone. In the last decades, futurists, speculative designers and strategists have promoted an active mindset and attitude to be in charge of our futures. We are living interesting and, sometimes, intimidating times that present pressing societal challenges. From tackling climate change to promoting the responsible development and use of technology, we are in charge of our futures. This might sound like a daunting task. However, it is the foundation for wonderful changes. How we address our societal challenges offers great opportunities for innovation and creativity.

Having this in mind, Responsible Futuring, the Design Lab’s approach was born. Our premise is that, if we want to make a difference in the world and innovate, we need one another. We cannot do it alone. We need to leave behind silos and disciplines; we need to open up spaces for collaboration. We must imagine futures ahead of us and reflect on the consequences of our actions. We have to embrace and realize the value of transdisciplinary crossovers. We need to look beyond technical challenges and reflect on and debate the soci etal and ethical consequences of our work.

This can be challenging. Often, we do not know how to get started: How do I bring together others to collabo rate? What is, actually, a societal impact? What do you mean by “plural” futures?

To answer these questions and adopt a learning-by-doing approach, we are creating a community around Respon sible Futuring on our campus and beyond. We want to equip and activate students, faculty members, and other external organizations to adopt a “we can shape our

futures” mindset. We are also exploring ways to embed Responsible Futuring as part of the life-long learning programs of the University of Twente so practitioners can learn from the approach and apply it at work.

To achieve our goal, our FIF project aims at connecting research and practice, experimenting with different methods and audiences to keep co-shaping the ap proach while we all co-shape futures. As part of our project, we are providing educational opportunities for students and practitioners, and creating places for experimentation to bring together communities, and to explore methods and tools to co-shape futures respon sibly. In May 2022, we launched a pilot masterclass with enthusiastic practitioners to test our methods and tools and learn together from their experiences. We are sharing our lessons learned with the Faculty Innova tion Fellows, and learning from their experiences to understand where the opportunities and challenges of making an impact lie.

We build our community with three main foundational elements in mind.

First, transdisciplinarity is key. When we want to make a difference and innovate, we need one another. Com ing together, we can turn challenges into opportunities because collaborating makes us more creative, helps us to see things we didn’t perceive before, and allows us to be more critical. However, collaboration can be bumpy. Sometimes, we might not understand each other’s perspectives or we might be familiar with the type of language we are using. That is why we experiment with transdisciplinary ways of working: to explore methods and tools that facilitate knowledge and perspective exchange in transdisciplinarity teams.

To achieve this, we are mobilizing our network of research fellows at the Designlab; researchers with diverse backgrounds that work on disciplines that range from robotics to policy studies that come together to address societal challenges. We are in a first stage of awareness creation within the network so we can connect research fellows to the Responsible Futuring community of practice.

Second, we need to foster ethical reflection. At times, we are so enthused by solving technological challenges that we forget to take a step back and reflect on what our actions might entail. Although it is not possible to anticipate all the effects that our developments will have, we can explore with others what controversial aspects might be part of them, and use those controver sies to fuel innovation and creativity.

The University of Twente, having a large community of students and alumni working on the development of technology, has great potential to offer life-long learning programs to stimulate a reflective mindset for those working on the development of technology. At the moment, we are exploring ways to embed Responsible Futuring in their curricula so, together, we can explore the impact of transdisciplinary collaboration and ethi cal reflection on co-shaping responsible futures.

Third, we embrace designerly ways of working. Making futures tangible and thinking with our hands immense ly support not only coming up with new ideas but also sharing them with others. We familiarize our commu nity with speculative design practices, to create proto types that bring futures to the present. For example, we tend to create smart cities that focus on efficiency but, what would happen if we put a different value, like ser endipity, at the core? How would our urban experience

change? The power of bringing these futures to the now is vast and fosters a type of discussion that cannot be achieved by looking at PowerPoint or PDFs.

For example, in some of our current educational efforts with practitioners, we are co-creating “provotypes” with experts to speculate around fraudless futures to reflect on the impact of governing values on various stake holders ranging from tax inspectors to elder citizens. Tangibilizing futures helps to stimulate ethical reflec tion and identify those actions that we can bring back to the present to adapt our practices.

Equipping communities to collaborate and co-shape futures is extremely powerful since it fuels responsible innovation. The task is to engage with communities to make this happen so they can discover the opportuni ties on their own. That is precisely what FIF is about: it offers an open and supportive platform to learn from each other and develop an experimental, reflective and innovative mindset. We are excited to be an active part of this community and look forward to co-shaping responsible futures together.

Credit: Christine Ayo

Discover “Who Do You Want to Grow Into?” Before Thinking “What Do You Want to Be?”

by Stephane Yu Matsushita Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate Tohoku University

“Which class, program or career should I choose?”

This would be one of the most important problems that many students in University encounter, not only during their campus life but also over their long lives. The firstyear student might ask “Which liberal arts class should I choose?” and the third-year student will ask “Which lab should I choose?” The master’s student may ask “Which of the various educational programs should I take in ad dition to my major?” or “Which career should I choose?” University offers a wide variety of courses, programs, and support to encourage students to be talented people or leaders in some fields. However, there are not many programs that can guide students to think and answer the question: “Who would I like to be, and what do I need to learn to be like that?”

The initial plan of my project was to develop a co-creat ed education program by faculty and students. Students would design their own learning programs with the support of faculty, which brings a dozen variations of entrepreneurship and innovation education. I thought it was a very interesting and student-centric project, and I started interviewing students about what kind of thing they wanted to learn.

“Leadership” and “Facilitation”... sounds good.

“Sports,” “Hobby,” “Cooking”... OK, might be interesting.

“Something cool”, “Nothing else”... hnnn.

Of course, some students gave me very interesting ideas, but most of the ideas were hard to connect to an education program. The biggest finding from the interview among 15 students was that it was difficult for them to think about what they wanted to learn

in addition to the curriculum in their major. Why is it difficult? By diving into a deeper level, I reached a hypothesis: Most of the students limit their future vision within an extension of their major. If we would like to change higher education to be much more diverse and creative, we should first give students the opportunity to think, design, and prototype their future with a diverse mindset.

After getting this hypothesis, I redesigned my project to build a program to discover, design, and prototype the future dream of each student. The program is construct ed in 3 parts (steps). Through these 3 parts, students can learn how to think about what kind of person they want to grow into, how to shape their ideas in real life, and how to take initiative. Students can find themselves in unexpected ways through experiences they did not anticipate when they entered university.

PART 1: FUTURE VISION LAB

FVL is a place where students can thoroughly imagine and create their own careers, and future dreams, and envision the future they wish to pursue and the paths that will lead them there. Students will learn how to find their dream and move toward it by empathizing with themselves, reflecting on their own success and failure experiences, brainstorming their future, and prototyping/testing their future.

PART 2: PROTOTYPING FACTORY

PF is a place to foster a mindset of making ideas real through systematic prototyping exercises. Students will learn how to shape their ideas and adjust them to their needs by doing rapid prototypes and testing them out of the classroom.

A PROGRAM TO DISCOVER, DESIGN, AND PROTOTYPE YOUR FUTURE DREAMS

PART 3: FUTURE CHALLENGE

Future Challenge is a place for taking the initiative to test the acquired abilities (future vision, prototyping mindset/skills, etc…) in a practical setting to enhance the willpower and challenging ability to take on difficul ties. Several programs in terms of 1-3 months, co-work ing with a social entrepreneur, creating a business model in a global team, and trying to implement digital transformation in the citizen, will be prepared. Students will select one program which fits their wisdom and tries to put their ideas, and visions into action.

Everyone had a dream as a child. But dreams mature and change over time as we move forward. Maybe there could be a moment we lose sight of our dreams and get lost. It would be wonderful if we could have a program to help, guide, and mentor students to find, design, and pursue their journey to reach their dream.

Credit: Laurie Moore

Reading Books With Your Ears

THE SPECTACULAR WORLD OF SOUND AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE OF OUR STUDENTS

by Daniel Flores Bueno PhD (c) Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

In the last 15 years of experience as a professor in the area of Humanities, I have witnessed how the printed books of the course I teach have been progressively los ing readers. This problem does not only respond to the reality of the university where I work, but it has to do with a global change produced by the emergence of new technologies. Nicholas Carr explains this in the book

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains1. The New media are altering our cognitive processes, attention and concentration, which are necessary for learning. Faced with this problem, researchers globally have raised several questions. In 2019, approximately two hundred researchers from areas related to the fields of reading, literacy and publishing worked on a paper on the evolution of reading in the age of digita lization2. While this research clarified some unknown aspects that existed between print and digital text; it was clear that there is still an unknown gap ideal for educational innovation researchers. However, one of the conclusions was that our students needed to develop a bi-literate reading brain that could take advantage of the best of both digital and traditional media.

With this in mind, in the last months, we have decided to turn this problem into an opportunity for innovation in the course of “Globalization: cultural and economic approach” of the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Apli cadas. Therefore, we have worked within the Stanford Faculty Champion framework, a solution that allows our students to access our readings both in printed text format and audiobooks through mobile technologies such as Spotify. This is intended to help those who find it difficult to decode a printed text, but who have sufficient motivation to learn. In this group there may be students with certain learning disabilities such as dyslexia, attention deficit, and a long etcetera.

The aim of this project has not been to create an audio book platform on Spotify to replace the reading of print ed books, as it is clear that it provides the conditions for the development of certain mental functions necessary in higher education. On the contrary, the focus is on being a means that serves as a complement so that students who for various reasons are able to read long texts, do not miss the opportunity to go through the ideas developed by the authors seen in class.

To carry out this project, the first thing we did was to record all the readings of the course supported by two homemade technologies: an Apogee Mic Plus USB, a mi crophone of studio quality purchased on Amazon.com, and an Apple iPad Air 2 with an audio editing software called Rode REC, in which we were able to work not only the editing but also on the post production. With these two accessories we have converted all the printed books into digital audios that we have published on a platform called Anchor, which allows us to distribute in a very simple way all our audiobooks through a Podcast chan nel called “Radar Investiga” on Spotify.

What has been the response from students and what im pact has it had on improving their learning? To answer the first question, we conducted some initial explorato ry surveys. First, we wanted to find out if the students had a mobile device and if they were familiar with the Spotify platform. These polls were conducted randomly in different classrooms. The results showed that almost 100% of the student population of the Universidad Peru ana de Ciencias Aplicadas in the courses “Globalization: cultural and economic approach”, from 2021 - 2022 have at their disposal a smartphone. Likewise, almost 90% of these students were familiar with the Spotify appli cation, which means the location of the Radar Investiga

1 Carr, N. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. 2010. Norton Paperback. New York.

2 Stole, H., & van der Weel, A. (2020). El mito del nativo digital: ¿por qué los nativos digitales necesitan libros? Lectura En Papel VS Lectura En Pantalla, 49–69. https://cerlalc. org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Cerlalc_Publicaciones_Dosier_Pantalla_vs_Papel_042020.pdf

podcast is ideal and facilitates rapid distribution of con tent. Regarding its use, a survey was conducted with 417 students from the same course. They were first asked for consent to participate in the research. 331 (79.4%) said that they agreed to participate. This allowed us to dis cover that 20.7% of them listened to the first reading of the course in its entirety only through the audio book”. Meanwhile, 18.2% reported that they read and listened to the reading and 42.2% said they only read it. These results show how the audio book can be a complemen tary tool to the printed text. We came to this conclusion because there is a group of students who listen and read simultaneously, as a form of aid to decoding.

Another important point has been note taking as a way to consolidate learning, which is common in people who have a habit of reading. 51.9 % of the people surveyed stated that they read and at the same time make notes, summaries or annotations. The number was notably lower in those who only listened, reaching only 28.4% out of a universe of 391 respondents. This means that there is a group of students who seek to access infor mation quickly, but are not familiar with processing techniques through note-taking, summarizing or mind mapping. That gives us an opportunity to train them in these methodologies so they can improve their learning through audiobooks.

To conclude, we agree with one of the conclusions made by the research of Singh & Alexander3. In this system atic review of the literature, it is stated that there is no definite yes or no regarding the positive impact of audio books on learning, but that it will depend on several fac tors. This means that there is still a lot of research and experimentation to be done. We are on that path.

Credit: Omar Vite

Crossing “Major” Boundaries to Co-Create the Future

by Aaron Bradley Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate University of Cincinnati

FUTURES IN FLUX

Information is instantly accessible for free, but it’s loosely regulated and not always accurate. Society faces increasingly complex challenges where solutions are undefined. Disruptions to social and economic systems are inevitable and likely perpetual. This could sound like the opening lines of an essay on dystopian futures, but disruption also breeds an opportunity for innovation.

For the world of higher education, rising to meet this moment means examining and adapting instructional methods, models of academic programming, and our general role in the social and economic landscape. Several pre-pandemic industry and economic forecasts were already challenging the confines of traditional discipline-driven educational models.

In 2017 the McKinsey Global Institute suggested that by the year 2030, 8%-9% of labor demand will be in occupations that have never existed before, and that up to 375 million workers could be forced to change job categories entirely1. For recent college graduates and current students, this means there’s a very real possi bility that the career they’ve spent 4-5 years preparing for won’t exist by the time they’re 30 years old. Simi larly, the World Economic Forum suggests that global economies are increasingly driven by jobs that require solving unstructured problems and effectively analyzing information.2

Post-pandemic, the timeline for many of these forecasts have accelerated or have already become a reality. In this landscape, spending 4-5 years in university prepar ing for a career that may not exist within a few years of graduation becomes a difficult value proposition. While the value of a college degree shouldn’t be measured

solely by its direct line to a specific career, these fore casts, coupled with the rising cost of higher education, do set the stage for thoughtful discussions about how we might respond. This moment presents educational institutions with an invitation to innovate and place an emphasis on developing graduates who are resilient, adaptable, critical thinkers, capable of embracing ambiguity with curiosity and confidence. Rather than curating and disseminating discipline-based informa tion, we have an opportunity to create and facilitate unique educational experiences that shape the way our students thoughtfully engage with the world. In this fu ture, universities will be home to subject-matter experts in a diverse array of fields AND experts in the creation of programs that facilitate cross disciplinary explora tion, discovery, and experiences that keep pace with the world outside of the university.

PROTOTYPES, PIVOTS, AND PILOTS

What would happen if students’ undergraduate careers were filled with experiences designed to foster a sense of curiosity and comfort with navigating complex un certainty? What if we trained students to see disruption as an opportunity for innovation rather than a potential setback? What if we introduced these experiences early and often in a student’s undergraduate career, while they still have some runway to let it shape their path?

At the University of Cincinnati, one of our responses is a newly launched, cohort-based innovation program called NEXT Innovation Scholars (NIS). Each year a co hort of high potential students from a variety of majors and academic years are selected to join NIS, inviting them into a diverse, multi-disciplinary community of

1 McKinsey Global Institute. (2017). “Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages.”

2 World Economic Forum. (2015). “The skills needed in the 21st century - New Vision for Education.”

THE WORLD — NOT JUST THE WORLD OF HIGHER EDUCATION — IS FEELING THE TENSION OF ACCELERATING CHANGE. SOME ANTICIPATED, OTHERS NOT.

innovators that we describe as “humble, hungry, curi ous, and bold in our pursuit of innovation and future creation”. Students from any and all undergraduate majors across UC’s thirteen colleges are invited to apply, and each year’s cohort is selected through a rigorous, multi-round review process by a committee that in cludes university leaders who specifically work in areas with cross-college reach.

The students selected for NIS receive scholarships to support their UC tuition for the remainder of their under graduate career, and gain access to signature cross-dis ciplinary educational experiences that sit outside the boundaries of traditional courses within their major. They remain in their traditional degree program and complete all degree requirements, but these signature experiences “wrap around” their degree to enhance it and give them ongoing opportunities to work outside

the boundaries of their degree program. They’re also immersed in a network of mentors and advisors from inside and outside the university who guide them along the non-linear path of becoming “more than their major.” Using the metaphor of the T-shaped professional, if their degree is the vertical line of their T, and the experiences they’d naturally encounter outside of their major are the top of it, NIS is like an amorphic sphere that encompass es their entire T and makes it possible to collide with other T’s and absorb their energy to grow stronger.

We’re also designing the program to enable fluid, agile collaboration with industry and community partners tackling real-world challenges together to explore future-focused solutions; students, faculty, and external collaborators come together to explore a messy chal lenge together, in an environment where no one has the upper hand. NEXT Innovation Scholars simultaneously

Credit: Marc-Olivier Jodoin

have one foot in their degree program and their college, and one foot in an ambiguous world of experiences cre ated to blur the lines of majors, disciplines, and indus tries. In exchange for scholarships and access to these experiences, students in the program are charged with sharing feedback on their participation and learnings, developing their own student-led cross-disciplinary innovation initiatives across campus, and working with faculty to co-create future experiences for their peers.

This nimble, invested group of students are working alongside faculty, administrators, and external collab orators to test and refine transformational models of teaching, research, and service with the potential to scale across all colleges and departments at UC (and eventually beyond). Prototyping and experimenting within this program has already revealed opportunities to disrupt existing paradigms - as an example, we’ve had great success experimenting with project-based industry or community-partnered experiential learning engagements that last between 5-8 weeks and aren’t constrained by traditional class structures.

Students in NIS participate in these short-term, highly experiential projects on short notice and in addition to their existing courses because they’re invested in the program (and incentivized by a scholarship), but credit hours are still the currency of a university degree. So, part of the vision for scaling these offerings across campus includes finding creative ways to give students course credit for experiences that start and end before or after traditional academic terms and present them selves on short notice. Learning comes through the lens of applied problem-solving in real-time response to the world outside of the university, and beyond the confines of their major.

Repeated educational experiences like these will train students to be comfortable in the uncomfortableness of messy problem solving and moving at the pace of change, while still allowing them to meet their degree requirements. Using the NEXT Innovation Scholars program as our prototype, we’re now in the early stages of exploring how to develop a scalable system for cre ating, vetting, and delivering classes like these across multiple colleges and departments, starting with other faculty and staff who are willing to experiment and learn with us.

This is just one example of what can happen when we give students and external collaborators a seat at the table and suspend some of our assumptions about how a course is structured or delivered, and I believe we’ve just started to scratch the surface of what’s possible when we embrace these principles. In just one year, students in the NEXT Innovation Scholars program have also used their platform and resources to create and teach design thinking and innovation modules to more than 200 first year students in cross-disciplinary gateway courses, developed a 4-week social innovation project with a local non-profit that attracted cross-dis ciplinary student teams and allowed them to earn com munity service hours for participation, and delivered a student-led workshop series teaching human centered design to faculty and instructional designers in our College of Nursing. Most of these projects involved early

tests and multiple pivots along the way, and all of them have moved past the prototyping stage and into the “pi lot” phase where they’ll be offered regularly to expand ing audiences. It’s exciting to imagine what else these experiments might spark or evolve into as they scale up and we invite collaboration from additional faculty, students, and partners.

WHAT’S NEXT?

So, where do we go from here? “We” as in higher educa tion collectively, not just this newly launched program at the University of Cincinnati. Just like any human-cen tered-design challenge, staying alert and aware of the changing landscape is critical. We must also adopt a bias toward action, and culture of experiments, proto types, and pilots. We need to invite external collabora tors as co-creators of educational experiences, rather than sponsors or clients. Similarly, we’ll have to see our students as collaborators and co-creators rather than consumers. In this world, the role of the professor or instructor tends toward coach, mentor, and leader, rather than lecturer or keeper of the “right” answers to the test. There’s a responsibility to design and steward the experience in a way that ensures student learning and moves the class forward toward benchmarks, but we’re also invited to learn alongside students and seek input on how the experience might adapt based on what everyone is learning together.

For the new program described in this article, we’re in the “messy middle” of ideate, prototype, test, and repeat, but we’re still on a clear path toward our original goals - we’ve also discovered and then met a few new ones along the way. The same is true when zooming out and surveying the landscape of higher education, and arguably the world as a whole in modern times. Embracing rapid transformation is fatiguing at times; as soon as a prototype is tested, another is waiting in the wings and the world may have already changed around us and made our original ideas obsolete. But, this also sharpens our ability to build structures and systems that stay nimble and leave room for real-time responses to changing landscapes. It teaches us to ride the wave of momentum and opportunity, instead of trying to force action through a static system.

If we invite students into the mess with us, they’ll learn to live in that same tension along with us — a skill they’ll inevitably need as they venture out to create the future when they graduate. What might this look like on your campus, with your students and collaborators from industry or the community? Better yet - what might it look like for us to collaborate across campuses, states, and continents, to create the future of higher education together?

As change makers, we rely on and cherish our connections with like-minded peers. Many of our students and faculty members are creating clubs, organizations, and communities of practice in order to gain collaborators and make progress on initiatives.

BINA NUSANTARA

UNIVERSITY

Santoni Dyaz, Janisse Janisse, Muhamad Irsyad Rafi Sudirjo, Yuliriani Yuliriani

The goal of B-Connect is to provide a space for students to interact and communicate with something they are interested in and become an integrated information access media. The problem we are trying

to overcome is the lack of connections that students make. We plan to begin this project with a small community of entre preneurship students. Every year, there are around 200 students who join the entrepre neurship track at Bina Nusantara for their Enrichment Track in college. We will start approaching them and start growing the community from there to achieve our big goals so we can share news, information, and opportunities.

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

Peter Chang, Nireeksha Namjoshi

The primary campus project that we are working on is Student Innovation Collective (SINC), at California State University, Ful lerton. Within SINC we create the possibili ty of connecting students and faculty across multiple disciplines and facilitate projects around the university that incorporate design thinking practices. Students also gain the opportunity to learn new skills and get connections while serving on projects within SINC.

ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM

Teodora Comanescu, Nick Tennekes, Anisha de Vries

FOOTHILL COLLEGE

Our project is to use an Enactus club to enhance the school’s innovative spirit. The central goal amongst our club members (and beyond) is how to activate leadership skills, sharpen entrepreneurial mindsets, and build a strong, safe community weighing in the social impact com ponent. This project addresses the need for innovators, young entre preneurs, and the growing attention for social change in the business sphere. The Business Innovation Challenge is a marathon-type compe tition that goes through a 4-5 week training to get from a business idea to a pitch in front of real judges. At its epicenter, BIC merges business innovation with social impact. Our primary involvement with BIC is to network it to Foothill students (especially of underrepresented popula tions), bring in speakers from the community and give the whole train ing process a more innovative twist based on design thinking. Enactus club members will be participating in the challenge.

Another project we are working towards for the end of the school year is a Cultural Fair, whose purpose is to celebrate unity, embrace multiracial backgrounds of the Foothill students and build a stronger sense of com munity. It addresses the challenge of disconnectedness that prevailed all over campus due to the pandemic.

The project we are working on is to create a campus innovation community. In our conversations with students and staff, we noticed that a lot of campus innovation projects are already taking place at Eras mus University, but each of these projects is guided by its own designated (small) team. This is often inefficient and often does not allow for the people behind these initiatives to get in contact with each other. We want to create an innovation community to com bat this problem, by actively connecting innovation-minded people and by allowing them to get in touch with each other for advice, help, or to promote projects. This way we hope to further propel campus in novation by bypassing the often inefficient bureaucracy of a university campus and creating shorter lines of communication.

INSTITUT TEKNOLOGI HARAPAN BANGSA

Timotius Haniel, Vincentsius Herlam bang, Cintya Kristianto, Thomas Ken Ronaldi

Our ITHB project focuses on building an entrepreneurship community that allows students to have experiences in running a small-middle level business or startup com pany. The goal is to make this community a place to explore their potential, knowledge, and skills. ITHB was founded by a family that has a strong business background and therefore business is an ingrained thing in ITHB. There is a course for engineering students called Technopreneurship which teaches students how to run a business with the latest knowledge such as running a startup company. We worked on a project to develop a community which facilitates students who want to be entrepreneurs or run a business. We have tested entre preneurship on our campus by attending a Technopreneurship course. In the final

Georgina Fakoukaki, Tatiana Fakoukaki

round, there were 8-10 groups which had the best ideas chosen by each mentor group. There were a lot of great business ideas in the field of technology, health, and property. One group showed us about great ideas on my campus which is possible to be a great business in the future. Now, we are still developing what community can help them to realize their business idea. We are planning to launch the community in Summer 2022.

PADJADJARAN UNIVERSITY Raihan Badrahadipura, Farrel Christian Pambudi Piether, Agung Anggara Rudini, Muhammad Shiddiq

Our team is working on facilitating a student community in innovation and entrepreneurship in collaboration with higher education institutions. In collab oration with the Electrical Engineering Student Association (HMTE) UNPAD and the OKK RK087 group, we held a Social Entrepreneurship Webinar with the theme, introduction to health monitoring tools. This theme is an important thing that needs to be done, especially in the current pandemic era, where one cannot see a doctor and seek treatment easily and there are also many people who do not know the importance of health monitoring tools. This activity aims to provide education to the public regarding the function and how to use health monitoring tools.

We are also planning to create a student activity unit on our Campus that is UNPAD Technology Club (UTC). These are UTCs that will accommodate technology inter ests, namely: Robotics, Artificial intelli gence, Digital technology, Internet of every thing, Information Technology.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMILWAUKEE

Rudi Marciniak

I am just starting to dive into the project to form a Living Learning Community in our University Housing that centers on design thinking. This is a very unpolished idea but targets the gap that we identified in access to design thinking knowledge and skills on our campus AND the gap in connecting new students to our campus.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA Jacqueline Small

The year 2020 was a memorable one for us all. My cohort and I dis cussed the significant changes in the mental and social climate, as well as the pandemic, in relation to their impact on our mental health. As it became time for me to decide on a project, I interacted with various groups of people to find a solution. I received a lot of feedback but decided to pursue an issue that I also related with, being a black girl at a Predominately White Institution (PWI).

After brainstorming, I started “(for a black girl)” to create a safe space for women of color on campus. I proposed the idea to various people and got overwhelming support by friends, students, and staff, so I continued with the process. (for a black girl) is now a Registered Stu dent Organization at the University of North Florida. We have about 100 registered members and they are amazing. Each girl comes from various backgrounds and has various career goals in mind. Some aspire to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, therapists, and teachers. They are intelligent and confident. Because of the club, we have been able to ad dress concerns about the Black community and our campus. One of the biggest concerns is the lack of representation on campus as well as lack of mental health resources. We hope to focus our efforts on advocating for these things this semester. We dream of being vital leaders in our community and seeing all parts work together in harmony.

The pandemic reminded us how essential it is to provide students, faculty and administrators with many different ways to engage with one another, both in person and online. This year, a number of Fellows and faculty designed new platforms and processes to make it easier for their community members to connect and find information.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT

Dana Bekdash, Jason Diab, Mariam El Madhoun, Zein Zebib

The primary project we are working on is the “How to AUB” app. One of the biggest problems in AUB is that information and advice are spread through word of mouth. More issues that arise include admin istration that spends a lot of their time answering the same questions, students enter AUB very confused, clubs do not have an official portal to put their info,

and students overlook important oppor tunity emails. The How to AUB is an app that is meant to increase peer advising and collaboration among AUB students. The app has three main features. 1. “How to” guides made by students or faculty for students. The guides will be written by students who want to help other students in AUB or written by faculty to answer FAQs. Students can navigate guides in a format similar to Tinder (swipe left to like, swipe right to dislike, swipe up to go to the next guide) 2. “Volunteering,” an AUB LinkedIn for students, people who need help with projects can post the role they are looking

for on this screen. 3. “Clubs,” a page on the app where clubs will put info, events, and images about their activities. These features will give AUB students a central place to access all there is to know “How to AUB.”

ELON UNIVERSITY

Alyssa Martina (Faculty Innovation Fellow)

My FIF project focuses on creative entre preneurs. Our initiative called Marketplace Under the Oaks has gained traction but we want to gain more momentum in the beginning of the Fall semester. In the past, we’ve found that the number of student micro-businesses expands significantly in the Spring semester. Yet, due to many seniors taking part, our numbers fall in the Fall. This year, we want to introduce Marketplace to freshmen in the hopes of getting first year students involved and building capacity more quickly. One change we’re considering is a new name and we are also developing some marketing campaigns that should help us gain a bigger following earlier in the school year. It is also our hope to also create a micro-business fund for these creatives to support their growth.

INSTITUT TEKNOLOGI HARAPAN BANGSA

HAMBURG UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Jan Famulla, Julia Föllmer, Lennard Korte

The primary goal of our UIF project is to shine a light on all the awe some offerings that are happening on and around our campus and that are often going unnoticed during everyday student life. Especially the last two years made it challenging for students to connect with one another and to take advantage of the offerings of our university. For this reason we launched a podcast that introduces a new topic every episode. The name of the podcast is “Planting Seeds” and it covers the three columns PEOPLE, INNOVATION and STUDENTS. Each episode is an interview with either a person working at our university, someone who used to study at the TUHH and now manages their own startup or a student that is active in a student group. We chose the podcast, because we feel like it is a medium that is easily accessible and easy to digest. People can tune in if they like the topic of the week and there is not a huge barrier to go anywhere and participate. Episodes run around 25 minutes, so they’re easy to listen to on the commute to/from universi ty. People don’t have to “make time” for the podcast — a perfect time slot already exists. The podcast was launched in early June and is now published every other week on Spotify and Apple Podcast. Check out the podcast at anchor.fm/planting-seeds, podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/ planting-seeds/id1628995535, or on Spotify (scan the below code using your Spotify mobile app).

Timotius Haniel, Vincentsius Herlambang, Cintya Kristianto, Thomas Ken Ronaldi

Our team of Institut Teknologi Harapan Bangsa (ITHB) Fellows is working on a proj ect that focuses on building a foundational infrastructure to allow students to have a wide professional network in order to reach their full potential in preparing for their professional journey. In this project, we are trying to solve problems in ITHB, especially in networking and collaboration. As some background, ITHB was founded in 2002 which means ITHB is only a 20-year-old newborn university in Indonesia. We found that there are differences between ITHB students (a local university) and overseas universities, especially in terms of self-de velopment, networking, and collaboration. We believe it leads to a lack of professional networking and also causes a lack of direct access to big industry professionals (e.g McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Google, etc.). This causes a snowball effect that can make students not have community support from professionals to prepare themselves to face the battleground. Therefore, we are trying to solve the problems by doing a collab oration with an Indonesian non-profit organization named Cornerstone Careers. Most Cornerstone Careers board members are early-middle professionals who are currently working in big companies like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, EY, etc. In this first quarter, we are focusing on building a long-

term relationship with the organization as our partner. Second, we are developing an exclusive career mentoring program for ITHB Students with the professionals/ mentor from Cornerstone. Lastly, we are trying to build a community that supports students’ career development.

IONA UNIVERSITY

Leah Figueroa, Aishani Nalla

We realized during training that there is a huge problem with communication on our campus. As a result, it has been difficult to foster a sense of belonging especially being that our campus is small and mostly commuters. We identified that many students stay in their groups or only attend class and usually do not know about the amazing events that are occurring on campus. After training, we met with our stakeholders and implemented the Student Events application on our campus portal for easy access. We will continue working on simplifying the process to have events added to the application. We will also con tinue to research student priorities on our campus and foster the sense of community even after graduation. After we came back from the UIF Meetup, we presented our idea at Iona’s Scholars Day. We identified that our technology solution is not enough to truly solve the problem with students not engaging with one another at events across campus. Our project is pivoting, and we are launching a survey to collect data during first-year student orientation. After con necting with other stakeholders on campus, we discovered that students follow and learn the community’s culture at first-year student orientation.

KHALIFA UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Majed Albarakani, Mohammed Alyam mahi, Salama Alzarooni

We are working on giving a platform to the students to express their inventions or businesses, the KU Bazar. In addition, we are working on a social media portal to majors, which will better introduce majors to students. We are also exploring ways to make the KU main hall more suitable and com forting to students, and to encourage more collaboration between faculty and students.

MADANAPALLE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

Sulasya J.M., Hima Siri Kadepalli

The name of the primary campus project we are working on as a result of our UIF training is “Project Showcase,” a web page for displaying project reports of students.

LOUISIANA TECH UNIVERSITY Andrew Bryant

As a result of my UIF training, I am continuing to work on my campus project, titled Bulldog Marketplace. Bulldog Marketplace will act as an active, centralized platform intended to provide much-needed expo sure to innovative entrepreneurial ventures originating from Louisiana Tech University. Not only will Bulldog Marketplace serve as a spotlight meant to highlight the creative talent at Louisiana Tech University, it will also give student entrepreneurs an outlet to connect and collabo rate with like-minded innovators around campus. This is perhaps the most important facet of the entire project; building an interconnected community founded on a valuable core of shared interests. Bulldog Marketplace itself is still under development and I am still deciding what platform will support my plans. This being said, progress is being made and the future looks bright. I am optimistically excited to see the impact my project will have on campus and beyond!

There are many students in the institute who are involved in many projects and research publications, individually or as a team, irrespective of departments. For example, every academic year the final year students of our institute work on a vast number of minor and major projects. Project Showcase will show the projects, also the abilities and skills of the people involved in them. Committing to sharing

student work with the public is a great accountability measure because Project Based Learning performances are likely to require demonstration of a broader skill set including not only content knowledge, but also important 21st century skills such as collaboration, creative problem solving, communication and creativity.

PADJADJARAN UNIVERSITY

One of our projects is to help students enter the business environment to build entrepreneurial skills. We found that it is difficult for develop ing business owners to find human resources both in terms of availabil ity and competence. And from the student’s point of view, we see that students need practical experience in the world of entrepreneurship through internships. For this reason, we created a forum to bring to gether business owners and students through Instagram. This program is called the MAU Project, and through this program, business owners can advertise internship vacancies for students. For students, in addi tion to getting information related to student internship vacancies, they gain knowledge about the world of work or careers.

point of our campus project (also because it’s one of the possible things to do during the pandemic). Main objectives of this project is to publish our strategic priorities, gain more audiences, and hopefully we are able to collaborate with other parts of the campus. A lot of people cheered us because of our entertaining podcasts. But still there are some challenges. Once again we found that it is difficult for four of us to virtually gather by the same time, since the podcasts require Fellows as the hosts. And also it is difficult to invite the key speaker or guest stars to our podcast. Check out the podcast by scanning this code in your mobile Spotify app.

MADANAPALLE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

Manvitha Buddalakshmi, Thota Sai Roopesh

We are working on a project named “MITS Luminaries.” It is all about showcasing the success stories and struggles of achiev ers to inspire the students. Many of their achievements are not properly pooled and documented. The students’ community is unaware of their success stories. So we wanted to create a platform to bring out their innate capabilities and contributions to the limelight. Public recognition and sense of achievement always boosts up one’s morale and the same motivates others to stay focused. Students crave for campus identity and this positive identity brings real world achievement into the “reel world” in the most interesting way: by interview ing and recording them, and uploading the videos on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. These crisp, clear, creative and interesting short videos attract

the youth. The impact will have a ripple effect and the synergy transforms into inno vations. Instagram @mits_luminaries

TELKOM UNIVERSITY

Ibrohim Al Hanif, Melani Hariono, Iga Narendra, Alfi Zahra Hafizhah

We are working on Project 2-20, as well as other projects. All the projects are meant to create a positive and creative habit that loops to students. Project 2-20 part is to encourage gratefulness through pre-COVID flashbacks. The major challenge for this project is because some COVID restrictions made it difficult to arrange meets and have a lot of students gathered in univer sity areas. Hence we created a podcast to accommodate the goal without arranging in person meetings with impacted students. The “UIF Tel-U Podcast’’ is a result of our strategic priorities during UIF training. We decided to make this podcast as a starting

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY

Watcharawut Masawat

I am working on an interview project with my friend who is not a Fellow. We invite professors and experts in different fields for an interview with us that focuses on how the expert’s journey made them who they are today, plus a brief explanation of their expertise, delivered in a very digest ible manner. We aim to inspire students who are burning out in the full online envi ronment of Tohoku University, and the very harsh situation that some international students are still stuck in their countries for almost two years because of the closed bor der. We are hoping that the interviews can give the audience motivation and inspira tion to continue studying and/or start new hobbies (because we talk about journeys).

UNIVERSIDAD DE INGENIERÍA Y TECNOLOGÍA

Nadia Chamana, Macarena Oyague, Mia Townsend

Our project is called Student Life at UTEC. This idea was born from interviews we conducted at students in our school where many of them expressed a desire to get to know and involve themselves in extracur ricular activities. At the same time, the majority admitted that they didn’t know what were the possibilities that students had created for other students. They were not aware of all of the options that are al ready available for them, how to join these initiatives or felt too nervous or unqualified to do so. We ourselves have experienced the same uncertainty of being university students and the expectation of doing something big. With that, we had a goal in mind! We have been creating a space with the purpose of matching students to the activity, project or organization that best suits their particular interests and talents. For this, we created an Instagram page

Raihan Badrahadipura, Farrel Christian Pambudi Piether, Agung Anggara Rudini, Muhammad Shiddiq

Credit iStockPhoto.com/Dimiraira

available to all students and are currently working on launching a whole web page for students to explore more about this world. Its purpose is to talk to them in a peer-lan guage in order to encourage them to take a step forward and take the risk to try something new. The benefit of having these resources is to give the student the benefit of being able to directly contact us, which many of them find less intimidating than talking to school staff. We also offer talks, workshops and networking spaces that help students grow in academic or extra-aca demic areas with the help of existing orga nizations or projects at UTEC. Recently, we hosted our first unconference of extracur ricular activities at UTEC with the help of another UIF led project. This semester, we are expected to launch an innovation workshop for high school students, among other activities. We are looking forward to continuing helping UTEC students find the best fit for their passions and skills.

UNIVERSITAS TERBUKA

Fabrianne Albertina, Hubertus Boli, Richmond Faithful, Nur Holifah

Cohort 2021 Fellows from Universitas Terbu ka have created UniTed as their final proj ect. This is a website-based platform aimed at increasing the number of outstanding students at UT, connecting UT students with other students, and as a forum to get various information needed by students both about campus, competitions, and scholarships. The website consists of 4 sections, each proposed and run by the four of us. “Hai Maba,” initiated by Richmond Faithful, is a feature intended for new students to get more detailed information about UT. “Stu ter” or Student Corner is a section proposed by Nur Holifah where students can connect with each other both between students, lecturers, and regional campus. The third part is UT 911 which was pioneered by Fabrianne Albertina as a forum for students to seek information about competitions, workshops, and scholarships both domesti cally and internationally. In the last section, there is Mapres 101 which was proposed by Hubertus Ade Resha Raditya Boli as a forum for data on UT’s outstanding students. This feature allows students to contact the out standing student directly to ask for guidance or ask about their experience. Explore the project at united.ut.ac.id.

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA

Joshua Oahre, Jerome Thomas-Glass

Our primary campus project is develop ing a newly innovative platform in which students can easily access opportunities to be involved in organizations, campus events, and volunteering opportunities. We

UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE Emilija Banytė, Radhika Kapoor, Panashe Mangezi

As part of our UIF training, we were taught to analyze problems that occur at our university and find solutions through design thinking. We identified a problem of student depression and anxiety before the pandemic, but especially during it. Social isolation restricted us from meeting and connecting with people. As we are social creatures, a meaningful connection is vital to us. That is the reason why the Meet & Greet was brought to life. We wanted to develop an initiative where both students and employees can casually gather and connect with one another while abiding by the COVID regulations.

With this project, we created safe opportunities for students to make meaningful connections. Four Meet & Greet Street locations were open every day for the duration of the project, and people could walk in anytime as long as it was within the opening hours of the building. We have arranged standing coffee tables with conversational cards to help people get started with a conversation. This project, just improved, is expected to continue during other occasions. For Valentine’s Day we or ganized speed dating for the purpose of finding a friend or even signif icant other. The pandemic distanced students and the ones who came to study during the pandemic encountered the problem of finding true friends. Thus, with this funky project, we helped to create new friend ships. Instagram @meet_and_greet_ut

have seen a challenge in which students are not aware of the vast array of opportunities that exist despite their interest in finding ways to explore their hobbies and passions outside of a classroom environment. Our initiative focuses mainly on developing an online program, such as a mobile or web-based application, that can act as the connecting point between organizations and students. We hope to build an incen tive/reward-based system in which students are motivated to attend events by receiving

digital rewards that can be redeemed for items either through the university or neighboring businesses. We hope to see campus life brought back to pre-pandemic levels and to see students being connected to new groups full of passionate individuals who feel empowered to make change in our community. Our situation is unique due to the commuter nature of our campus, but what seems to be a weakness can quickly become a strength for our UNO community.

UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE

Emilija Banytė, Marlen Braun, Fátima González-Novo, Thomas Goudsblom (2020), Novianita Isnaynizhra, Panashe Mangezi, Seth Palsgraaf

In the past months, we have been working in close collaboration with the Univer sity marketing department to develop a platform called Prikbord (currently being used by the employees of our universi ty). Prikbord is an online version of the physical advertising boards that you can find at every supermarket. It is based on open-source software and can be hosted at our university, ensuring that the data will be safely stored and only accessed by our students. The main goal of Prikbord is to facilitate communication between students from our university by developing a platform where they can freely share their feelings, give advice, ask for help and talk with each other. The platform we plan to develop is fully customizable, with the possibility of creating an unlimited number of categories. Students will have the possibility of sharing information, commenting and liking different posts, and searching for specific topics (among many other functionalities). Some of the topics that students could discuss on this platform are the following: advertisements/sales, housing advice, events, questions about courses (previous exams, exercises...), and informal job offers (private tutoring). A few of us presented a project proposal to the Digitalisation department. All of the Fel lows from our Cohort will work further on the implementation of this project as soon as the action plan is approved.

Jacques Fürst, Fátima González-Novo, Radhika Kapoor

We helped with the UIF wellbeing walks, an initiative for students to connect on a short walk in the forest around the UT during the Christmas holidays and beyond. For this, we created posters for walks of different lengths and a WhatsApp group for people to connect and go on these walks together.

VASIREDDY VENKATADRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Madan Mohan Chunduri, Haindavi Ghanta, Vinay Manukonda, Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Jyothirmai Reddy bathuni, Jayanth Upthala

We wanted to connect students on campus with alumni, so we felt a website would be the perfect choice to bridge the gap. With this website, VVIT Alumni Connect, we wanted to make use of our large alumni network spread across the world and utilize it in the best way possible. The website has been developed and is being used by some students to help find any errors. We also

communicated with some alumni who can guide students on campus with internships and career guidance. We arranged a few alumni interactions with students. Apart from that, the website connects alumni to our school by posting all of the events and news that are happening on campus, so they can stay up to date on what is going on in college. We officially launched the alumni website on December 23, 2021, on the occasion of our college Alumni day. To reach this website to our Alumni, we are currently sending registration links to their emails. Visit the website at vvit-alumni. herokuapp.com.

VNR VIGNANA JYOTHI INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Hitaarth Jainn, Ratna Keerthana Naduri, Padmavathi Nayak, Akkinapally Snigdha

The project we are working on is a platform the promotes the growth of innovation and entrepreneurship culture at VNR VJIET.

The concept behind the project is to create awareness amongst the students of the half completed projects (done by alumni) or the ideas that the students have. The plan is to release a podcast, calling it “The Lunch Talk” which tells about all the ongoing innovation related activities, entrepreneur ial related activities, trends and winnings in the campus in an appealing way. The spreading of the idea of innovation is planned by announcing “Idea of the month” or something similar, felicitating the win ners with a special mention on the institute website and taking their idea forward if found viable, calling them the Campus Jugadians. We’ve also teamed up with the Entrepreneurship Development Cell and Institute Innovation cell of the campus for conducting activities that promote young Innovators and Entrepreneurs, enabling them to become the Student Preneurs. We have been working on the website which outlines the ongoing events, activities, half-done projects, where students give their ideas and releases podcasts. We dug up to know what was needed in the website after interacting with the faculty and stu dents mainly, circulating google forms to know what does “the college community” expect to be a part of the website. “Idea of the week” or something similar will result in the enlightenment of the I&E culture on our portal. We even plan to organize talks “Promoting the Luxury of Failure.”

Recursive Impact for Indonesia Digital Archipelago

A BREAKTHROUGH IMPACT THAT LEVERAGES THE FUTURE TECH TALENT OF INDONESIA

By Nurrizky Imani University Innovation Fellow Universitas Gadjah Mada

Completing our strategic priorities as a UIF team was dif ficult, especially at the end of the semester when we were swamped with multiple projects and internships. After we implemented the second priority, the team was no longer able to continue with the same members, as they all grad uated and accepted different opportunities.

At the time, I was preparing for the UIF Silicon Valley Meetup at Stanford University in March 2022, and I was preparing to conclude my UIF journey in a positive man ner. Nonetheless, the Meetup proved to be the launching point for my non-profit program to assist tech product engineering students to get opportunities through internships. During the time I spent preparing for the trip, I had to ask myself if it was worthwhile to invest the time and effort. My preparation was not easy; I struggled with funding due to a campus complex administration process, which ultimately resulted in a denial of fund ing from the campus administration. However, I was fortunate to get funding from my study department in computer science, which helped to lower the cost. I then joined the UIF Meetup by myself to represent Universi tas Gadjah Mada.

I am grateful that the hardship of coming to Stanford allowed me to rediscover my true north star. The Meetup aided me in discovering my passion for understanding “system” through design thinking. For me, this “system” entails creating social change through the product engi neering sector in the technological realm. This led me to the final strategic priority implementation.

In April 2022, I was thrilled to be accepted in Mckinsey & Company’s Young Leaders of Indonesia (YLI), one of the most prestigious and competitive scholarships in Indonesia that provides leadership knowledge and opportunities. During the program, I was able to develop the UIF UGM’s final strategic priority as one of the Per sonal Leadership Projects with the assistance of mentors from Young Leaders of Indonesia and UIF. Using my experience in developing two UIF priorities, I designed a non-profit program called “Recursion Tech Mentoring Program,” which helps students obtain internships in technology product engineering roles. This project rep resents the convergence of my interests in technology, leadership, and design thinking.

The trainings offered by UIF and Young Leaders Indone sia enabled me to create a mentoring program without significant difficulty. I collaborated with a team of four to develop an end-to-end plan for the long term, which aid ed in the development of a simple yet effective working and monitoring system. During the mentoring program, I was able to invite nine mentors with extensive industry experience from Google, Gojek, and Tiket.com, among others. With the support of three communities, I was able to register more than 40 students and select 20 for the mentoring program. During mentoring, we delivered content and also fostered a sense of belonging and con nection with each individual. Our objective was to ensure that mentoring is enjoyable, which facilitates effective learning. This was the implementation of Susie Wise’s “Design for Belonging” session that I attended at the UIF Meetup, which helped me make Recursion a fun commu nity despite its high level of online activity.

In the end of the Recursion Program, I was able to create 18 mentoring sessions and invite 36 students to a closing event about internships at Google. Recursion has become one of the most enjoyable initiatives for me. It allowed me to implement what I’ve learned about design thinking frameworks from Stanford and problem-solv ing frameworks from McKinsey & Company to influence the technology community in Indonesia so that Indone sia can realize its vision of becoming a digital archipel ago. I hope Recursion will continue to impact students in Indonesia by connecting them to the industry in the future. Check our impact on Instagram and LinkedIn @recursion.tech.

The final meeting of the Recursion Program

U-Life

YOUR EVER-GROWING PLACE BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

By Silvana Balarezo Faculty Innovation Fellow Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

Universities are rapidly moving from face-to-face to virtual. We started the process a few years ago but the pandemic has accelerated the need for such transforma tion. We know that university life goes beyond just taking classes. If we want to transform the university experience for distance-learning students, we need a platform that promotes university services and values such as social interaction, diversity, multiculturalism, co-creation and innovation.

During pandemic lockdowns, when we had to move to virtual campuses, we had students who did not experi ence physical campuses. Also, during this emergency process, we were focused on maintaining class sessions without losing academic quality. There was no time to address university life beyond the classroom — what hap pens in the corridors of the university, dining halls, yards and parking sites, and in the interactions of the students. These students, in addition to studying, were entering a world where they hoped to find new friends and a social environment that complemented their academic training and reinforced their soft skills.

In this context, the need to create this parallel virtual space appears, which allows students and teachers to meet in a non-formal environment facilitated by the university.

Carolina is a student who finished high school with great emotion and enthusiasm, given that a few years earlier, she was in the process of choosing which university ca reer she would follow. Finally, she opted for the Interna tional Business career, which is also very trendy. In fact, she entered the UPC a few months before finishing high school. She took a well-deserved vacation and when she returned ready to start this new stage of her life, eager to meet new friends who would also mark the path of the following years, a global pandemic appeared, and Caroli na began her university classes online.

She focused on her classes, on understanding the Virtual Classroom concept, and on trying to stay awake in her classes, which she often took from her bed. It was a challenge.

The university began to offer some virtual activities to meet friends, but nobody turns on their camera, nobody talks. In conclusion, the university — besides the classes, some being good and others more or less — couldn’t offer life beyond the class sessions. At most, she talks with her teachers and the people from the group she has been working with on some courses.

After two years, Carolina feels disappointed and bored with the life she leads. She gets up, goes to her classes, does her homework, doesn’t know who she’s talking to and assumes they’re good people. But she would like to get to know the university and to know what other activities there are. Sometimes she finds out about some of them when there are no longer any more places left, because someone mentioned it, and everything is very scattered in the university.

She recently found out that there is a virtual parallel world that has activities within the university. She is very curious to know how it works so she can meet other friends, and/or be part of a community of interest. She really likes skating and surely there must be more people interested in this topic. Carolina registered so you can enter this world and explore and see what it is about.

The day came when Carolina was able to enter the U-Life world and found that she could visit any of the campuses. She first visited the Monterrico campus, which was her study campus, and she was pleasantly surprised by all the spaces that it has. She found a community of entre preneurs and chatted with them for a while. She then explored the e-sports community, where members were

talking to see if they could create a group of skaters and they said yes. Now she is thinking of creating that com munity in this world and being able to meet students interested in this topic. She was also able to see that there is a community of tutorials in Statistics. She went there because the truth is that things are not going very well on this topic, and she could see that many students attend these tutorials and improved their grades. And ohhh surprise, on the weekend there is a live concert, by God, she will not miss that. She only needs to convince two friends to go with her to get her ticket. And suddenly when she left the virtual world because she had to run to a class, she was very happy to know that there was life beyond the classroom.

Carolina has created a community of skaters in the e-sports section of U-Life, she has more than 30 follow ers in her community, and even now that she is already returning to face-to-face spaces, they have been able to meet physically last Friday in the hour of University Life. This online space is great for creating a community, coordinating activities and whenever you want you can complement it with face-to-face meetings.

In addition, Carolina found out in U-Life that it’s possible to organize a hackathon to create a space in the world, and she is encouraging the skating community to create a skating rink to hold online tournaments in this world.

U-Life is a parallel world created by the university based on the structure of the four university campuses, with some initial communities and spaces, but which allows students and teachers to add/create spaces of their own interests and create a community. Combine online and face-to-face activities and have this space for socializa tion and networking beyond the classroom. The objec tive is to create a door to all extra-curricular activities so that students and teachers can get to know and explore

them. Currently there are many extra-academic services offered by the university but they are dispersed.

With U-Life, UPC students and teachers will be able to find a virtual space that they can access from the Virtual Classroom at any time with their university credentials and meet their classmates, make new friends, attend events, activities and/or online services and combine them with face-to-face meetings. In the same way they will be able to create new spaces of their own interest and promote them. This will allow taking advantage of the hybrid experience to which the university is moving and those students and teachers, who do not have the opportunity to attend in person, have the opportunity to learn about the university and its different activities and services, beyond the classrooms.

Here is a link with a tour of the campuses from U-Life (MVP): youtu.be/P0JLXUsyUbA

U-Life avatars. Images courtesy Silvana Balarezo.

Bringing people together to learn has always been a core activity of our Fellows and faculty. This year, we saw many creative ways that our community members are learning with others outside the classroom, including workshops, week-long experiences, speaker series, virtual events, and more.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT

Dana Bekdash

I am a member of the Lebanese Interna tional Finance Executives (LIFE), which is an organization that connects Lebanese diaspora together to support each other in their academic endeavors, mentors the upcoming scholars during their transition from universities to the workplace, and provides scholarships to these scholars. Therefore, I have volunteered to run en trepreneurship panels where I would give workshops about what the entrepreneur ship journey looks like, based on my own experiences, as well as the importance of design thinking in establishing a successful startup. Furthermore, I will be discussing the ways the UIF program aided me in pushing forward my entrepreneurship journey and encouraging students and universities to establish a design-thinking program and register for the UIF program.

BINA NUSANTARA UNIVERSITY

Santoni Dyaz, Janisse Janisse, Muhamad Irsyad Rafi Sudirjo, Yuliriani Yuliriani

Bi-Works is a program that aims to increase students’ interest and knowledge of design thinking, entrepreneurship and innovation mindset through seminars and workshops. We hope this project can build resources that will last beyond their time on campus for students, contribute to the national dialogue on their needs in higher educa tion, and discuss topics to enhance the educational experience. The first Bi-Works event was held in December in the form of a workshop, called “Idea to Company : Startup Edition.” The speaker was a former analyst from a VC in America (UIF Hannah Hund). In that event, we collaborated with teams of lecturers from Binus Incubator (our university’s incubator program divi sion), to run an event called Binus Virtual PITCH UP Expo. The next Bi-Works event is likely to take place in April, as well as the opening of the Bi-connect mentorship program for students who are interested in being the next Fellows.

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

Nireeksha Namjoshi

I have received the opportunity to serve as project manager and lead designer for Cal ifornia State University, Fullerton’s team at the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon 2023. I am responsible for fostering con nections between multiple micro-projects and teams within the build and overseeing the construction.

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF URUGUAY

Sofia Carballo, Carol Glass, Nicole Imbert, Sebastian Soto

Our project is a 5-day workshop/competition in which students from different careers will sign up to solve a real problem on campus. The first days of the week will consist of workshops and presentations to teach the students about design thinking and make some icebreaker games to integrate them. Each team will have a mentor who will help

them in the process of thinking the solution and prototyping it. Teams will develop the solution following the steps of their newly acquired tool “Design thinking.” On the final day each team will present their solution and the winning team of the challenge will be chosen, the students who participate will gain a very good experience and knowledge about Design Thinking. Also, they will have the possibility to act as team mentors in the next instances in which the event takes place. Our main goal is to try to make that change students are looking forward to.

FH SALZBURG (SALZBURG UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES)

We are working on a symposium event for all first bachelor’s degree pro grams at our university of applied sciences. The symposium is concerned with the topic of Climate, Change, and Resilience. For the first time, the symposium was held without much participation from our side last year. When it is held next April again, however, we will have the opportunity to play a major role in shaping the symposium, from the selection of topics to an interactive workshop part, in which the topics of design thinking are to be brought closer to the students, we are involved in the design. Participation is open to all first bachelor’s degree programs at our univer sity of applied sciences. In addition, the Rectorate and the various heads of study programs encourage students to participate. In this way, we find ourselves perfectly in tune with our primary goal of interdisciplinarity. One thing we are particularly concerned about is ensuring that this sym posium establishes long-term contacts between the students. These early acquaintances between students can help them in the further course of their studies. In this way, we hope to influence the challenge of interdis ciplinary linkage at our university positively. Furthermore, we have other project ideas in the pipeline, and it remains exciting to see how far and where the work of our cohort will make itself felt at the university.

Amelie Arrer, Sophie Frohnwieser, Helen Hinrichs, Lars Kähler, Janette Kaspar, Benedikt Matysek, Julian Nöbauer, Benjamin Typplt, Johanna Wicht

CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

D’Yon Padgett, Joshua Wright

Our campus project is called Innovation Insight Challenge Program. This project focuses on introducing the program to the following students: high school juniors, senior level, community college, and CMU freshmen and sophomores. The program is designed to help students who are unde cided about their majors learn more about entrepreneurship and innovation (I&E). The students will take part in a five-day innova tion challenge that will focus on the stages of product and concept development. Each day of this challenge, students will learn the basics of each step in the start-up process. On the fifth day, students will compete in a pitch competition judged by business professionals, who will give feedback. Stu dents who enter the competition will have the chance to win prizes. Even if students discover that I&E is not a career they would like to pursue, this program will still be beneficial because entrepreneurship and this challenge involves accounting, logistics, marketing, engineering and many other fields of study. This challenge may help lead them down a career path in other fields they have not yet explored. The ultimate goals are for students to have a better understanding of I&E, to learn what it takes to start a new venture, and to help reduce the number of students changing their majors.

Kyleigh Golightly

I co-led the organization of our first hack athon, which was held on March 25 and 26. The theme was “Reimagine” and the event was led by students and supported by the College of Business Administration, College of Arts & Media, and College of Science & Engineering. Forty-five students participated as well as a team of volunteers and judges. The participants had three challenge streams to choose from and the Mental Health and Wellness stream was by far the most popular. This was a meaning ful and high energy way to bring CMU into the world of Challenges and Hackathons.

LINGNAN UNIVERSITY

Ngar Kiu Chan, Wing Lam Fu, Hao Hong Jiang, Trinh Ly

We are working to promote the concept of I&E on campus and develop a start-up project to promote sustainable living. Due to the pandemic, many projects and events were organized in an online mode. Fortunately, one of the mass campus events was able to be carried out in a F2F mode. We successfully attracted more than 400 beneficiaries to join the event.

ROWAN UNIVERSITY

Kenyon Burgess, Shruti Dalwadi, Aatish Gupta, Isabella Marshall

Rowan Innovation Weekend is an event designed to spark interest in design thinking and use student ingenuity to address issues on campus. The focus the 2022 event was mental health. In preparation, we spoke with the several campus health faculty members as well as staff at the Rowan Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to learn how to run the event, educate the students on mental health and design thinking, and be an enjoyable experience overall. We segmented the workshop in a very specific way: have students discover something about themselves and each other, increase their abilities and knowledge as individuals and as a group and use their growth to benefit their community. We had students do self-reflection activities that led to questions about their mental health journeys at school, and how they could make a differ ence for other students experiencing the same problems. This led to the formulation of their “How might we?” questions. We then led them through brainstorming and rapid prototyping workshops, helping them build their ideas into something concrete. After they had made a bare bones version, they pitched their idea to a panel of experts from across the University who gave constructive feedback.

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY

MARYLAND

Elena Johnston, Juan Lopez, Joshua Rafferty, Kelly Reynolds

We are organizing a TEDx talk discussing student issues in the 21st century. We plan on having speakers on four topics including mental health, sustainability, college af fordability, and digital learning. This event will be open for any student to attend, and we also plan on opening it up to the com

munity. We will reach out to surrounding schools and want to invite local Baltimore high school students to attend as well. We want to also host a round table discussion after the TEDx talk where attendees will be able to discuss the topics. They will have the opportunity to think more deeply and critically about these issues and hear one another’s opinions and ideas. We think this would be an excellent opportunity to discuss these topics and to get the students involved. Hearing different perspectives would be very beneficial to all attendees.

Bonfires are a great way to encourage students to socialize and get to know their peers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its requisite social distance, there is a great need on campus to see more of a family-like en vironment and relationship between students and staff. Through hosting a bonfire on campus, this social event will invite students and faculty to converse with one another, make new mentor-student relationships, and connect on a deeper level than a day-to-day interaction. We want students to have conversations where they feel comfortable discussing differences and similarities, and gain a closer bond with each other. Even more, we want to help Spelman maintain its sisterhood and its traditions. Due to the pandemic, events such as Founders’ Day, Homecoming and even Graduation were held in a hybrid format, which adversely affected seniors and freshmen the most. Most of the Spelman campus has been eager to experience campus life firsthand and because of the pandemic that has not been possible. Events that would normally be available to everyone, were determined by a ticket draw. Thus the Bonfire project that we propose will help enhance the community considering the pandemic and the impending Monkeypox Virus which will also adversely affect how students and faculty gather and interact on campus. We are currently investigating the logistics of how this event can be hosted on campus. We are questioning shareholders to determine the possibilities of this hap pening in the near future.

event, we are not only creating spaces where campus stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and specialties engage in interdisciplinary discussions, but, equally important, we are also offering a creative space to turn their ideas into action by building and testing their own prototypes with others. We are truly grateful for the generous support we received from our university for this project. Through it, we aim to further our mission towards leading change for sustainable futures.

We also collaborated with a group called RISE and designed a workshop for middle school and high school students at Seisen International School in Tokyo. Our work shop was called RISE Together for Change, and we hosted it as part of a TEDx event organized by Seisen students. The theme of the event was the “butterfly effect,” and we designed a workshop aimed at empowering students to take action together with others to bring forth positive social change. Build ing upon the RISE Together for Change workshop, we hosted two more workshops called “Spark the Change: From Idea to Ac tion” in June and July for students at Sophia University and Reitaku University. In this workshop, participants had the opportu nity to utilize design thinking mindsets and methods to apply their creativity and individual knowledge towards collectively solving challenges they face on campus.

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE

Sofia Frumkin, Ipeknaz Icten, Jackie Le, Shirley Liu

SOPHIA UNIVERSITY

Giuli Nagai, Haruka Oizumi, Hana Saeki, Mana Short, Maria Sjøblom Bjørndalen

In our desire to spark innovative collabo ration among stakeholders on the chal lenge of making Sophia a truly sustainable campus, we created the SDGs x Innovation Sparker. This is a university-wide event that

brings together stakeholders to discuss and co-create solutions by applying the design thinking mindset and skills to the SDGs framework. As a precursor to this event, we organized another university-wide event called the Sustainable Campus Forum in collaboration with KASA Sustainability, a student organization, and the Sophia Office for Sustainability Promotion. Through this forum and the SDGs x Innovation Sparker

The Swarthmore College Innovation Fellows hosted a wellness event focused on attempting to “design” a sense of belong ing for Swarthmore students, faculty and staff. As a part of the planning process, we surveyed both the student body and faculty about their opinions on current campus resources and suggestions for areas of improvement within the campus community. Much of what we gathered through these surveys, interviews, and ad ditional stakeholder meetings provided an underlying theme of fostering collaborative community spaces and a sense of ‘belong ing’ on campus. As the end of the semester approached, we directed our focus more towards teaching other students about the design thinking process. Modeling after the “Design for Belonging” workshop taught at the d.school, we implemented the same workshop format with modifications for students unfamiliar with ideation. We walked students through empathy-focused activities and reflected on both student ex periences at Swarthmore and their impres sions with the ideation process. Then, we wrapped up with a collection of prototypes, both silly and practical, and reflective notes that addressed the moments of partici pants’ partners that they designed for.

SPELMAN COLLEGE

Savannah Adams, Grace Burch, Tiffany Oliver, Jalen Tatum, Robert Hamilton (Faculty Champion)

Credit: iStock.com/Warchi

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY

Atsushi Aoyama, Watcharawut Masawat, Haruka Minemura

We held design thinking demo workshops after UIF training. In these workshops, we focused on leaders of students’ organizations, student entrepreneurs, and students who related to any business in Tohoku Uni versity as our target. We empowered them to solve their problems and improve their actions. We would like to introduce three cases below.

The first case is for the student organization that oversees sports teams in our university. Their concern was how to motivate members in their meetings. This group used to be tightly hierarchical and new leaders de sired to change their dictatorial atmosphere to encourage members to discuss. Using the design thinking process, we explored why members hesitated to convey their opinions. As a result, we created two proto types: extra events for team buildings and icebreaking contents before regular meetings.

The second case is for an entrepreneur who is tackling translation ser vices for local restaurants. His concern is how to present his business idea. We reviewed his vision and achievements at first. Following the design thinking process, we created a prototype of his presentation.

The third case is that we provided solutions for the chocolate company. The student who worked for the company as an intern asked us to come up with an idea of how to solve the food loss problem in the manufac turing process. We set up an idea board in which anyone could post sticky notes at our community space on our campus. The company staff was pleased with various innovative ideas from students.

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY

Atsushi Aoyama, Watcharawut Masawat, Haruka Minemura

We are organizing the “Innovation Festival,” an event to increase the momentum for stu dent-initiated change within the university by sharing information about what extra curricular activities students around us are engaged in. We first thought of building a website where all the student activities related to any kinds of value-creation will be gathered on it. However, after doing some interviews and discussing with some students who are good at web design, it is not easy to build a web-site on our own and cannot find anyone who can help to build it. We changed our plan to gather informa tion about students’ activities first physical ly, which is easier technically than online and also could greatly impact the students. We were selected for the university’s crowd funded student project “TomoPro” and succeeded in raising $5,000 for holding the event through crowdfunding. We are now discussing the details of the “Innovation Festival” project with the members. We are going to hold the festival this summer.

We have also been working with the English section of Tohoku University Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship Club and constantly holding brainstorming sessions to bring design thinking to transform To hoku University’s scientific research mind set. We held several mini-workshops on design thinking for friends from October to December. The main focus was on how to brainstorm. After that, in order to plan a workshop on a larger scale, we started a biweekly event called “BrainDump” in Feb ruary, where we tested various methods of brainstorming. Instagram: @irivertide2021

UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES, CHILE

Magdalena Arraztoa, Azul Lizana, Dom inga Mandiola, Florencia Ramírez

In May 2022, we held the first ADS Innova tion Day, an event focused on innovation and creativity for the students of Admin istración de Servicios (ADS), the program where we study. The event’s main goal was to foster innovation and bonding between our classmates, and to provide an opportu nity to reconnect after two years of online classes due to the pandemic. We had 50 students attend the day of activities. The activity surpassed all our expectations. Our classmates’ reaction was tremendously encouraging, and we learned much about them and ourselves. Read more on page 56.

We conducted a workshop series that consists of 3 sessions with “Tech nopreneurship” as a theme. The first session was about “Introduction into Technopreneurship.” We hoped that in this session the workshop participants will gain more insight into the technopreneur field and spark their interest in this field. The second one was about “How to Start a Tech Base Startup and to Get Funding.” In this session we hoped that the workshop participants can understand how to start and establish a technology-based startup and can survive in various conditions in order to remain sustainable and keep growing, as well as how to get funding as a student of Brawijaya University. The third one was about “Inspirational Talk Show.” Through this session, participants were able to broaden their horizons through various experiences from technopreneurs that can motivate them to participate in the technopreneurship field.

as part of CuriousU, a European Summer School with an international taste. The program took place in August 2022.

Jacques Fürst, Fátima González-Novo, Novianita Isnaynizahra, Seth Palsgraaf

The Nights at DesignLab Project is a recur ring event aimed at facilitating cross-study collaboration and knowledge exchange between students from different faculties. By providing afternoon workshops and lectures for and by students, we hope to fill in the current gap that exists between study programs while facilitating the exchange of information. Several committees and students have shown interest in joining and hosting the sessions, which will be conducted in a building called DesignLab as soon as the safety regulations allow it, thus the name “Nights at DesignLab.” Some of the workshops already scheduled for the beginning of 2022 are a session about negotiation, one about entrepreneurship, one about design sketching, and a final one about how EMD songs are made. The number of attendees will vary per work shop, with a minimum of 25 attendees per session.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMILWAUKEE

Rudi Marciniak

UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS Brady Gruenhagen, Cory Kaisersatt, Fadel Hasan, Grace Northamer

We are working on an event with the goal of connecting students to alumni/commu nity as well as inspire innovation across all majors and concentrations of study. The largest looming question for us right now is whether or not to hold our event in per son. We had to put plans on hold with the uncertainty of the Omicron impact, but we are leaning towards it in person (we believe we will have a greater impact this way). We are going through the nitty gritty process of event planning and the tedious details that come along with it. While there are a lot of things to plan, we want to maintain focus on our goal; create a recurring event that inspires innovation and entrepreneurship across the school regardless of major or concentration. These two things should not stop with just our business school.

UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE Emilija Banytė, Marlen Braun, Philippe Damoiseaux (2020), Fátima González-Novo, Thomas Goudsblom, Novianita Isnaynizhra, Panashe Mangezi

We held the 2022 UIF European Meet up at Twente. With changes happening around us every day, we need to be able to deal and cope with these situations in order to thrive. Problems are becoming more and more complex as technology is rapidly evolving, which requires a dif ferent approach in thinking, identifying, designing, and implementing solutions to these complex problems. Not only learning these skills is important, but being able to effectively teach these skills to other people and spread the message might be even more crucial. This course offered partici pants a series of sessions that address skills required to recognize and execute viable change. It also taught them the ins and outs of design thinking that will allow for a stepby-step process of approaching complex projects and problems. The Meetup, called Leaders of Innovation and Impact, was a 9-day, student-driven experience of a life time! The European Meetup was organized

The primary campus project I am currently working on a result of my UIF training is hosting a seminar for students that focuses on ways to modulate anxiety in life. We had a main focus on student wellness that was identified through our training and this is a project to directly target that gap. Addi tionally, we are looking to host the seminar at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center on campus to increase traffic and awareness of the resources available to student there, which is another gap we identified in train ing. We have not yet named the seminar but are working with some performance psychology faculty on campus to design the workshop and then name it before we be gin promoting the May offering to students.

VASIREDDY VENKATADRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Madan Mohan Chunduri, Haindavi Ghanta, Vinay Manukonda, Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Jyothirmai Reddy bathuni, Jayanth Upthala

Tech Discussion Forums is our primary campus project. Our main goal in introduc ing this to campus was to provide a space for all students to discuss technology and its innovations. We felt there was a slight gap that could be bridged with the help of this forum because freshmen are unfa

UNIVERSITAS BRAWIJAYA

Nurafifah Alya Farahisya, Angel Anggina Nasution, Marsellino Prawiro Halim, Dzaki yyah Rosyadi

miliar with what technology is and how it works in the real world. In simpler words, the Tech Discussion Forums is a place where students from different departments on campus come together to share and discuss technical innovations from around the world. It was held twice a month, and we chose different topics to discuss each month. It not only helped students build connections but also expanded their knowledge of other concepts which were not from their core department. Initially, Students struggled to speak up even though they had a lot to say, but after a while, they were so enthusiastic and excited to join each forum and creatively learn new things, as opposed to the monotonous class. After every session, we have collected feedback from attendees, and they have given us good responses regarding tech discussion forums. After reading all the responses we make changes like increasing the time for discussion and confining the topics. We, as a team, conducted the forum six times and had to take a break due to the exams. Cur rently, we have revived the Tech Discussion Forums.

Our team has also held Design Thinking workshops. From the initial cohorts, Design Thinking workshops hosted by Fellows have brought a greater impact which made students develop more of an innovative mindset. We have conducted design thinking workshops during the Student Induction Program covering the entire strength of the college which made the students change their mindsets from the initial stages of their engineering educa tion. We’ve also held a number of design thinking workshops for the entrepreneur ship council students. Recently we have hosted a student exchange program with the Singapore’s Millennia Institute where we have conducted design thinking work shops for them and made each team work on a specific UN Goals. Using the design thinking process taught by the Fellows, Each team developed different solutions and presented them to the stakeholders of both the institutes. We also hosted a 24-hour design challenge called the Design Venture, where students who participated were exposed to intense design thinking workshops for the 24 hours straight.

VNR VIGNANA JYOTHI INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Hitaarth Jainn, Ratna Keerthana Naduri, Padmavathi Nayak, Akkinapally Snigdha

We conducted workshop sessions for 300 first-year students so that they have a basic structure and understanding about design thinking. We gave them a few problem statements and conducted various activities in a playful manner, giving them the actual essence and importance of each stage of design thinking and allotting each one a team full of gender diversity. We made them play games for team bonding activities like the Jujube Challenge (which we learned as the Marshmallow Chal lenge). All the activities were done by them with minimalistic guidance from us, so that they could explore their own creativity. We even made them fly their papers like a rocket to a different team for suggestions to the ideas of their problem. The solutions suggested by the students are being screened along with the Institute Innovation Cell Coordinator. We even volunteered for the Annual Entrepreneurship Fest of VNR VJIET ECFICIO 4.0H and helped conduct the fest smoothly and innovatively. We even interacted with the students regarding Entrepreneurship and Innovation during the Publicity Campaigning for the same.

Strangers Are Just Friends Waiting to Happen

HOW AN INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP CHANGED CAMPUS LIFE

By Janette Kaspar University Innovation Fellow FH Salzburg (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences)

In our ever-changing world we notice different perspec tives and viewpoints from both ourselves and from our peers. It’s natural to have differences in ideas, concepts and executions, and there is always a reason and bene fits. But do we, as students and teachers, take them into account?

It has never been more important to be able to work through unexpected situations, to be able to deal with changing environments and to understand each other on a whole new level. Studies have shown that people who broaden their horizons, and who can think outside the box, generally do better than those who stick to just one area throughout their lifetime.

That is where interdisciplinary workshops and design thinking come into play. We noticed at our institution that the different degrees and programs became sepa rated during the pandemic (or perhaps never had been that interconnected to start with). Some peers didn’t even know that certain programs and workshops existed. We decided to change that in hopes of bringing the different degrees and people closer together. And that we did.

In the beginning of Fall 2021, we were able to participate in the first part of a conference held at our university. Many first-year students attended this event, so we de cided to use this opportunity to act and promote UIF at FH Salzburg and amongst the new students.

One of our aims is to increase the level of participation and democratic voice students get to have in their own study experience. Thus we held a survey during the con ference and received confirmation that a lot of students basically didn’t know each other, had no real connections and were unaware of all the different opportunities at our institution. They wanted more interdisciplinarity.

They also were asked to request topics for the second part of the conference, which was set for Spring 2022 and wished for specific topics that were hardly ever covered. We already had this feeling but seeing it in numbers hit us hard. We had to do something now. The idea of holding a workshop arose almost immediately.

Through our training and experience with UIF we slowly developed the idea to create a workshop as a third part of the conference: a space where students could collabo rate and work on the lecture topics from the conference.

Our university gave us a lot of support to organize and develop the two-day event for the conference partic ipants. The first day consisted of four different talks about four different aspects of our day-to-day life, to give the students a better and broader perspective. On the day of the conference, talks were chosen based on results of our survey from the conference part one in the Fall. Day two was our day.

Our cohort hosted an interdisciplinary workshop, as part of the conference with the same title “Climate. Change.Resilience” (but we called it the CCRxUIF workshop). Our workshop consisted of three major components. First we gave the participants an insight into the world of UIF. Inspired by the 2022 UIF Meetup at Stanford University, we did a little wake-up session with the help of some energizing stokes, we introduced the agenda for the day, showed them various creativity methods for the ideation phase that we learned from our experience as well as from the book Creative Acts for Curious People and held a brief presentation on Design Thinking. We explained UIF and design thinking to the students, showed them methods for brainstorming and introduced them to Design Thinking. But just these input talks and motivational words would not result in more innovative thinking and collaboration. So we had

a special plan in mind. It was important to us that the participants would actually get the chance to apply the Design Thinking steps while working on some of the big questions posed in the talks the day before.

At the UIF Meetup, we were part of an unconference, where students decided what to talk about and how to talk about it. Other participants could join whenever they wanted. We found the idea very interesting and decided to try something similar for our workshop.

Our university allowed us to use the small castle on uni versity grounds to hold our workshop. Each room con tained a challenging question that had been discussed during Day 1 of the conference — just a general question, no instructions, no directions. However, just like in the UIF Meetup session “Co-Creation Is the Ghost in the Ma chine,” we also created a recommended agenda for their time as a group that they could follow if they felt lost.

We then asked our peers to pick their favorite, some thing that sparked their interest and something they would love to talk about. Assigning the groups that way resulted in different students, from different degrees, with different viewpoints to all come together to discuss one topic they all had an interest in. The results were interdisciplinary, vastly different and thoroughly mixed groups that got combined by passion.

With some light support on our side — we assigned buddies for every team — the groups worked on ideas, problems and solutions for the topics, identifying issues and coming up with creative ways to solve them.

To motivate our peers even further and keep the energy going, we held a “find-your-mate” type of game during lunch. The instructions had been given in the welcome bag. Each student received a bag at the beginning of the

day containing a notebook, pens, stickers and a card. Each card had a game printed on it. Have you ever seen people doing a push up competition in the middle of lunchtime, or someone suddenly speaking anything but their mother tongue? Starting a big game of “Marco Polo”? We certainly did and it was a blast!

After lunch, groups finalized their work and presented what they had come up with. We heard about how to reduce pollution by equipping cargo ships with hydrogen motors, how higher education could change the way we think about our failures, how to use AI and still be cau tious with it, and many more ideas and future projects.

The workshop was a success. The students loved inter disciplinarity, working together and getting to know each other. The final presentations were also held in front of a representative of the rectorate, and we re ceived a lot of positive feedback. The rectorate has now asked this to be an annual event as part of the confer ence for our first-year students, in order to ignite our university spirit and to bring interdisciplinary innova tion to our institution.

We believe we can notice how people now come togeth er more often for new projects, our university is becom ing more and more lively every day.

We can see the change. We can see what UIF taught us and what we can give the students at our university. For us as Fellows it is wonderful to see that we have an impact at our very own university and that we can help to bring that motivation to innovate and improve our peers. Design Thinking and innovation to our peers. We saw different viewpoints and offered them to the students. It is clear that some of them gained a new perspective.

A team of participants discussing a challenge during the “Climate.Change.Resilience” event. Credit: Benjamin Typplt.

Soaring Into STEM

AN HBCU PERSPECTIVE ON AFFECTING CHANGE

IN HIGHER EDUCATION

By Maya Hamer, Christopher Lawson and Dr. Siobahn Day Grady University Innovation Fellows and Faculty Champion North Carolina Central University

North Carolina Central University (NCCU), home of the Eagles, was founded by James E. Shephard in 1910, is located in the heart of (downtown) Durham, North Caro lina. Soaring Into STEM was an idea created by students that saw a need to affect change on campus, invoked by the opportunity to become change agents in higher edu cation and to embody our beliefs in, “Truth and Service.” After canvassing our campus, we saw that there was a disconnect between staff, students, and the surrounding community. Through the University Innovation Fellow ship sponsored by the Hasso Plattner School of Design (d.school) at Stanford University, we sought to impact the areas of creativity, innovation, and design-centered thinking at NCCU.

Seeing the lack of enthusiasm in students, poor engage ment between students and faculty, and not seeing the engagement with the community was eye-opening. Soaring Into STEM is an event that will strengthen col laboration and build cohesion across university colleges, faculty, and students while enhancing the relationship between NCCU and the surrounding communities. We will accomplish these efforts by hosting a three-day event where we will expose our students to a research symposium, career fair, and food drive tailored to Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). Our event is important because it promotes innovation and has a design-centered focus to affect change. We will increase camaraderie among current students and staff while cre ating a blueprint for other HBCUs and MSIs to mimic.

Providing the students a platform to express their indi vidual thoughts in a formal setting provides exposure to research and fosters future researchers. The food drive welcomes the community as a partner instead of an outreach as it will be an exchange of resources and an opportunity to grow together. The food drive will also

provide us the opportunity to partner with the NCCU Campus Pantry. We not only have the ability to use an already created resource, but we can enhance experienc es and shed light on areas of opportunity to overcome challenges and bridge gaps of underused resources. The career fair would be the cherry on top as we provide career experiences that revolve around our students and companies aligned with Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The stakeholders involved include students, faculty and staff, school administration, and executives.

UIF taught us that there will always be ways to overcome challenges through incorporating design-centered think ing and providing us transferable skills that last beyond academia. We were afforded online training, weekly virtual meetups, and mentor support that was tailored to our individual challenges and areas of opportunity at NCCU. With design-centered thinking, we had to reshape and pivot our ideas on how we could make Soaring Into STEM possible. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were limited on making a physical impact; however, utilizing virtual spaces would be ideal. We had to be empathetic to the overwhelming pandemic, and be clear and concise with the experiences we wanted to show our staff and students.

By ideating and having stakeholder involvement we were able to compose an event that could be life-changing and have a great user experience. With the help of our Faculty Champion Dr. Siobahn Day Grady, we were able to start an international organization called the Associa tion for Computing and Machinery (ACM) Student Chap ter at NCCU, linking computing professionals from all over the world. Through ACM, we have the opportunity to raise funds, get connected with speakers and leaders in the computing field, and be an added resource to the students at NCCU for opportunities and networking. We hope to engage both undergraduate and graduate

students during orientations and other campus events that bring exposure to ACM and the School of Library and Information Science.

The methodologies that we take from UIF will aid in implementing Soaring into STEM by collaborating with our faculty, deans, trustees, and institutional leadership. As university change agents we now have a platform to discuss ways that enhance our educational experiences by engaging with students in a hands-on approach and capitalizing on self-guided learning experiences. We can advocate and lead partnerships that are cross-depart mental at NCCU and cross-institutional that include other HBCUs and MSIs. Having a space to be an incubator that incorporates creativity, innovation, design thinking, and entrepreneurship will bolster our traditional coursework. With the tools and resources provided, Soaring Into STEM will make broader impacts as we can speak about the UIF partnership and our project at national confer ences. We are now collaborating with other Fellows that are not within our region or discipline. Our advocacy for policy change and the support of Soaring Into STEM using passion as a catalyst to solving societal problems using the necessary attitudes, skills, and abilities to affect change locally, globally, and nationally.

Soaring Into STEM will be an ongoing venture; how ever, one of our challenges will be whether to hold the conference in person or have it virtually. COVID-19 is still a threat to all and we face ongoing restrictions if we choose to hold this conference in person. Some restrictions would be COVID-19 consists of testing sites on campus, mask-mandate requirements for attendees, vaccination record submissions, as well as numerous other requirements we may need to enforce. Holding the conference in person may require a larger quantity of personnel and staff that we may not have the budget for. Another challenge we will face is incentives.

Though we have a few companies interested in invest ing, we still would like to provide travel stipends for selected students from HBCUs; specifically, those who have been selected to be presenters. Lastly, a chal lenge we may face is our current student conference on campus, the Graduate and Undergraduate Research Symposium (GURS). GURS is a one-day event where undergraduate and graduate students have the oppor tunity to present their research to a panel of judges as well as participate in a poster presentation. While we are not trying to reinvent the wheel, we do want to do a similar symposium that allows students the chance to speak about their research or project they are passion ate about. We want to expand the range of who will see them present. By inviting other HBCU undergraduates and graduates we begin to create a network and space solely for them.

Next steps will be meeting with our Chancellor Dr. Johnson O. Akinleye, Ph.D., and facilitating another stakeholder meeting where all parties involved can attend. This is where we can provide concrete ideas and express the partnerships that we’ve gained in addition to showcasing the need and broader impacts that this event will have. We can also elaborate on our experienc es in San Francisco and at Stanford University. We have created a community amongst HBCUs that attended the UIF and will be reaching out to them in order to collab orate on this project. It cannot be stated enough, how much support we garnered in such a short amount of time from NCCU and UIF. Being the inaugural cohort of NCCU, the exposure to an opportunity such as the UIF through Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner School of Design (d.school) and their HBCU Initiative was monu mental and deserves recognition.

From left: Fellow Christopher Lawson, Faculty Champion Dr. Siobahn Day Grady, and Fellow Maya Hamer. Photo courtesy of the authors.

Diseña Tu Vida Universitaria

By Valeria Aguayo, Danae Chipoco Haro and Diego Muñoz University Innovation Fellows Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología

I’m excited, it is the first week of the semester. I’m going to study a lot, I’m not going to fail any course. I think about the classes I’m taking, I hope to have good professors. “You must take the most of college to find a good job” says Mom. But one part of me doesn’t want to work. What is a “good job” anyway? It is the first week of the semester and I’m excited, yet at the same time afraid.

THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

During our freshman year, we don’t know much about the activities and programs that our institutions can offer. Sometimes we are even overwhelmed by the in formation and some of it gets lost. But at the same time, we want to enjoy this time because we know it is going to be unique. Not all of us get to immerse ourselves in activities that will drive us closer to our goals. Some of us are trapped between classes and assignments. We think constantly about the future, but we cannot plan it.

DESIGN THINKING FOR LIFE

Design thinking is a methodology to create and develop solutions. It has become one of the most used methodol ogies when designing prototypes and innovative services or launching start-ups. This human-centered process has allowed many companies to discover unsatisfied needs of their customers and improve their products.

If design thinking helps companies succeed, can it do the same with our lives? We can approach life planning through several ways. Design thinking sparks our curi osity and invites us to learn from others and ourselves. It sets us into a constant iterative process allowing us to learn fast and improve. Many times, our lives are not a straight line path and our problems are not resolved by

consecutive steps. We are complex beings with many wishes and interests. We change all the time as we discov er new things. Thus, we need a plan with multiple options and objectives. By developing several life plans, we have the chance of imaging different paths, each of them excit ing in a unique way. In this way, we learn what works.

With the objective of showing freshmen students these tools, we invited them to think about what they want and how they want to do it, to evaluate the different opportunities that college offers to take the most of it. Above all, give them confidence to take risks, try new things, to think as a designer and to build their path.

We invited them to reflect on what they want to do and how they want to do it, evaluate the various opportu nities college presents to them to decide how to make the best use of their time there. Specially, give them the security to dare to take risks, try new things, think like a designer and build their way step by step.

HANDS ON!

Inspired by the books Creative Confidence and Designing Your Life, we discovered several tools to apply them in the design of university life and professional career. The first challenge was to select a few and how to present it to freshmen in a short time.

One distorted thought we often have is the belief that we must find a passion to dedicate ourselves to as our occupation. This generates fear or insecurity in people who enjoy doing different activities and do not know which one to choose as a “passion,” or others who do not believe they have found it yet. Therefore, we decided to start with an introduction to remove that fear and give them the confidence to find their occupations without having a passion in mind.

HOW CAN WE HELP STUDENTS DESIGN A FULFILLING UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE?

Take part in meaningful activities. Before forming life plans, it is necessary to get to know ourselves better. We asked participants to create a diary of different activities they carried out on a day-to-day basis, and they wrote comments about them. Then, the level of commitment they felt with these activities and how much energy they demanded or provides was evaluated. This is how the students were able to get to know each other better through their day-to-day life.

Build a north. If you want to pursue a journey, it’s be cause you want to enjoy all of it, not just one part. In the case of life plans, we want to create paths we will enjoy in all aspects important to us. But how do we know that? First we need to know what is important to us, and how we will treat those important aspects of our life. In this activity, we gave students several questions regarding their occupation, hobbies, interpersonal relationships to guide their thoughts and how to best complement them.

Design several futures. After the students got to know themselves better, we encouraged them to plan their next five years. First, they though about a plan with the resources they currently had. Then we asked them to forget their constraints and focus only on what they wanted. To help them evaluate their plan, we added indicators at the bottom of the activity sheet: resources needed, how much they liked it, confidence, and coher ence between the plan and what they have learned about themselves in previous activities.

Identify doubts. When thinking about our future plans it is normal to have doubts about them: am I ready for this? Are there job opportunities within my city/country? Are people currently working on the field fairly paid? But what’s important is to solve our doubts. Thus, we created a space for students to write down their doubts and solve some of them (the ones we could) among the

people in the workshop. Finally we encouraged them to talk with people that have done things related to their plans to solve their doubts.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

Most universities seek to give their students an integral education and several opportunities to complement their technical formation. However, the way of communicating opportunities is usually not adequate. In addition, the number of opportunities can overwhelm the students and decrease their focus to take advantage of them.

Therefore, it is important for students to have spaces to think about what they want to do or what they want to try, so that they can make the most of this experience. College is an important space for discovering new things and getting to know themselves better. As a result, it is common for students to change their goals along their years. Thus, developing these life plans at several stages of their career help them to focus on what they want. This allows them to identify questions and doubts which motivates them to solve and allows students to gain con fidence to pursue their goals.

WHAT NOW?

A team of University Innovation Fellows at UTEC started the program “Diseña Tu Vida Universitaria” to teach students at several levels of higher education design thinking tools to plan their lives. This creates spaces to connect students at several stages and disciplines with alumni. It also facilitates experiences for students to get closer to different professional paths in their fields of interest that helps them in their career choices.

Participants exploring their paths during the authors’ workshop. Credit: Ariana Beraun Gasco.

Innovation Day

FOSTERING INNOVATION THROUGH TEAMWORK AND REAL-LIFE STORIES

by Magdalena Arraztoa, Azul Lizana, Dominga Mandiola and Florencia Ramírez University Innovation Fellows Universidad de los Andes

In May 2022, our team held the first ADS Innovation Day, an event focused on innovation and creativity for the students of Administración de Servicios (ADS), the program where we study. The event’s main goal was to foster innovation and bonding between our classmates.

Everything started when we took part in the UIF pro gram in 2021. Our group attended training and partici pated actively week by week. After finishing the train ing, we thought of generating this event since we wanted to promote innovation among our classmates, and we also wanted to provide an opportunity to reconnect after two years of online classes due to the pandemic.

In December 2021, we presented our project to stake holders in our university and our school, receiving the “go ahead” to organize the event. We had to change scope and focus, but we were ready to pivot and go. May 4, 2022, was assigned for the event. We then started brainstorming ideas for the day, meeting several times over the summer to plan and think about the best way to make our classmates participate.

Once we returned from our summer break in March 2022, we started to work on our project. We chose the name “ADS Innovation Day.” We thought about the ac tivities we wanted to create, focusing on letting students take an active role. We worked on inviting guest speak ers, designing the logo for the activity, and securing a budget.

Then we assigned roles for each of us and started work ing on making this happen: Azul Lizana was in charge of budgeting, securing all materials, and graphic design; Florencia led the communications effort, overseeing so cial media and communicating the event to all involved; Dominga worked on the day’s activities and shared them

through the School’s Student Council; and Magdalena oversaw securing our guest speakers and sponsors for the event.

Throughout all the planning, we constantly communi cated and met, something we had learned during the UIF program. This way, we could support the others and be up to date with what was happening.

In April, things were taking shape quickly, and we finally had defined our program schedule. We would start with an exercise to allow participants to meet and get to know each other. We did this through the “speed introductions.” After that, students would be quickly introduced to prototyping and working in teams through the “Marshmallow Challenge.” Then, Professor Felipe Wilson (UIF Faculty Champion) would provide a brief overview of innovation and its impor tance for students.

Students would then participate in a “futures thinking” exercise, looking to invent the future of services. Finally, through a “future scenarios” activity, we would make students think about possible futures and the services needed in those situations.

Finally, we would have two guest speakers: Camila Mohr, CEO of Innspiral, a firm focused on driving innovation in large corporations; and Tomás Ffrench Davis, founder and CEO of Kellün, a social startup focused on innovating how to collaborate with social innovation projects.

Once we defined the program, we started communi cating this to our classmates. We started inviting the students through social media, official school channels, and word of mouth.

Finally, it was May 4! The day had arrived. We were apprehensive since the school had canceled classes to allow students to attend the event, but for many of them, this meant a holiday! But students were interested, and we finally had around 50 students show up (we are a small program!), which was an excellent number. Azul and Dominga welcomed all the students and provided them with our “Welcome Kit,” which had sticky notes (for the activities), a marker, an Innovation Day sticker, and snacks for the day. Florencia and Magdalena were waiting in the conference room to kick off the meeting.

At the end of the day, we were thrilled with how the stu dents participated and got involved in all the activities. Their feedback was very positive, and they highlighted the guest speakers and group activities.

From our side, the activity surpassed all our expec tations. Our classmates’ reaction was tremendously encouraging, and we learned much about them and ourselves. We felt that we went beyond what we usu ally do, which helped us better know each other and ourselves. We want to encourage every student to take these opportunities to grow, learn and improve. The UIF program helped us gain new tools and mindsets and gave us self-confidence. And above all, it reinforced how teamwork makes things better!

Credit: Rolando Oyarzún

Credit: Rolando Oyarzún

Design Venture

HOW WE HELD A 24 HOUR DESIGN CHALLENGE

Our UIF team at Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Tech nology in Namburu, India, hosted the Design Venture, a 24-hour design challenge where students were exposed to intense design thinking workshops for 24 hours straight. It was the region’s first of its kind. The theme was human centric design thinking where people’s perspectives are given more importance in all steps of approaching a solu tion to their respective problem.

We provided a one-of-a-kind opportunity for attendees to meet and learn with other Fellows and instructors in person. By fusing the most effective contemporary techniques, including design thinking and various other strategic techniques, the event presented a systematic approach to continuous design and delivery that allowed participants to concentrate on the right things at the right time.

Prior to the event, our team had gathered to talk about some issues and potential fixes for them, as we always do. We usually sit for a couple of hours or so, but there came a thought — what if we work on a problem for 24 hours straight? This thought was followed by several questions: Can we ask other students to sit along with us and work on a problem? Will students come forward to work with out even sleeping? Will we be able to help all the students continuously for 24 hours? And so forth.

Through the discussion, the idea for the design venture was born. We aimed to provide all of the participants the most cutting-edge creative expertise so they could take on all of the endeavors with the skills they had gained over this 24-hour period and act as changemakers on campus.

The event started with the phrase “Find your inspira tion,” asking each attendee to write down something that has inspired them and why. It’s true that some of

the responses are great and have everyone here in awe. Then, to assist them comprehend the value of learning and why it is necessary for someone to continue learn ing, we had a session on the “purpose of learning.”

“WE DON’T JUST LIVE, WE INNOVATE LIFE”

Problems are opportunities for innovators. So follow ing a great discussion of what innovation is and how it should be done, the crucial stage of the journey “choos ing an idea as a team” came next. The first step in inno vating or creating something is to select an idea. After defining the notion of an idea, we let the teams select an idea that they want to work on. The ideas generated by each team were excellent. We told every team to write down their target audience after selecting their idea, since we intended to follow the human-centric design approach, which enabled them to effectively offer ex ceptional results.

Then was the moment for each team to pool their resources and use design thinking to come up with a workable solution. Every stage was well thought out with enticing real-life examples, and different ways for im plementing that step within the allotted time were also discussed. Additionally, we supplied a toolkit for record ing the work completed at each phase, and a person was assigned to each team to assist them if anyone got stuck in the process. In the ideate phase, several ideas were jotted down. By the end of the competition, each team had produced a prototype. Each team created a plan for putting its concept into practice in the real world, which was then presented to the panel of judges for consider ation. The judges’ ideas helped the teams come up with a more workable approach.

by Haindavi Ghanta, Vinay Manukonda, Madan Mohan Chunduri, Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Jyothirmai Reddybathuni, and Jayanth Upthala University Innovation Fellows Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology

“DO ANYTHING WITH JOY“

The enjoyable aspect of the event was strokes. A variety of strokes were used to improve the participants’ rela tionships, get them to know one another, relieve ten sion, and warm up discussions as needed so they could connect with one another without feeling awkward. The most engaging exercise was having students recount a song’s lyrics while dancing to it in the manner they want. The music below was utilized for this.

Chop Potato Chop Chop Potato ….. Toast Chicken Toast Toast Chicken …..

We have already hosted two Design Ventures, the first of which was for students at our school March 31-April 1, 2022, and the second of which was for students from other universities April 28-29, 2022. For each of our design venture events, a sizable number of students joined up. The participants were from various universities, and we have had great feedback from them, the management, and other faculty members who have seen everything. A few former Fellows from our institution worked with us throughout the whole preparation process and even helped deliver some of the sessions.

Being a change agent entails a significant amount of responsibility. We make every effort to provide the com munity with the best possible service. Before presenting it to the attendees, we watched, learned from, and tried out a number of new techniques. This strengthened us and gave us the courage to work on similar problems in order to come up with solutions that would be useful to both the attendees and us. Most significantly, the an swers to all the questions raised during our discussions have been addressed. The issues that the teams tackled

and the conclusions they came to were excellent. Both the attendees and we had a wonderful time.

In the future, we intend to have such workshops two or three times an academic year, adding a lot more mate rials to assist participants in finding the best answers to any issues they may be facing.

Peel Banana Peel Peel Banana…..

Participants of the Design Venture challenge gather to celebrate the event. Photos courtesy of the authors.

operations & student life

A growing number of Fellows and Faculty Champions are working on projects that students, faculty and leaders can use to improve the higher education experience, from feedback platforms to systems to propose new classes.

BOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY

Britnee McCauley, Shafeqah Mordecai, Syeedah White

Our team has been working on increasing student engagement for commuter students by looking at 3 areas: 1) commuter student lounges on campus, 2) support for students who have children and 3) updating BSU app / event calendar. We adjusted our plans based on feedback from campus stakeholders and administrators who have this work as part of their portfolio. We worked with the dean of the College of Business to suggest ideas on what could enhance the lounge and selected new furniture for it. We made progress on supporting students by conducting a survey centered around the improvements we came up with in our project, to determine what ideas they would like to see happen. Shafeqah and Syeedah participated in a focus group with student-parents led by our faculty guide Dr. Erica Hernandez. Interviews of students that are parents were conducted by Britnee, which helped to gain more insight on student-parent concerns and see if they were interested in having an on-campus childcare center. Finally, our group was also asked to join the new Childcare Taskforce, which is a committee that is working to get a childcare center on our campus. Once all the planning for it has been completed, the final proposal will be turned over to the president of our school to see if the center gets approved.

and experiences. We’re currently planning to define these issues in our upcoming workshop that will focus on the second step of design thinking, “define.” In addition, we scheduled three workshops on February 22, March 8, and April 5. Simultaneously, as we hold our workshops, we create “Discovery Reports” to report on students’ experiences at Fordham and their needs.

INSTITUT TEKNOLOGI SEPULUH NOPEMBER

Zati Adila Nurifa, Zakiya Azizah Cahyaningtyas, Ferdian Wibowo, Rintan Widhi Hapsari

We made an ITS Mural and distributed it to all students for resource mapping in under standing student needs or complaints. We have held meetings with stakeholders at ITS with the aim of discussing needs/problems/ complaints that usually occur on campus as an effort to convey aspirations so that problems can be resolved immediately.

Rintan Widhi Hapsari

The Event Management Training program aims to provide an understanding of what is needed to run an event. Many year two students have to run a campus event, and many of them do not understand how, so that the event is not maximal. The event charger that we recruit is a senior student and has experience in the event. The material presented is related to teamwork, schedule formation, finance, and examples of events on campus. Training runs 3 days with 25 participants from my department. My hope is that this program can be applied in all departments at ITS.

MADANAPALLE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

Sai Raghavi Vagga, Venkata Puneeth Chowdary Gangarapu

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

Alina Furman, Gillian Gural, Braulio Mourao Pacheco, Annie O’Malley

Our project aims to understand and im prove students’ relationship with academics to enable more positive learning attitudes. Our team prototyped “Discovery Work shops” to reach out to students and gather information on what they think needs to be improved in the university. We hope to help students develop a better connection

with their education and university with these workshops. We also hope to inform students about resources on campus and educate them about different steps within design thinking. We held our first workshop in December 2021, focusing on empathy. We discussed the university’s at tempts to help students adjust to in-person classes and students’ needs to improve the transition. By focusing on mental health, we were able to start an open discussion with students regarding their struggles

We are working on a campus Interactive Map. This initiative will help freshers and students explore college resources and keep every student connected. This will also be handy to first-time campus visitors and also the students to know the pinpoint location. We are currently taking 360° degrees panorama pictures of every block which will be rendered and published soon in the Google street view app. Once the map is published, students can browse through street view, which will help them to drive themselves to the destination and gives them a better idea of the whole campus.

MENLO COLLEGE

Chara Higaki, Lina Lakoczy-Torres, Andrea Restrepo, Bryan Zaremba

We are creating a student development fund to motivate and allow students to pursue their dreams. Once per fiscal year, students are allowed to apply for a $500 grant to pursue something along the lines of their personal development. This includes the re quirement that they share what they learned from this experience with their Menlo peers.

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Jade Harris

Morgan State University is the largest HBCU in Maryland. It can be strenuous, especially as an architect major and student athlete who has to carry a lot of materials and proj ects on a daily basis, traveling across cam pus. I will propose and continue to push for bus stop expansion. We currently only have one bus stop. It would maximize conve nience if the stop was not only close to the academic quad, but one on the north side of campus (where CBEIS — the architecture school — is located) and one on the south side of campus closer to the new shopping center that is being built.

Yolanda Christophe

I am working with my university as Hyflex Instruction Course Assistant (HICA) to bridge the gap between students learning face to face and virtually. I do this by train ing faculty with innovative hybrid equip ment, troubleshooting issues mid-class so that learning is not entirely disrupted, and engaging with IT as a liaison for the classroom. I’m also working with the United States Association of Small Business to deepen my impact as an entrepreneurship educator. As a part of this doctoral consor tium, we work on a research project, and my UIF training has prompted me to under stand the impact of campus ecosystems on students’ entrepreneurial identity. There fore, I will be using tools provided during the UIF training to facilitate this project.

PADJADJARAN UNIVERSITY

Raihan Badrahadipura, Farrel Christian Pambudi Piether, Agung Anggara Rudi ni, Muhammad Shiddiq

The UIF team at Padjadjaran University (UNPAD) is working on the centralization of innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) resources. We created a website portal containing a collection of information related to existing resources at UNPAD with the aim that students have easy access to all I&E resources around campus. Website creation begins with ideas and concepts by looking at one of the references, namely

the websites of institutions in UNPAD. We collect these references and make a list which will later be included as content on the website. After collecting references and data from innovative and entrepreneurial institutions, we created a prototype website with the help of a website builder to facili tate website migration when needed and we named this website BizPad with the website address sites.google.com/view/bizpad

RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

Fiona Clarke, Aditya Sivakumar

The primary campus project we are working on is a website for aggregating innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) resources. The I&E resource website will bring together RPI’s disparate entrepre neurship resources in an easy-to-use site that will help connect potential entrepre neurs to the services and help they need to become successful. We hope that this project addresses the opaqueness of RPI’s wealth of entrepreneurial resources, which is a result of complexity, not low quality.

The other project we are working on is the project showcase, a display of student entrepreneurs’ innovations, research, and other projects that will be shown in our student union. The goal of this project is to “normalize” I&E by showing students that their peers are actively working to produce meaningful projects in their spare time.

SOPHIA UNIVERSITY

Giuli Nagai, Haruka Oizumi, Hana Saeki, Mana Short, Maria Sjøblom Bjørndalen

We are aiming to officially establish UIF within our university. Our Fellows and Faculty Champions have discussed in depth the best course of action of whether UIF should be a student-led organization, club, or credit course, and we have been in close contact with the administration of Sophia University. In order to officially incorpo rate UIF into the university and pursue our upcoming projects, we have been holding weekly meetings, publishing articles, and creating an official UIF Sophia website to share our story. Once UIF is established in our university ecosystem, we hope to have a more solid foundation on which to build our projects and provide a secure starting point for future UIF cohorts.

Giuli Nagai, Mana Short

We have been working with a student organization called KASA Sustainability on a few projects called Sustainable Campus Map (SCM), Sustainable Campus Forum, and Campus Farming & Composting. Through

the SCM project, we wished to increase the visibility of the sustainable initiatives on campus by creating a common resource that the university community could use to learn about ways to have an environmental ly-friendly lifestyle. The map that we created displays the locations of resources such as water refill stations, shareable umbrella stands, and food trucks that accept students’ reusable takeout containers.

There are many students, faculty, and staff who are still not engaged and sometimes not even aware of the importance of sustainabil ity. To address this, we created the Sustain able Campus Forum (SCF) so that different actors within campus could freely discuss how to make our campus more sustainable. Through the SCF, we also aim to empower more students to participate in sustainable initiatives and to raise awareness related to global environmental problems.

The Farming & Composting project consists of two activities: managing a campus garden and two composting systems. In the first activity, students learn how to properly plant, grow, and harvest different types of vegetables commonly seen in grocery stores. In the second activity, students learn how to create a cycle of resources within campus by using kitchen scraps from the cafeterias and fallen leaves from around the university. The compost that is created is then added to the garden soil to nourish the plants. This project gives students a glimpse into what it takes to maintain their own garden, and it allows them to gain a new perspective about the challenges of food scarcity and food production in a world experiencing climate change. Visit the website at kasasustainability. org/action.

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

Gabriel Bonansinga, Kate Held, David Hernandez, Nicholas Winkler

Our project is called Touch of Nature Reno vations. This project is meeting the campus need for interaction with the natural world, specifically the natural settings found off-campus in the Carbondale area.

UNIVERSIDAD PERUANA DE CIENCIAS APLICADAS

Carla Isabel Rojas Arana, Lucia Gabriela Corilla Grados, Sergio Manuel Farfan Mendoza, Nidia del Carmen Quintana Zaconetta

After the training, we planned to work on several projects. The flexible university allows students to choose their modality and pace of learning, a kind of Flex delivery mode. We wanted to create an entrepre neurship group and promote entrepreneur

ship at UPC. Another project was to create a program with employer companies to create a bank of real cases and final cycle students can work on these cases as part of the hours of professional practices. Finally, we wanted to create an entrepreneurship course that is offered on a voluntary basis to final cycle students so that it can comple ment their entrepreneurial plans.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA

Kathryn Fox, Matthew Lashenick

We pivoted from our original plans and sent out a survey to students to see what they would like to have to improve students’ men tal health. We received about 60 responses and are seeing what we can do based on those. We are adjusting our plans further to make the campus more accessible for stu dents by building a swing table in the library for those who may need alternative seating.

UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE

Emilija Banytė, Marlen Braun, Fátima González-Novo, Thomas Goudsblom (2020), Novianita Isnaynizhra, Panashe Mangezi, Seth Palsgraaf

We are currently working on the develop ment of a new campus app in close collab oration with different departments of our university. The plan is to launch the new university app at the beginning of the next academic year (September 2022). At the mo ment, we have a campus app but this one is only targeted towards incoming students, and after a few months on campus, these students stop using the app due to the lack of interesting functionalities. We want to update the current app while incorporating the features that students need and desire. At the moment, for example, it is very hard to book a room on campus due to an inef ficient system. However, many rooms are often available and students have no way of reserving or making use of them. That is why we want to incorporate a room book ing system into the application, to facilitate students’ collaboration with each other on campus. Additionally, our university doesn’t have a central platform for events. When a club organizes an event, it is very hard for them to reach new students. Thus, bringing all the events together into one central platform will not only benefit the students who will learn the different activities that are going on in their surroundings but also associations, which will now be able to expand their reach.

Marlen Braun, Philippe Damoiseaux (2020), Seth Palsgraaf

We are working on connecting startups and students. The University of Twente has a lot

UNIVERSITAS GUNADARMA

Muhammad Ramadhani Alfarizi, Dara Mulia, Dolva Pagansy, Pricilla Ruly

Since it was established in 1981, Gunadarma University has not had a canteen because the campus philosophy is to have a positive economic impact on the surrounding community. However, because it is surround ed by various main roads, it is risky to have activities outside campus. We distributed questionnaires and received responses from nearly 300 students. 92.4% of the community stated that they often order snacks but tend to buy from sellers who are closest to campus. Of course, this does not support economic equality. In addition to safety and economic stim ulation, hygiene factors and payment are also problems. Our solution is a mobile application named UGFoodHub, a Digital Collaboration Canteen Application that provides food and drinks from various MSMEs around campus. Students can also sell their food and beverage products at UG FoodHub. UGFoodHub has promising prospects, because in the market there is no food ordering application that does not have application fees or revenue sharing. With a total of 15 campuses and 34,717 students, ex cluding lecturers and staff, UGFoodHub has a high market opportunity. In the future, it is possible for schools that have similar circumstances to Gunadarma University to adopt UGFoodHub.

of entrepreneurial possibilities for students or young startups, but just not everyone knows who to contact in what situation. The project is called CommUniTy, with the U and T from University of Twente. We are starting out by mapping out the entrepreneurial possibilities and opportunities at the UT. We are contacting a list of organizations and communities to ask for their unique points within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, so we can then use this to create a visualization of that ecosystem. Right now we are in the middle of gathering information from these organizations. After that we are planning to pitch the concept to NovelT, the biggest entrepreneurial organization at UT.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMILWAUKEE

Allyn Lottouzee

The UWM Precious Plastics Workstation has been my personal primary project. This would allow students to gather plastics from around the campus to shred and remake into a number of different molds from an assortment of five different work stations, which would help immensely with sustainable prototyping. I am also working on making the campus more sustainably minded. I am first doing so with an in-ves sel composting system, set to arrive by this May. It also includes work on a recycling

UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND

Ushna Khan

My project is the Spider Venture Fund. I discovered the need for a stu dent venture capital focused organization after reviewing the university startup ecosystem and confirmed the need for the organization through conversations with students and faculty. I recruited and trained 7 ana lysts from a pool of 80 students and formed partnerships with Business school, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and venture capital firms.

Currently, I’m delivering training workshops for analysts throughout the summer and securing a venture capital course for training. I formed a partnership with Richmond VC firm, Trolley Venture Partners and deliv ered a due diligence project for Trolley during Fall 2021. I’m working on two more projects during Spring 2022 that will build a holistic entrepre neurship ecosystem at the University of Richmond by meeting the need for a student venture capital focused organization.

their respective communities. Finally, Honors curriculum is limited to under graduate studies only, and UIF could retain student involvement into graduate studies and beyond. I am also increasing campus visibility of UIF by creating tangible items with UIF logo and info for distribution and placement at events and visible locations.

Another element of my UIF work is pub licity for Mental Health Resources. I am generating a list of resources available to students and the community for mental health services and publishing tangible items for connecting those who need help to those who can help.

VASIREDDY VENKATADRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Madan Mohan Chunduri, Haindavi Ghanta, Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Vinay Manukonda, Jyothirmai Reddybathuni, Jayanth Upthala

Our college clubs have been our main source for identifying and supporting student talent since the outset. So, we came up with the idea of motivating students and giving them the support they need to take the top certification examinations in their various fields of interest in order to help them land jobs in those fields and advance their careers in those fields. To make it happen, we spoke with the club’s resource people to learn about the examinations that students can take simultaneously with their regular academic schedules and compiled a list of potential certification exams that students could take. Later, we informed the members of each specific club about the certification exams available to them, the benefits of doing so, and answered the concerns they had.

campaign, a zero-waste grocery store, updating the bylaws to require green roofs on new buildings, and a food processor that turns food into sludge in less than a day that can be further composted.

Manuel Garmendez, Antonina Johnston, Allyn Lottouzee, Rudi Marciniak

We are working on an interactive mural project. This includes a prototype form which is just an email survey, but will hope fully lead to an interactive media display in our student union where students can add their thoughts on how to improve our campus through design and inclusivity. We call this the Campus Mural.

I am working on integrating UIF into Hon ors College curriculum. Honors College offers intellectual pursuits across all majors for undergraduate distinction at UWM. Seminars in various disciplines are offered as professors rotate Honors classes each semester. There is also an Honors Living Learning Community that provides greater involvement in academic participation. Currently, UIF faculty have taught seminar classes, but there exists a much greater opportunity for recruiting into UIF from the Honors College than currently offered. Likewise, UIF would offer Honors students tools for greater impact on campus and

We are also working on Campus Quora, a one stop destination for everyone to clarify their doubts regarding campus. We created the Campus Quora website where students can post their queries. All the faculty on campus have access to view the doubts posted by students and the respected faculty can answer the doubts raised. It works similarly with the administration also, as students can raise doubts about tuition fees, bus routes, or holidays. Most frequently answered questions were listed and displayed automatically. It is included with an automated chat bot which answers questions to some extent. All the remaining questions or the unanswered questions are automatically mapped to respected faculty for answering and a notification is also sent to the user if his/her question gets answered. The website is developed by the students of our college and is ready to launch officially.

Manuel Garmendez

Center: Ushna Khan. Credit: University of Richmond.

Earning a Degree When You Have Kids

BUILDING STUDENT-CENTERED SUPPORTS FOR STUDENT-PARENTS

By Erica Hernandez Faculty Innovation Fellow Candidate Bowie State University

As I rush into class a minute late, quickly logging into the instructor computer station, I suddenly hear the unexpected sound of a toddler squealing in delight. This adorable visitor is the two year old daughter of one of my students. The student gets her daughter settled into watching a video while also getting her own notebook out for class. Today, this student-parent is trying her best to balance caring for her daughter with pursuing her own education to create a better future for her growing family. There are a myriad of challenges that student-parents must overcome to earn a degree. How might we help student-parents to attain their education al goals while also honoring the importance of their role as parents?

Student-parents make up approximately one in five college students in the United States, for a total of 3.8 million students1. Student-parents frequently face barri ers to graduation such as a lack of institutional resourc es geared towards students with children, challenges balancing family and school responsibilities, and feeling isolated and different from other students.

However, it’s not all bad news: many student-parents find supportive faculty and staff at their institutions. Student-parents report that they are motivated to graduate because they want to set a good example for their children and gain financial independence for their family2. At Bowie State University, I found that there are many individual faculty and staff who are supportive but there are no institutionalized services for student-par ents. I decided to focus on creating a set of institutional supports to increase student success while ensuring that student-parents feel seen and valued.

The Faculty Innovation Fellows (FIF) program has provided a great community for feedback, ideas and encouragement for this project. One of the best pieces of advice came from a Faculty Innovation Coach: “try stuff.” I started by reaching out to faculty and staff who support students with different types of special needs to find allies with the power and willingness to support student-par ents. I found campus partners whose existing services, from tutoring to medical and disability accommodations, might be adapted to meet the needs of student-parents. From this, I started building support among colleagues to propose a Student-Parent Resource Center. In July 2022, I will apply for a federal CCAMPIS grant to provide financial support for student-parent childcare expenses while also providing wraparound support services using existing campus resources. I am also working with col leagues at different institutions to create a research hub to compile existing research about student-parent support services and educational outcomes.

Another essential concept that I learned through FIF at the 2022 Silicon Valley Meetup was “co-creation.” I realized that an effort to support student-parents will be more impactful if the voices of student-parents are in cluded from the beginning stages of design. I have been honored to work with University Innovation Fellows who are student-parents themselves. They are very effective advocates for positive change for student-parents, and their voices have guided this effort. The Fellows also connected me with other student-parents to launch the Student-Parent Association. This will provide an oppor tunity for student-parents to connect with other students like them, reduce isolation, and advocate for impactful positive change on campus.

1 Ascend at the Aspen Institute & Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (2020). Parents in College by the numbers. [Fact Sheet]. https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ C481_Parents-in-College-By-the-Numbers-Aspen-Ascend-and-IWPR.pdf

2 Ajayi, K. V., Odonkor, G., Panjwani, M. S., Aremu, O., Garney, W., & Mckyer, E. L. J. (2022). Social-Ecological Barriers to Student-parents’ Academic Success: A Systematic Review. Journal of Further and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2022.2065629

Over my first year in the FIF program, my project has taken a three-pronged approach to supporting stu dent-parents: proposing institutional supports, starting a research hub to consolidate national efforts, and launching a student-organization to amplify the voices of student-parents. My vision is that all student-parents feel seen, valued and supported as they attain their educational goals. Creating these supports at a His torically Black College / University (HBCU) like Bowie State University elevates HBCUs as part of the national conversation about student-parents. Considering the millions of student-parents in the United States, finding an effective, scalable solution for increasing student suc cess among student-parents will have a dramatic impact on the education and financial independence of both the student-parents and their children.

Credit: Eric Anderson

Credit: Ryan Pelham

Establishing a Start-up Ecosystem with a Prototype Design Network

HOW MIGHT WE FOCUS ON CUSTOMER NEEDS EARLIER IN THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING TECHNICAL SEEDS?

By Takeshi Kato Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate Tohoku University

When I joined the Faculty Innovation Fellows program, I was assigned to support a start-up education program for both faculty and students. My experience working at technology companies and meeting with hundreds of researchers and faculty members about potential startups primed me for this challenge.

I have worked in product marketing at an American high technology company and have experience starting up a software service company with American-Moroccan in the Bay Area in California. Since 2016, I have met over 100 researchers for the promotion to apply for a seed funding application at Tohoku University in the EdgeNext program. Seed funding is monetary support that encourages research activities for commercialization and might be useful for Intellectual Property strength, customer needs qualification with the prototype design, some potential market research activities, team building activities for start-up, etc., before funding by Venture Capital in this case. Tohoku University is opening over 460 seed applications on the official Web site every year.

I was lucky to meet 10% to 20% of the faculty mem bers who were interested in this fund to accelerate the commercialization from the seeds. From these meet ings, I found that many researchers seem to be eager to complete papers before seeking patents and might not be interested in customers’ requirements or busi ness trends even in the engineering department. I was surprised that many faculty members would not show a significant interest in seed funding money to accelerate the commercialization. Based on this experience, I was thinking about two goals for a change-leader education program with UIF and a sustainable start-up ecosystem.

THE PROBLEM

It seems to be difficult for researchers to qualify custom er needs by using a prototype design because they lack knowledge for processes for commercialization from seeds or any chance to design the prototype for custom er needs verification.

The objective of many faculty members seems to be to complete research for their papers or submitting to international journals before obtaining patents. There seem to be critical issues not to match the customer needs to accelerate commercialization in the research mindset. I also supposed there was not enough educa tion or information on verifying customer needs in the technology commercialization process.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM

Now Tohoku University is leading a new program, START: Program for creating STart-up from Advanced Research and Technology, supported by the Japanese government. This project is based on the consortium with 10 public universities in the Northeast region in Japan from June 2022. My goal is to establish a sustain able ecosystem to start up business and make a common education platform for start-ups in the consortium and expand our programs into our regions in five years.

My observation is that our region has two major strengths. One of them is the synergy effects with usage of many resources in 10 universities for start-up edu cation programs and start-up activities including many labs and technology centers. The other is that Tohoku University has some experience leading entrepreneur ship programs such as Edge-Next program in the past five years. On the other hand, the weakness of this

consortium is a lack of communication to share any information with each other. We do not understand what other universities are progressing in start-up education or any activities of commercialization from universities.

I also realized that we needed a change-leader education program with UIF to change the mindsets of faculty members, some education programs for commercializa tion from technology seeds and promotion activities for researchers and faculty.

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION

Considering our strength of a synergy in our consor tium, we would try to establish TPCO (Tohoku-Consor tium Prototype Coordination Office) as the function of coordination for technical matching with public technology centers or some companies to accelerate the prototype design from technology seeds or regional so cial issues in some universities. We are also to start the negotiation to make the network, MuNES (Michinoku University Network for Entrepreneurial Support) with 10 universities and 16 technology centers for prototype design. We are expecting to use these networks to design the prototype to verify customer needs in the commer cialization process from technology seeds.

Our team is starting bi-weekly online lunch meetings with 10 universities to understand each other. Addition ally, we have just started the off-site two-days meeting monthly. Each university will take turns to lead this in-person meeting every month so we can understand each university’s characteristics, advanced program, and challenging points in different regions. I have also done the kick-off start meeting including an idea generation and a brainstorming for start-up ecosystem establish ment in 10 universities with the City of Sendai and the company to design the prototype this summer.

LOOKING AHEAD

We will start the first trial activities to establish a sustainable start-up ecosystem including education programs for a change-leader program with UIF, proto typing facilities by support of City of Sendai, banks and venture capital companies, and some design companies from next year, 2023.

We will start to establish the start-up network or communication networks via MuNES in the regional technology center to accelerate the prototype for the Proof of Concept or to do the matching customer needs with technical seeds in the start-up companies or the labs in the University. We are also planning to execute combination programs of start-up education by design thinking with UIF in our region and start the promotion for students, faculties in universities and entrepreneurs in our region.

Our team will make our common start-up education programs in 10 universities and keep biweekly and monthly communications on major topics such as social issue solution, technology start up program, start-up education including technology colleges and a sustain able start-up ecosystem with technology centers. These entire projects will benefit the Tohoku Community network in 10 universities and beyond our region in the future.

Graphic courtesy of the author

Emancipated Impact for Indonesia

CONNECTING INDONESIA STUDENTS TO GOVERNMENT FUNDED OPPORTUNITIES WITH KAMPUS MERDEKA

by Nurrizky Imani, Vincent Junition Ungu, Elan Yudhoprakoso, Fajar Kenichi Kusumah Putra University Innovation Fellows Universitas Gadjah Mada

As students, we never imagined that the lessons we learned in the University Innovation Fellows pro gram would have such a profound effect on our fellow students. Ever since the very first training session, our Universitas Gadjah Mada team has been functioning below its potential. Due to everyone’s busy schedules outside of UIF, we regularly fell behind the target. Because of everyone’s varied schedules, we occasionally had to catch up on last week’s work. We even sometimes wondered if we’d be able to sustain the impact beyond the UIF leadership period as we neared the end of the training. It turned out, we underestimated how much it would grow.

During the most recent training, we developed an ambi tious plan to establish three strategic priorities on cam pus. We thought it was too ambitious and the fact that Nurrizky, one of our Fellows, was leading the UIF UGM in a different time zone 12 hours while on exchange at the University of Pennsylvania. In the end we developed three priorities:

1. Creating a space for students to obtain industry internships.

2. Providing students with mentoring opportunities for preparing them for international experience through exchange students.

3. Creating an environment where students can learn about product engineering jobs and oppor tunities.

Our strategic objectives were determined by what we had learned as product engineering students in tech nology. We discovered a missing piece of the puzzle in our community regarding how students have strong technical skills but insufficient work experience. This has become an endless loop from which students can not escape. On the other hand, we discovered that the Indonesian Ministry of Education is pushing a massive program called “Kampus Merdeka,” which translates to “Emancipated Campus,” to encourage students to learn off-campus via internship and exchange program.

This allowed us to test our first strategic objective, “Mentoring Kampus Merdeka: Internship,” in which we established a mentorship program to assist students in obtaining their first internship. This mentoring program instructs mentees on how to compose a personal brand ing and interview.

During the implementation, we were able to identify nine mentors with various business and engineering responsibilities. In addition, 42 individuals signed up to be mentors, and 18 students were selected as their men tees. With only one month of mentoring, we provide the students with learning activities and modules that give them a comprehensive understanding of each interview process. This Mentoring assists mentees in obtaining their initial internship. After 5 months, 75% of our men tees were offered internships. Our first endeavor has inspired us to make a second significant contribution.

On our second priority called “Mentoring Kampus Merdeka: Exchange”, we assisted students in applying for the Indonesia International Student Mobility Awards (IISMA). This mentoring program provided students with the opportunity to study at partner universities out side of Indonesia, including the University of Pennsyl vania, Melbourne University, UC Davis, and more than 50 other institutions. UIF UGM created a mentorship program that assists students with the review of their essays and each step of the activity, such as the interview and test administration.

We were able to attract up to 30 mentees and assist 20 students during the second round of applications for this mentorship. We were ultimately able to help 10 students be accepted in the program. It was remarkable that ten students were able to gain international experience in world class universities. This simple, cost-free but pow erful mentorship has helped students have their best college experience.

The impact of UIF UGM has led to unimaginable op portunities for students in our campus, and this has led them to a new journey of learning opportunities. This impact was not something that we expected in the first time and this led us to be excited with our next impact both on campus and also in other communities. You can check our impact on Instagram @uif.ugm.

Image created by Laurie Moore using DALL-E

Work on a class project, create a business, build a prototype with paper and glue, talk about life. Each year, members of our community create and reimagine places for students and faculty to learn and grow together.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT

Mariam El Madhoun, Zein Zebib

I [Zein] participated in a design sprint to design a space in AUB. My team and I ended up getting the winning design and we are now working at AUB to implement our designs. At my university, there is a department called the Interdisciplinary Design Practice Program (IDPP) that has a collaborative class (225) and a headquarters (HQ) — those are the spaces we are de signing. We are designing the spaces to look more efficient and attract attention towards the IDPP among AUB students. Moreover, we even included a mini prototype of one of our stra tegic priorities from UIF: we are going to add an “AUBe the change” box that allows students to write their suggestions to the IDPP. It allows students to send their voices to changemak ers at AUB. Mariam joined our team after the sprint to implement the designs.

ROWAN UNIVERSITY

Aatish Gupta

I work at Studio 231, a makerspace at Rowan that was started by a former UIF cohort. I have used what I learned from my UIF training to run design thinking, low resolution prototyping, and high resolution prototyping workshops there. I have also led workshops like intro to app develop ment, intro to arduino, and intro to 3D printing, using the same skills. These activi ties help to encourage I&E among a variety of students at Rowan, of all majors.

TOBB UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND TECHNOLOGY

During the 6-week online training, we had the chance to meet with many students, academicians and university staff. The first main problem we focused on as a result of these interviews was that the students felt that they lacked a space of their own. Almost all areas reserved for students’ use in the main campus are also used by stu dents to study. This limits the space where students can socialize and share their ideas with each other, apart from cafes and

restaurants. In order to meet this require ment, we decided to establish an innova tion and design station (I&D Station) within our school. In this Station, which will be open to everyone within the university, we aim to gather students to discuss their ideas, to make projects, to support these projects with our school’s enterprise center Garaj, to pave the way for interdisciplinary studies, to organize various inspiration meetings and hackathons... In short, we expect this field to be a starting point in our university in the light of innovation and design-oriented thinking.

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY

Atsushi Aoyama, Watcharawut Masawat, Haruka Minemura, Bungo Tanaka

The I-River is a room for innovation, a place for prototyping, a place for people to connect, and a place for information to come together. The concept is a sustainable innovation cycle. Innovation is likened to the flow of water on earth, with the iriver as the source of innovation, and the waves of innovation flowing into society. The water of innovation that flows into society eventually sublimates in society, and the innovation born in society becomes clouds, which again flow into the iriver, the source. This is a sustainable cycle of innovation in

which the innovation we create becomes a stream that affects society, and we receive the benefits of the innovations created in society, which in turn becomes a new stream of innovation. Many people have already gathered in this room, and the members have held workshops, rented it out to people who want to use it, and held ceremonies. Not only students, but also teachers have been invited, and the Vice President has visited. We will continue to hold effective workshops and attractive events in this room, with the aim of inviting more people and making this room a place where people want to come to Tohoku University because of it.

Ekin Al, Ömer Bahadır Orhan, Aleyna Ece Yalavaç

A Common Workspace for Implementing Innovative Ideas

by Aditya Shasank PSKPVS University Innovation Fellow Aditya College of Engineering

While pursuing my bachelor’s degree, one of the Central Government Organizations of India called for Innovative Projects through a program called Chhatra ViswaKarma Awards. Our team, along with several other teams, attended the Region-Level Meet with their ideas from different colleges. My idea, to prepare a model which automatically delivers grocery items based on consumer choice, was submitted under the title “Ra tion Distribution Management System,” and we secured first place. We were asked to present the working model with minor additions at the National-Level Meet. We participated at the National Level meet by enhancing the suggestions as a working model. The proposed idea and functioning of our model was well appreciated by the panel of judges. As a part of this I have implemented the logic for inventory maintenance, consumer biomet ric authentication, digital payment.

However, during the Regional Level Meet, many of the teams were disqualified for various reasons, and only a few teams were selected for the National Level Meet. One question that dwelled on my mind was the reason for disqualification of ideas that are found to be good and interesting. We started interacting with those teams and analyzed the same.

We found that most of the projects are related to multi disciplinary majors, and the team didn’t have a proper combination or they don’t have proper understanding of the majors that were involved. Another aspect is the lack of knowledge, coordination, and guidance as the problems chosen are related to multidisciplinary majors.

After analyzing the reasons, we University Innovation Fellows thought that we could address this problem on our campus. This change is implemented with a concept called Common Workspace for Implementing

Innovative Ideas. This is the space where students can express their ideas and form teams and start working on the ideas.

If a student in a particular major has an idea and wants to start implementing the same, it may require exper tise and support of technologies from different majors. The common workspace provides a platform to acquire the expertise and peers from different majors who are interested in collaborating and implementing to make it successful.

We expressed this total scenario with purpose and proposed change with the peers, Faculty Champions, campus advisors, stakeholders. Based on the feedback and suggestions received from the stakeholders, we came up with a proposal to have a common workplace equipped with components and tools that may be needed in implementing different concepts. For this we got the approval from authorities for implementing the same on a trial basis.

The following steps were followed in implementing the trial run.

• All the students are informed regarding the avail ability of common work space emphasizing the purpose and asked them to register their area of interest/expertise along with their idea if any.

• Provision to view other peers with similar/suitable expertise related to other majors is provided so that collaborations are formed.

• The best few ideas are considered, and the men tor(s) allocated for each of them. Mentors coordi nated the team formation by choosing a pool of people for each idea.

“THE SECRET OF CHANGE IS TO FOCUS ALL OF YOUR ENERGY, NOT ON FIGHTING THE OLD, BUT BUILDING ON THE NEW.” - SOCRATES

• Budget required for procuring the necessary com ponents, tools if any are provided to the teams. Procurement is done by the team and the same was monitored by Mentor.

• The considered ideas are converted into models and the same are presented to the stakeholders and few of them enhanced based on the sugges tions given.

• These three models are exhibited in different competitions and two of them won the Best Idea/ model prizes and the other model got apprecia tion.

As the trial run results are successful and there is a visible improvement found in the students to work on multidisciplinary majors, the college authorities approved to enhance the workspace so as to cater more number of students. Now, we are at a point of making the workspace ready and the same is going to be inau gurated soon.

Credit: iStock.com/Designer

Building a Community of Manufacturers and Designers

A SPACE WHERE IDEAS BECOME REALITY AT FLORIDA TECH

by Maria Fernanda Sagastume University Innovation Fellow Florida Institute of Technology

Imagine a place where you can build your own air guitar or design your own electric bike, a place where no mat ter how old you are, you can learn and have fun at the same time. The Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design (CAMID) at Florida Tech where I work as an Engineer Designer is the place where these ideas become a reality and where innovation and design come together through hands-on learning.

CAMID is a 100,000 square-foot facility full of STEM pow ered activities and equipment that has been designed to serve as a business incubator and innovative laboratory space for manufacturers of all sizes. This center has continuous support from the City of Palm Bay and key companies around the Space Coast of Florida to become a hub for developing the next workforce and improving the skills of our current one.

As a University Innovation Fellow, I was first introduced to a similar open and welcoming environment at the d. school and I was fascinated to see the co-working spaces and tools available to any individual that wanted to come in and use this facility. From maker-carts and movable furniture and walls to power tools and cool carpets, everything is purposely placed to allow for creativity and innovation to flow. While I was there, I worked with a diverse team to brainstorm ways to improve healthcare and to utilize concerts and festivals to create awareness about high impact social issues. Thanks to this experi ence, I not only learned about design thinking and how to apply it but I have become more open and accepting of different ideas and learned to work with people of diverse backgrounds in an environment that promotes innovation and design as soon as you step in.

By bringing this welcoming environment and ideas for co-working spaces at the d.school to Florida Tech’s CAMID, I can promote an environment of making and creating through the simplest yet most intentional ex periences that inspire individuals to achieve their goals and bring their ideas to reality. I am even more aware now of the importance of creating more spaces like the d.school and CAMID around the world so more individ uals can be exposed to a place like this to start breaking barriers and reinvent the way we teach and learn.

It is not enough to sit down in a classroom anymore, we can also learn and become even better human beings through spaces like the d.school and CAMID and ulti mately improve our community and our world.

Maria (right) at Google during the 2017 UIF Silicon Valley Meetup. Photo courtesy of the author.

We are driven, motivated, and passionate. We are also deeply reflective, curious, and thoughtful. We asked Fellows and Faculty Champions to share their thoughts on what keeps them up at night, and what keeps them going during the day.

Trailblazing

by La Selene Dommu University Innovation Fellow Aditya College of Engineering & Technology

UIF has been a great opportunity for innovating and to bring a change in the Ecosystem of our college. From the day the journey of UIF started, it has opened the doors for new perspectives. The interactions that we had with diverse students by getting into their shoes and under standing their views, brainstorming on picking up the problem that would help most of the students were some of the challenges.

The approach of Design Thinking made it easy to go in a step by step manner and tackle the problem at each level. It takes the first step of empathizing to actually start whatever you want to work on. There by defining the problem which has to be ideated later on to generate a “HMW” (How Might We) question. Then comes the phase of prototyping which gives a scope to use a wide variety of tools depending on the requirement and the interest. The final phase of any product is testing, which actually validates all the hard work done so far.

Design Thinking offers us a means to think outside the box and also dig deeper into problem-solving. This can be a continuous recurring process until the desired out comes are seen. For example, if I have to talk about one of our 4 strategies that we implemented, “AlFaSt” — connect ing ALumni, FAculty, STudents — we had to use empa thy to figure out what would actually help the students, define the problem statement to be able to be precise and concise, ideate on the ways of bringing it a shape, take it to a next level by prototyping and finally testing it recursively. This whole process made us get into those narrowed down problems and their solutions as the final 4 strategies. The results that we saw after this sequence of action made us go from “aw” to “wow”! Though it was a time taking process to actually get your hands dirty in making things happen, all the work done is worth it.

The long-awaited in-person 2022 Silicon Valley Meetup at Stanford’s d.school for the 2019 cohort was another great opportunity to go through the same approach and work with diverse teams on different problems. It was an awe-mazing experience to witness such an environment and network with people all around the world. The whole community of UIF is a place to get inspired from. It’s always a feeling of admiration to see the UIF core team Humera, Leticia, Laurie, Lupe, G for all their great efforts

and for always being there. I got to learn from UIF alumni through their ignite talks including Tara Rahmani, who moved me and made me feel through her poetic story. I enjoyed all the workshop sessions, getting to meet new people, learning about different ideologies and also fun activities like doodling around our pictures. We also had the chance to know about the programs regarding how to get into Stanford, the senior Design impact students gave a glimpse of the work and innovations they were working on. It was indeed a proud moment to be there as a UIFian in Stanford and was a great experience to get to know new things and perspectives. The moments spent there would be something that I will cherish.

This experience and journey is not something we would like to keep with us for our Cohort. We want this legacy to continue and make more students be part of the UIF family to experience all the fun and emotions. With that idea, we nominated the next Team of UIFians from our college to go through this roller coaster of feelings. This is an opportunity to come forward as a Change Agent, be the Voice of the Students, to lead a movement to ensure that all students gain the attitudes, skills and knowledge required to navigate a complex world. These are the ones who can demonstrate a passion for innovation, creativity and the entrepreneurial mindset. Some of them were the ones who were inspired by our efforts and were already ready to take this up forward. Hope this continues and expands in leaps and bounds, where people inspire each other and grow together. #doepicshit

The author (left) at the UIF Silicon Valley Meetup 2022. Credit: Patrick Beaudouin

Is an Impactful Work Life Possible?

by Zişan Özdemir University Innovation Fellow Boğaziçi University

When I was a newcomer at the Chemical Engineering department, it was quite disturbing for me to realize that I would be working for companies producing petro leum-based products. Because, I thought I was going to work in industries that don’t care about their damage to the environment. (At that time, my knowledge of chemical engineering consisted only of what was taught in lectures.) This awakening demotivated me for a while but it didn’t take too long.

Thankfully, with the help of a schoolmate, I discovered alternative ways of using my major for better purposes. With impact-oriented experiences (projects, trainings, internships, etc.) I gained throughout my college life, I was able to shift my career to the field I wanted. Long story short, if you haven’t discovered impact-oriented career opportunities yet, I’m writing this article exactly for you!

The combination of pandemic conditions and increasing social and environmental awareness has been a massive wake up call, and people got the opportunity to rethink their career choices. Many people began to feel the need to change their jobs and look for a “purpose” in what they do. When it comes to “purposeful” jobs, thankfully, it’s been a long time since the only way to make a social and environmental impact was volunteering for an NGO. However, we still witness far too many people rushing towards just one option: becoming an impact entrepre neur! Of course you may start your own impact-oriented business if you have an idea to solve real-world problems and make a profit at the same time. However, impact en trepreneurship is more than owning an impact-oriented business, it’s a mindset! (Yes, I’ve also been asked many times why I haven’t founded an impact venture yet. The answer is very simple: I still don’t have a solid idea and not everyone has to found a start-up.)

With the mindset shift to the cross-sectoral approach, we are more aware than ever before that the partici pation of all stakeholders, a collective transformation, is essential to fully achieve sustainable development. From government to non-profits to impact ventures to venture capitals to academia, and the rest of the tradi tional for-profits, there’s a role for all organizations to contribute to the transition to sustainability. It’s a must!

Credit: iStock.com/phototechno

Therefore, you can make an impact as a policy-maker, impact investor, sustainability consultant, academician or intrapreneur. (We can extend this list as long as we want.) But first, you have to decide why and for what you want to make an impact. (Climate change? Poverty? Inequalities? Human rights?...) Which problem in the world is bothering you the most?

Besides all these, of course, you don’t need to have “sus tainability” or “impact” in your title to make an impact in your position. There’s a growing number of impact enterprises or corporate companies that truly care about sustainability and impact out there. If you sincerely believe in the company’s mission and vision and if you enjoy the working conditions associated with the compa ny’s culture, you may genuinely find fulfillment by join ing such an organization, which is one of the alternative ways to use your expertise to make an impact.

In an ideal world we expect everyone to look after soci ety and the environment in what they do, but I’ve tried to compile ways we can do our best until we get closer to the ideal (based on my own experiences). I believe we will achieve better as we demand. (fingers crossed!)

I’ve found my way to create impact by managing the car bon footprint of companies as a sustainability consultant @3pmetrics, and I want to contribute to decarbonization more and more!

CREATE IMPACT THROUGH YOUR PROFESSION WITHOUT OWNING AN IMPACT ENTERPRISE

Just Breathe

MY ANXIETY AND GRIEF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL

by Navya Chelluboyina University Innovation Fellow Kakinada Institute of Engineering and Technology

Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide

Working from home, lockdown did not affect me much as an employee of a multinational corporation. Life remained undisturbed even after relocation of work location. Piles of targets to meet daily along with home routine kept me busy for months after lockdown was imposed.

Everything was in flow! I lost track of days that went by without talking to a special close person in my life. I kept on postponing my thought of giving her a phone call to have a small chat. One day when I did, I received the news that she quit her life (suicide). I denied the very fact that she no longer existed. I believed it wasn’t true yet I was afraid to ask for the truth one more time and chose to stay in denial not for minutes or days but for months.

I shut myself behind my room door from everything that connected me to the outside world. I resigned from the company I had then worked in. I cut off communication with everyone. I completely isolated myself.

Little did I know I had high functioning anxiety. When I went to little family gatherings, my whole body shivered with fear out of nowhere. I was able to reach out to one or two friends who kept on saying “try to stay calm” while my whole consciousness shifted into my brain, bouncing side to side with sharp unfocused conscious ness, going blind to the physical world around me. I made instant judgments that everything and everyone around me were having bad intentions about me. I used unhealthy distractions just so that I didn’t need to feel the pain and suffering. That temporary dopamine kept me happy for a small period of time only. So I got used to that temporary happiness more and more.

I wished it never happened and rethought every possible situation.“I should have done that,” “ I wish I knew,”

“Where did I go wrong,” “did I ignore or haven’t been supportive,” “only if I had the chance.” This loop of selfworth questioning kept on rolling inside my head for several days, draining me physically and mentally, and at the end making it another non-productive day.

The whole grief process and unhealthy choices disrupt ed my overall emotional health and cognitive thinking. All I could think of was bad outcomes, and focusing on career growth has become the most difficult and impos sible thing.

There was a day I got tired of all the suffering and begged for help. I felt being dragged down more as the choices I made haven’t been healthy so the very point of giving a start to change has become the toughest thing to con quer. The first thing I cried out loud and many times was, “I don’t want to suffer anymore! Let go of this pain.”

I observed that saying this out repetitively for a mo ment some heavy load was removed. I was desperate to change and I started exploring grief coping mech anisms. I kept on collecting coping mechanisms and focused on only one thing: consistency in showing up for myself every day.

In April of this year, I happened to see a call for articles for this journal. I read through all the articles in last year’s journal, inspecting the range of topics presented. I felt a connection with “Daring to Dream Bigger,” by Maria Romina Dominzain de Leon of the Universidad de Montevideo. She described a few meditation techniques which I decided to include in my routine. In her article, she carefully chose words for deeper understanding. From this, I acquired valuable information to self-regu late my emotions. Her article about herself gave me igni tion, and from that point of time, I was led in a different path of thinking and attitude towards life.

I wondered — if she influenced this much change in my personal life into a smoother way of living just by her article with only words, perhaps I could also influence people by sharing my journey with anxiety and grief.

With that in mind, I would like to share my coping mechanisms:

• My emergency tool to ground myself is “Mindful Breathing.” Yes! It is the most effective solution: 2 short inhales - Hold air inside lungs for at least 3 seconds, exhale through the mouth and then repeat 3x times.

• Self grooming to stay away from negative thoughts.

• Increasing physical activity mainly outdoors to deal with my crowd fear (rope jumping, running, going on dates alone).

• Preparing my diet meals.

• Maintaining a journal to keep check on my emo tional health. Writing every thought that makes me feel blocked.

• Most importantly, meditating daily as simple as focusing on air flow while inhaling and exhaling (2-10 minutes)

It can be hard to ask for help when you need it the most. I hope that this journal on my anxiety and grief man agement, and these coping mechanisms, can help you as well. Through this process I promised myself that I would hold on and not give up to the darkness made by my mind. I am proud of what I have accomplished, and I believe that you can accomplish the same.

Credit: Navya Chelluboyina

Re-Futuring Starts From Campus

by Magdalena Ionescu Faculty Innovation Fellow Sophia University

Faced with an impending environmental collapse, more than ever before our generation is asking itself: what are we leaving to the next generation? Frankly, however, it seems to me that the question needs to be rephrased!

Rather than focusing on what we leave to the next gener ation, I believe it is far more important to ask ourselves what we leave in them.

Let me explain.

The 20th century was powered by an industrial mindset that has been characterized as defuturing1, since, in treating the earth as a resource rather than a respon sibility, it has effectively led to a colonization of the future, thereby robbing future (human and non-human) generations of the resources necessary to fulfill their own needs.

I believe that by far the biggest task before us today is that of shifting away from this de-futuring mindset (on which all major systems and practices are based) to a re-futuring one. Framed as a challenge, this can be formulated as: how might we enable a shift in our self-perception as separated from nature to radically interdependent on the entire array of animate and inan imate components that make up the Chain of Life? And how might we redesign our socio-political and economic systems to reflect this perception shift in ourselves as “responsible custodians”, rather than “entitled owners” of our natural world?

Without this perception shift, any current and future at tempt to avert the impending ecological disaster caused by our rampant crossing of planetary boundaries is doomed to fail, amounting to nothing more than green washing. After all, as Einstein famously enunciated, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

So, what to do?

Age-old wisdom informs us that change comes in only two ways: by accident or by design. Although not a task we have chosen for ourselves, we cannot be as reckless as to passively wait for an accidental change! In truth, the only way in which we can assume the responsibility our generation has been entrusted with, is to intention ally envision and design the blueprint for the sustainable kind of future we wish for ourselves and our children2. Therein lies my own power and responsibility as an educator.

I embarked on this University Innovation Fellows’ journey a little over two years ago out of the need I felt to open up new spaces where my students could explore on their own terms solutions to some of the big chal lenges we are facing. With its mission to equip students with the changemaker mindset and the tools required in the process of creatively designing and implementing solutions to challenges on and off campus, UIF has been delivering.

2 In the age of unsustainability “once one understands the nature and magnitude of the defutured, how one accounts for the history of the material world dramatically chang es.” (Fry, 2020, p. 1) In this context, thus, design is not only political, but also ontological as it becomes the fundamental philosophy behind an age of sustainment calling forth new ways of being and doing in our world(s). See also Arturo Escobar (2017) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

1 Term coined by Tony Fry, (1999/2020) Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy, London and NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.

START WHERE YOU ARE, USE WHAT YOU HAVE, DO WHAT YOU CAN WITH WHOM YOU CAN!

Credit: Shutterstock/hkeita

SOPHIANS TOWARD SUSTAINABLE FUTURES

by Mana Short, Giuli Nagai, Haruka Oizumi, Hana Saeki, Maria Sjoeblom Bjoerndalen, Kokoro Kuroiwa and Tomohiro Loeer

University Innovation Fellows

Sophia University

We are collaborating with organizations on cam pus, such as KASA Sustainability and the Sophia Office for Sustainability Promotion, to organize forums about campus sustainability. Through these cross-campus partnerships, we are striving to close the student-teacher hierarchical divide and bridge the seniority gaps in Sophia by bringing students, faculty, and staff together for collective discussions on how we may drive change for sustainability from within our campus and beyond.

We are stepping beyond the campus and build ing bridges with secondary education institu tions by hosting youth-empowerment work shops. In April 2022, we partnered with RISE to deliver a 40-minute workshop for students at Seisen International School based on the theme of the Butterfly Effect. Our workshop, RISE Together for Change, guides students to find their strengths, encourages them that they are enough to create the change they want to see in the world, and shows them the power of taking action together with others.

We are fostering both creativity and a culture of collaboration across professions and status by creating spaces where campus stakeholders unite to take concrete actions towards solving challenges on campus. The SDGs x Innovation Sparker Workshop is a university-wide event that our team will carry out in October 2022 that applies design thinking skills and tools to SDGs related challenges. See page 46 to learn more.

We are breaking down disciplinary silos in the Sophia Program for Sustainable Futures (SPSF) by bringing together students from a wide range of different departments to tackle sustainability challenges using elements of Design Think ing and Systems Thinking. We have designed a workshop for SPSF students intended to empower them to move from being passive bystanders to becoming active change-mak ers who use their skills and knowledge in the process of shaping socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.

We designed an experiential learning program where design thinking acted as the foundation for participants to develop new skills and feel empowered in their work of opening new path ways for sustainability on campus. We tested this 8-day prototype in March in collaboration with Green Sophia, a student organization tak ing on big environmental challenges on campus. Going forward, we will use this learning program as a way to gather multiple stakeholders (stu dents, professors, student affairs and adminis trative staff) behind a campus design challenge.

Although they have just recently embarked on their journey as changemakers, the UIF Sophia Fellows are already contributing to their community, putting their knowledge and skills to use in a flexible and mobile way. In various ways they are reframing the debate around sustainable campus life and facilitating the co-creation of solutions/practices towards sustainable futures).

Starting on a journey like this with your students may seem daunting. It did for me! At first, all I could see were limitations and obstacles. But throughout any peri

od of self-questioning and self-doubt, I kept reminding myself: “My students need this! And our communities need them!” I realize now the only thing that was truly required was my openness to the new and the trust in myself and my students that we would eventually find a way. We did, and, inspired by Jacqueline Novogratz’s advice to “be more interested than interesting” and to “let the work teach you”, we are continuing along this th with passion and confidence3.

Novogratz

World, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Publishing Group,

Finding a Great Team

by Macarena Oyague, Marcela Yeckle, Mia Townsend and Mirella Rivas University Innovation Fellows Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología

Being inspired all the time is difficult even for creative people. It is a hard reality we’ve come to realize because, despite our urge to create a positive impact in every person that crosses our path, at times we may feel like our motivation can falter, becoming a never ending storm in which negative aspects are eclipsing our desire to change the world. And this is a completely normal feeling. Also, at some point in our lives, we may be facing difficult situations in personal matters as well as in the professional side. Sometimes we may even feel alone trying to overcome this, but surrounding ourselves with colleagues that can match those pieces of your soul can help you to overcome every situation and make you believe that the rainbow at the end of every storm will appear. Digging even more in this topic, an inspirational teamwork is not about a competition to discover which star is shining more. On the contrary, it is about sharing our inner light with someone who needs it the most at a particular time.

It is human to feel that someone has qualities that you admire, but it is also human to accept that you also have qualities that someone else would admire. The key to making a great team is to identify and appreciate the different abilities each person has and help them in the one they need to improve. Maybe one person can be the best at speaking in front of people but is not so good at managing bad news, and someone else could be capable of creating peace in chaos but is too shy to express their ideas. Together, they can improve all the difficulties, and that is the kind of empowerment we found at the time we start working as a team.

Inspiration is about empowering the people around us to find their own path and be happy. We know that this can be seen as an idealistic philosophy, but it is seen in that way because there are always people who try to turn off the light in others. We are conscious that it is difficult to continue if someone is telling you that you won’t succeed.

In our particular case and story, all of us have known each other for a short amount of time, but ever since we had started to work together in different initiatives, workshops, projects and even talking about life itself, we came to realize that this philosophy made us achieve a

lot and learn as well. We inspire each one of us through difficulties in work and life, and come with crazy and amazing different ideas to overcome anything. This is the kind of group you can be with and think that you can overcome anything that comes in your way.

Designing ideas and projects involves working hard er. For that reason, you need to know that envy and competition are something that will always be there by the ones that only want themselves to succeed. We as a team, Mia, Mirella, Marcela and Macarena, have discov ered a helpful insight to you: find a great team that helps you to literally shine with your inner selves and make you believe that at the end of every storm a rainbow will appear.

A GREAT TEAM CAN HELP US SHINE AND TACKLE PROBLEMS EFFECTIVELY

Obstacles to Accessing Quality Education

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT INTERNATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR LATIN AMERICANS

by Marcela Yeckle University Innovation Fellow Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología

Studying abroad is a hard topic to talk about, especially if you live in Latin America and you don’t know anyone who lived that experience. There are so many challeng es: funding, level of English, VISA documentation, refer ences, level of maturity. I won’t end this article if I keep mentioning them. Will I be able to understand classes in a foreign language? Will I be prepared to cope with the culture shock?

So many questions like these come to the mind of young students, and the fear keeps growing to the point that they don’t want to talk about it until they feel prepared. As a Peruvian student, I decided to get involved in the process little by little. So in my first year of university, I decided to identify any kind of opportunity that reached me to inter national education and life, just for living the experience.

The first step I made was to talk with other students studying in my field about the possibility of joining international organizations related to our field, and it worked! We founded a big Civil Engineering Student Center for all the students interested in exploring their career with the security of receiving quality resources to grow professionally. Then, thinking about doing an exchange program, I talked with some people in my university who were involved in international programs. Ironically that’s how I heard about the UIF program for the first time. Four years later, I can’t believe that I know people from all over the world, that I understand what international education opportunities exist, and that I have a better sense of the vision international students have about their ideal type of education.

Since I realized all that I won from just asking a person about international opportunities, I set an objective to make it easier for students to get involved in any kind of international opportunity they wanted. Nevertheless, there was something that I was missing. So, instead of looking for solutions, I decided to look deeper into the problem. What were the real challenges that Latin Americans faced in seeking international opportunities?

In my research, I found the main reason that it’s neces sary for me to share with everyone who doesn’t know about the reality of education in Latin America. The most principal problem is the inequality of opportuni ties. Most countries in Latin America face the problem

of centralization, which means that on one hand, you can see a fully-developed city and people with access to quality education and resources to keep growing as a person and a professional. On the other hand, if you go far away from that city, you can see a different reality — people with no access to basic needs in public schools don’t have a quality of infrastructure, curricula content, or trained teachers to guide students in their learning process. Therefore, most Latin American people don’t look for international opportunities because they don’t even have an idea of how life is in developed countries, they don’t have a reference that tells them about the different opportunities they have, and they don’t have people who can support and advise them. All of these re minded me of my parents. All my life they have motivat ed me to look for international opportunities to improve my way of life, but when they were my age, their reality prevented them from even thinking about it.

My intention with this article is to encourage more people to join the movement to change the reality of education both inside and outside their environment. If you’ve had the chance to have a quality education, share your experience with people you think should know about it. If you are Latin American and you had access to a scholarship, exchange, or internship abroad, inform people about how you found it. If you wish, you can start generating activities that let more people know about what education and, therefore, a quality future is. There are so many solutions, and if we work together we can improve the quality of life of thousands of people.

Credit: iStockphoto.com/fizkes

Not All Those Who Wonder Are Lost

AN ODE TO QUESTIONS

by Romina Dominzain University Innovation Fellow and former Faculty Champion Universidad de Montevideo

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

What am I doing? Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What is the meaning of (my) life? What is all this?

Last year I found myself with a lot of free time. Maybe “too much” for my ideal of existence back then: produc tive, full of work projects and side hustles. What started as more time for leisure, fun, and self-discovery ended with a lot of questions. Big and existential questions that I started collecting and journaling about.

What describes us? Our history? Told how? Our ambi tions? Our plans? What are we doing, saying, hearing, thinking, or feeling?

As an Engineer, I tend to treat questions like problems that need to be solved. I feel attracted to embark on finding ‘good’ solutions, hoping to discover a better solution than what already exists or I just know, secretly dreaming to discover the best, right possible solution. And as a Fellow, Faculty Champion, and educator; Design Thinking has been more than a tool for me, a mindset, sometimes almost a religion. It is attractive to think we can design everything: our home, life, relation ships, and job. But it is anguishing not being able to find what we are looking for.

What if for some problems there are no solutions? Do questions always have correct, right, or better answers?

I feel we live in a culture that prefers answers and solutions over questions and problems. From our early childhood, teachers deliver us answers, sometimes to questions nobody asked. When they ask us questions they are just meant to be answered, brainstormed on, only a medium for the solution. And sometimes we are even requested to reply in the shortest possible time to be considered smart or efficient enough. It embarrasses

me to admit that I am that kind of teacher sometimes! But on my behalf, I think the praise for fast answers is just our adult default mode.

Isn’t education a form of question instead of answer? What is the role of doubt in the act of creating and innovating?

We get inspired by TED talks, social media posts, books, and stories from people who share their trouble (only) when they found, or think they found, a solution for it. The majority of our popular narratives are based on the hero’s journey: the common template that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a deci sive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.

Can we only learn from heroes? What about people who failed or did not find some answers? Where are the antiheroes portrayed? What about the problems that do not have an answer yet?

How to…, ten tips to…, the tricks I applied to get…, everything you need to know about…, what you should do to avoid…these are the titles of the content we share, buy and consume.

What is true? How do we recognize the truth?

I believe the world is full of lies and half-truths. The only thing I can do as an antidote is to question more.

As Maria Popova says in my favorite blog The Marginalian:

Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — in complete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

What questions do you ask? What don’t you question? Who don’t you question?

For centuries, human beings, especially philosophers, artists and writers, have been asking, and sometimes answering, questions. For me, the best answers don’t provide a clear-cut path to follow but leave me with more questions. Reading philosophy and literature gives me comfort in knowing that these questions have been asked before, that they are still relevant and will always be. We are not alone in our existential quests. Questions are what make us human. They are a sign that we are self-aware enough to wonder about our place in the world and what we want our lives to mean. Not all those who wonder are lost.

What if we consume more content that brings us ques tions? How can we integrate digging into big questions into our STEM education philosophy, literature and art?

When I go to conferences where speakers deliver motivational addresses, I always hear students asking questions that expect straightforward answers, fast tips, and advice like: What would you say to your younger self? What would you recommend me to get…? And often he (the speaker is frequently a man) seems happy giving advice on very personal issues. That brings me more questions…

How do we discern useful advice? When do we really need help and when do we just need to search for our own way of living? How do people who present as men tors, who seem to have it all figured out, impact on our doubting selves? Do they really have it all figured out?

Habits, rules, recipes, and lists for success, happiness, and health rise and become trending topics. They are eclipsing our doubts, failures, and misfortunes that are part of our everyday and real lives, that complete our wholehearted humanity.

In her book, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt expands on the importance of doubts: Simone Weil wrote, “Doubt is a virtue of intelligence.” As with every other principle, enshrining doubt as the highest principle in thought may become merely another excuse

for intolerance, but I believe there are forms of doubt that are virtuous. Doubt is less attractive than certainty to most people. The kind of doubt I am thinking of doesn’t swag ger. It doesn’t shake its finger in your face, and it doesn’t go viral on the Internet. Newspapers do not write about it. Military parades do not march to tunes of doubt. Politicians risk mockery if they admit to it. In totalitarian regimes people have been murdered for expressing doubt. Although theologians have understood its profound value, religious fanatics want nothing to do with it. The kind of doubt I am thinking of begins before it can be properly articulated as a thought. It begins as a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling that something is wrong, an as-yet-unformed hunch, at once suspended and suspenseful, which stretches toward the words that will turn it into a proper question framed in a language that can accommodate it. Doubt is not only a virtue in intelligence; it is a necessity. Not a single idea or work of art could be generated without it, and although it is often uncomfortable, it is also exciting. And it is the well-ar ticulated doubt, after all, that is forever coming along to topple the delusions of certainty.

And poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and poet Franz Xaver Kappus:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

What is the conclusion of all this? I don’t know. I prefer to leave it open and keep asking. What questions are still unsolved in your heart?

You can share them with me through romi.dominzain@ gmail.com and I will send you some of my favorite ques tions in exchange.

Credit: Romina Dominzain

in the Blank

by Rodrigo López Techera University Innovation Fellow Universidad de Montevideo

Throughout my life I’ve always been happy; I had a great childhood and such. Then, there were the college years.

In my first year, there was nothing out of the ordinary: getting used to timetables, studying harder, being organized, etc. It was in my second year that something changed. Some advert had been posted about a program called UIF. “Me picó el bicho” (“I got bitten by the bug”, a way of saying my curiosity was awakened). So I applied, and didn’t make the cut, as my university had its own pre-application process and only a few students were se lected to apply for the program, but I stayed around, as some innovation and entrepreneurship event was going to be organized by my university, and what these guys were planning actually sounded cool.

That was the starting point of everything. I worked with an unmatched, energetic, warm group of people during the span of two months for an international five-day intensive workshop. The prevailing feeling inside me was “I want more of this! Why am I not having more of this in my life?”

That year I had started being an assistant teacher in a ro botics course, and the feeling was quite the same there, but with less intensity. From there, I just wanted to do more, to give more. To help someone with my free time, to show them what they are capable of, to give more opportunities to everyone. These events started a spark inside me, so I wanted to do the same for others. How? What am I good at? What superpower do I have?

Then I realized I had the superpower of understanding people.

So I started doing what I believe this program does for everyone: not exploiting technical skills nor throw ing lots of theoretical content to students and friends, but rather showing them that they can _____. That blank space could be taking up a new hobby, changing something in their neighborhood, creating a space for a minority community, just founding a club to hang out and meet new people, or creating a solution to solve a world-class issue. From big to small, any size.

My blank is showing students what they can achieve with learning in courses, and showing them they can do it at any pace. To give support, and understand them,

so that they can become better versions of themselves. Kindling inner passions, one at a time.

Having spent my time in what made me happy for a whole year, I applied again to UIF and got in! I always believed that if you really wanted to make a change, you would do it no matter what group you belong to or not, but it was a great feeling knowing that I’d have the chance to connect with a lot of people that have the same passion for guiding and enlightening other than me!

Having attended the meetup, that spark, that “I want more and to do more” feeling came back even stronger, and my will to guide whoever I could in filling their blank got a massive boost. And I’ll start by posing the following question:

For you, reader, how can you fill that blank that will inspire you and help you inspire others too?

Just try new things and it will come for sure. New foods, friends, environments. Start from where you feel comfortable and push that limit at your own pace. I’m sure you will find that unmatched energy and be able to spread it out too!

YOU CAN HELP OTHERS TO FILL THEIRS

Credit: iStockphoto.com/tiero

How Might Education Change to Prepare for the Future?

AND WHAT ROLE DOES THE WORKFORCE PLAY?

by Harrison Kellick University Innovation Fellow University of Technology Sydney

Looking towards the future of work, technology should only replace or automate what we don’t need to think about. Human-centric skills cannot be programmed and will continue to grow in importance. I spoke with Humera Fasihuddin at the 2022 UIF meetup at Stanford University, she said that “90% of problems are human problems [and] there are some tech problems that’ll require a human touch too.”

The pace of education is failing to keep up with the rapidly changing skills market. As universities typically offer long term study, with courses of three to five years, there is little room for integration of current in-demand skills. Interest is growing for the just-in-time learning approach, which may address the shortcomings of tra ditional educational institutes by delivering training on an as-needed basis for the learner. Learning is heading towards short form content or micro-credentials, in intensive and practical bursts to match industry needs, which can be referred to as flexible learning.

The rapid transition to online learning throughout the COVID-19 pandemic brought competition between ed ucation institutions to a global stage. For the first time, individuals can now complete micro-credentials based anywhere in the world from the comfort of their own home. The market is crowded by organizations target ing flexibility and costs, such as LinkedIn Learning and Coursera, driving up competition. Despite promoting fewer barriers to entry, these platforms are still in their adolescence and continue to struggle with financial and accessibility barriers.

Another emerging problem is the disconnect between secondary education, tertiary education, and the work force. Secondary education fosters an environment in which students compete against one another for their rank and final mark, only to join a workforce dominated by teamwork and collaboration. The UIF meetup work shop by Ise Lyfe and Bre Przestrzelski, “Co-creating is the ghost in the machine behind great design,” explored our human desire to be independent by nature through the lens of puberty. A child is heavily reliant on their parents for everything, whereas a teenager has a drive to be their own person. However, once independence is reached, many people stop there. My favorite quote from this session was “Independence is childish, and maturity is being interdependent with one another.”

A crucial step in the transformation of education is for organizations and industries to be more vocal about what they are looking for in a candidate. For example, a consultation company in the United Kingdom is now hiring school students in listings that call for transfer able skills that students already possess, such as a knack for organization. This allows them to avoid competing for graduate talent and provides emphasis on the crucial role of human-centric skills in the workplace. Similarly, organizations are partnering with tertiary education to develop work-integrated learning, where students receive credit for work experience. When organizations are vocal, they help break student perceptions and high light that flexible education is a legitimate and welcome pathway. Educational institutions will need to integrate flexible approaches to keep up with the rapidly changing paradigm of work.

To explore this, the UTS UIF 2020 team has curated workshops highlighting important skills of the future and how students can develop them, and has recently embarked on a project encouraging students to develop a portfolio that evidences these skills. As I approach the end of my degree and transition into the workforce, I’m interested in exploring new perspectives within this system and the impact that reflexivity or self-awareness has on a student’s experience joining the workforce.

I encourage you to consider what role you play in this evolving complex system; how might we encourage active, life-long learning?

Credit: Harrison Kellick

What We Learned to Create a Longer Impact

MULTIPLY THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH AND INNOVATION

University Innovation Fellows

Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology

After our six-week intensive UIF training, we started working on implementing strategic priorities on our campus. During this time, we also studied all the pri orities of previous cohorts in a detailed manner and we contacted some of them through mails and various platforms and discussed our priorities and their experi ences. We observed some priorities become a part of the college formalities. Keeping all of this in our minds, we worked with a passion and faced many new experiences and tides. Now we are sharing what we understand to make a longer impact on campus.

If Fellows don’t feel comfortable with renewal and reinvention, they will begin to lose their impact and influence quickly. Fellows on campus not only require the ability to continuously manage crisis and change, but also the circular vision to see around, beneath and beyond the obvious in order to anticipate the unexpected before circumstances force our hands. As we embark upon our change management journey, we challenge our capabilities as change agents and potentially become defining moments along our leadership success path.

Fellows can no longer be comfortable just gravitating to the batch they belong to. Connecting the dots of talent, unique perspectives and experiences requires all Fellows to change their attitude, approach and style to accommodate the needs and seize the opportunities that lie within a broader range of long reach. With the in volvement and support of stakeholders, we bring about change in our campus within a short time and create a long impact on students.

We have always been open to suggestions and there are times where the suggestions from previous Fellows helped us a lot. We have a WhatsApp group with all the Fellows (from the initial fall batch) and Faculty Champi ons, in which we regularly post about the activities that

Fellows were engaged in and make sure that everyone in our group is updated. When required, we schedule meetings with the previous Fellows, explain the detailed plan and let them give their suggestions or feedback. Then we work on the suggestions and feedback given by them and proceed with a final plan.

We don’t get stuck within the confines of the student groups that we are most familiar with. We get out of our comfort zone and learn how to multiply the oppor tunities for growth and innovation. We invest time to understand the insights in the broader field of talent and students that lie around and in front of us.

by Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, Madan Mohan Chunduri, Jayanth Upthala, Jyothirmai Reddybathuni, Vinay Manukonda and Haindavi Ghanta

Credit: Authors

Visions of Change

STORIES FROM VIRGINIA STATE UNIVERSITY FELLOWS

by Isaiah Freeman and LaQuawne DePriest University Innovation Fellows Virginia State University

INTRODUCTION

by Isaiah Freeman

Making a change for your institution or community, at a basic level, starts with conversation. It starts with determining the needs that exist and ways to resolve them, while also inviting your target audience to assess its value and suggest changes. In more simple terms, change begins with the individual in mind.

As fellows of the 2021 cohort, Computer Science stu dents Isaiah Freeman, LaQuawne DePriest, and Christo pher Parham have their own user-driven goals in mind. Thanks to the Silicon Valley Meetup and the University Innovation Fellows program, LaQuawne goals have focused on improving the Computer Science program by introducing a form of project-based learning that re flects the reality of that career path. Isaiah’s goals have shifted towards enhancing the voices of VSU students in a way that promotes productive interaction with faculty and administrators. Christopher has aimed towards finding concise methods of providing students agency over their preferred learning methods. Now equipped with inspirational experiences, two of the Virginia State University cohort, Isaiah and LaQuawne, share their stories to provide insight into their visions of change.

A WAY FOR EDUCATION TO MIRROR THE OUTSIDE WORLD

by LaQuawne DePriest

Throughout my first process for making a change on the campus of Virginia State University, I concentrated my efforts on developing a more effective education for VSU Computer Science students through project-based learning. During my investigation, I discovered that not

many students have projects to present to companies after graduating from VSU. I also discovered that VSU had a coding club that many students were unaware of. I took it upon myself to inform others about the coding club, which increased the club’s attendance. Interesting ly, me and Isaiah had a similar thought process when it came to a project based learning environment at VSU.

Shortly after mine and Isaiah’s Fall semester, we had a chance to travel to Stanford for the Silicon Valley Meetup. This is where my way of thinking about problem solving started to change. During the meet up I was approached by Ms. Rishelle Wimmer, a Faculty Champion and Senior Lecturer at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences.

During an intermission between sessions, we discussed for 30 minutes before attending our next session. How ever, I did not know we would actually be attending the same session. Designing for Belonging was where me and Ms. Wimmer got more acquainted with each other’s thought process. An assignment was given during the Designing for Belonging session where we had to come up with a design and solution to something we faced in our everyday lives. Myself, Ms. Wimmer, and the team were then given ample time to discuss. Each of us talked about a problem we encountered.

The subject I talked about was a time when a professor gave me a zero for an assignment that I completed early. It was unfortunately a common issue that did not come as a surprise, as I was known in that class for question ing the practicality of our learning when applied to real life during class discussions. In response, I sent the pro fessor an email regarding the zero that I was given. He gave a much less than polite response. So, I ended up adding his superior to the email with both of us about the grade. When he noticed what I did, he changed my score for the assignment.

Isaiah (left) at the 2022 UIF Silicon Valley Meetup. Courtesy of Isaiah Freeman.

LaQuawne at the 2022 UIF Silicon Valley Meetup. Photo courtesy of LaQuawne DePriest.

Ms. Wimmer then shared her personal subject. She talk ed about her experience as a professor in Germany. She stated that she wasn’t very fluent in German. Because of this, a lot of students looked down on her intelligence because of her grammatical errors in a new language. My solution to Ms. Wimmer was that she could write out a paragraph on the board or type in a Word document. She can then create an extra credit assignment where students can go in and fix the grammatical mistakes. This would allow her to learn more about how to im prove her use of the language. Ms. Wimmer took on my problem I had with the teacher. Boy, did she open my eyes to a different way of thinking.

Ms. Wimmer created a system that would weed out professors who have a lot of student complaints. If the professor had enough complaints, the system would no tify the board for the professor to be investigated. When I heard her system, a light bulb went on in my head.

I started to think about how to apply such a process to my computer science project at VSU. I also started to think about how to bridge the gap between PWIs and HBCUs by allowing HBCU students to develop real-world skills during the course of one’s degree program.

What drives me to close the gap between HBCUs and PWIs is seeing the amount of resources the latter has when compared to an HBCU. Due to financial hard ships, an HBCU professor tends to leave and go to other schools, taking programs that particular professor brought to the school with them and leaving students who were excited for new opportunities completely stranded. When I saw this with my own eyes, that’s when I made a decision to help bring attention to HBCUs. I want the rest of the world to know that great things do come out of overlooked and underfunded schools, with the hopes that the recognition of this can bring more resources to HBCUs like Virginia State University.

COMING TOGETHER AS A GROUP

by Isaiah Freeman

In my initial formation of how I might change my campus, I had focused my mindset towards a solution that could enhance the project-learning aspect of our university, similar to my teammate LaQuawne. How ever, in the process of learning and researching design thinking, getting feedback for our prototypes, hearing from staff members during interviews - I discovered a much greater need.

The first spark of this need began during the unconfer ence portion of the 2022 Silicon Valley Meetup. Distin guished students, educators, and administrators from all over the globe discussed various chosen topics. From those topics, we had formed potential solutions and areas of improvement. There was a significant divide in views. Regardless of this, we were able to create a hierarchy of specific improvements or concerns that all members of the conversation could agree upon. There was no complicated thought — no deep analysis — just a medium of conversation.

Upon deep reflection days after, the Silicon Valley Meetup was the key event that helped me take note of this need. It prompted me to review everything from my six-week training: Our meeting notes, recordings of our conversations with staff members, and surveys we tabulated from our peers.

At our campus, there are so many singular voices. These voices are those of the student body. Each of them are calling for solutions to certain aspects of their campus experience. Although their voices are unique, what they say is quite common, enough that the magnitude of their voices could be shortened into only a few categories.

The students are being vocal. The staff can hear them. However, through no fault of their own, they do not have a method of turning such a long list of students’ concerns into a manageable list of actions. If someone were to turn on a television and find themselves blight ed with the video and audio of five channels, not even one of those channels could get a translatable message across, even though the channels are transmitting and the viewer is seeing and listening.

From there, the need becomes clear. Our campus needs a network that can take the needs of students and re turn to the staff a concisely defined list. An initiator for a conversation. And, similar to the unconference I was able to participate in, a medium through which students and staff can now properly converse and develop united solutions.

Finding this need brings to mind the iterative process that a change agent must have in order to define a significant positive impact in their communities. There was a dimension of need hidden within each moment of my first iteration of design thinking that I did not see until it was time for my second iteration.

However, I do not see this as a setback. Much like how one can only reflect on the previous day after a rest period and waking up the next day, I could only see this particular need at Virginia State University by com pleting my training and observing what resulted from it. My next steps have now become to create a process for communicating needs of students to faculty and administrators.

CONCLUSION

The change agents at Virginia State University were able to spend their freshman year gaining a well-surveyed perspective of the needs within the student, faculty, and administrative body. Now, as rising sophomores, the University Innovation Fellows team at Virginia State University plan to utilize both the six-week training in addition to their continuing education as undergrad uates to secure a lasting change for their remaining 3 years at their campus.

Aditya College of Engineering

Aditya Shasank PSKPVS, 75 Aditya College of Engineering and Technology

La Selene Dommu, 80 American University of Beirut Dana Bekdash, 34, 44 Jason Diab, 34 Mariam El Madhoun, 34 , 74 Zein Zebib, 34, 74

Bina Nusantara University

Santoni Dyaz, 30, 44

Janisse Janisse, 30, 44 Muhamad Irsyad Rafi Sudirjo, 30, 44 Yuliriani Yuliriani, 30, 44

Boğaziçi University

Zişan Özdemir, 81

Bowie State University

Erica Hernandez, 66 Britnee McCauley, 62 Shafeqah Mordecai, 62 Syeedah White, 62 California State University, Fullerton

Peter Chang, 30 Nireeksha Namjoshi, 30, 44 Catholic University of Uruguay Sofia Carballo, 44 Carol Glass, 44 Nicole Imbert, 44 Sebastian Soto, 44 Central Michigan University

Kyleigh Golightly, 45 D’Yon Padgett, 45 Joshua Wright, 45 Cleveland State University

Bryson Davis, 10 Kelle DeBoth Foust, 15 Cameron LaMack, 10 Abigail Poeske, 10, 13 Nicholas C. Zingale, 13, 15 Colorado School of Mines

Ashley Dunivan, 10 Adam Schwartz, 10 Indiana Sjahputera, 10

Dian Nuswantoro University

Kevin Maulana Afriyanto, 10 Yunia Nur Anisa, 10 Rosa Paramitha, 10 Elon University

Alyssa Martina, 34 Erasmus University Rotterdam

Teodora Comanescu, 10, 30 Nick Tennekes, 10, 30 Anisha de Vries, 10, 30

FH Salzburg (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences)

Amelie Arrer, 44 Sophie Frohnwieser, 44 Helen Hinrichs, 44 Lars Kähler, 44 Janette Kaspar, 44, 50 Benedikt Matysek, 44 Julian Nöbauer, 44 Benjamin Typplt, 44 Johanna Wicht, 44 Florida Institute of Technology Maria Fernanda Sagastume, 77 Foothill College

Georgina Fakoukaki, 10, 30 Tatiana Fakoukaki, 10, 30 Fordham University

Alina Furman, 62 Gillian Gural, 62 Braulio Mourao Pacheco, 62 Annie O’Malley, 62

George Fox University

Jesse Bartel, 10 Sierra Hinds, 10 Luke Roderick, 10 Hamburg University of Technology Jan Famulla, 34 Julia Föllmer, 34 Lennard Korte, 34 Malte Krohn, 11 Hollins University

Zahin Mahbuba, 11 Institut Teknologi Harapan Bangsa

Timotius Haniel, 30, 34 Vincentsius Herlambang, 30, 34 Cintya Kristianto, 30, 34 Thomas Ken Ronaldi, 30, 34

Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember

Zati Adila Nurifa, 62

Zakiya Azizah Cahyaningtyas, 62 Ferdian Wibowo, 62 Rintan Widhi Hapsari, 62 Iona University

Leah Figueroa, 35 Aishani Nalla, 35 Kakinada Institute of Engineering and Technology

Navya Chelluboyina, 82 Khalifa University of Science and Technology

Majed Albarakani, 35 Mohammed Alyammahi, 35 Salama Alzarooni, 35

Lingnan University

Ngar Kiu Chan, 45 Wing Lam Fu, 45 Hao Hong Jiang, 45 Trinh Ly, 45

Louisiana Tech University

Andrew Bryant, 35 Loyola University Maryland

Elena Johnston, 45 Juan Lopez, 45 Joshua Rafferty, 45 Kelly Reynolds, 45 Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science

Sangeetha Malle, 11 Manvitha Buddalakshmi, 36 Thota Sai Roopesh, 36 Nitish Sine, 11 Sai Raghavi Vagga, 63 Venkata Puneeth Chowdary Gangarapu, 62

Menlo College

Chara Higaki, 63 Lina Lakoczy-Torres, 10, 63 Andrea Restrepo, 63 Bryan Zaremba, 63

Morgan State University

Jade Harris, 63 Yolanda Christophe, 63

North Carolina Central University

Siobahn Day Grady, 52 Maya Hamer, 52 Christopher Lawson, 52

Padjadjaran University

Raihan Badrahadipura, 31, 36, 63 Farrel Christian Pambudi Piether, 31, 36, 63 Agung Anggara Rudini, 31, 36, 63 Muhammad Shiddiq, 31, 36, 63

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Fiona Clarke, 63 Aditya Sivakumar, 63 Rowan University

Kenyon Burgess, 11, 45 Shruti Dalwadi, 45 Aatish Gupta, 11, 45 Isabella Marshall, 45 Aatish Gupta, 74 Sophia University

Magdalena Ionescu, 84 Kokoro Kuroiwa, 84 Tomohiro Loeer, 84 Giuli Nagai, 46, 63, 84 Haruka Oizumi, 46, 63, 84 Hana Saeki, 46, 63, 84 Mana Short, 46, 63, 84 Maria Sjøblom Bjørndalen, 46, 63, 84

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Gabriel Bonansinga, 63 Kate Held, 63 David Hernandez, 63 Nicholas Winkler, 63 Spelman College

Savannah Adams, 46 Grace Burch, 46 Robert Hamilton, 46 Tiffany Oliver, 46 Jalen Tatum, 46

Swarthmore College

Sofia Frumkin, 46 Ipeknaz Icten, 46 Jackie Le, 46 Shirley Liu, 46

Telkom University

Ibrohim Al Hanif, 36 Melani Hariono, 36 Iga Narendra, 36 Alfi Zahra Hafizhah, 36

TOBB University of Economics and Technology

Ekin Al, 74 Ömer Bahadır Orhan, 74 Aleyna Ece Yalavaç, 74

Tohoku University

Atsushi Aoyama, 47, 74 Takeshi Kato, 68 Watcharawut Masawat, 36, 47, 74 Stephane Yu Matsushita, 21 Haruka Minemura, 47, 74 Bungo Tanaka, 74 Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología

Valeria Aguayo, 54 Nadia Chamana, 36 Danae Chipoco Haro, 54 Diego Muñoz, 54 Macarena Oyague, 36, 86 Mirella Rivas, 86 Mia Townsend, 36, 86 Marcela Yeckle, 86, 87

Universidad de los Andes Magdalena Arraztoa, 47, 56 Azul Lizana, 47, 56 Dominga Mandiola, 47, 56 Florencia Ramírez, 47, 56 Universidad de Montevideo

Romina Dominzain, 88 Rodrigo López Techera, 90

Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

Silvana Balarezo, 40 Nidia del Carmen Quintana Zaconetta, 63 Daniel Flores Bueno, 23 Lucia Gabriela Corilla Grados, 63 Carla Isabel Rojas Arana, 63 Sergio Manuel Farfan Mendoza, 63 Universitas Brawijaya

Nurafifah Alya Farahisya, 12, 48 Angel Anggina Nasution, 12, 48 Marsellino Prawiro Halim, 12, 48 Dzakiyyah Rosyadi, 12, 48 Universitas Gadjah Mada Nurrizky Imani, 39, 70 Vincent Junition Ungu, 70 Fajar Kenichi Kusumah Putra, 70 Elan Yudhoprakoso, 70 Universitas Gunadarma Dara Mulia, 64 Dolva Pagansy, 64 Muhammad Ramadhani Alfarizi, 64 Pricilla Ruly, 64

Universitas Terbuka

Fabrianne Albertina, 37 Hubertus Boli, 37 Richmond Faithful, 37 Nur Holifah, 37

University of Cincinnati Aaron Bradley, 25 Yulia Martinez, 12 Jonathan Raj, 12 Haley Rich, 12 Lily Stewart, 12

University of Nebraska at Omaha

Joshua Oahre, 37

Jerome Thomas-Glass, 37 University of North Florida

Kathryn Fox, 64 Matthew Lashenick, 64 Jacqueline Small, 31 University of Richmond

Ushna Khan, 65

University of St. Thomas Brady Gruenhagen, 48 Cory Kaisersatt, 48 Fadel Hasan, 48 Grace Northamer, 48

University of Technology Sydney Harrison Kellick, 91

University of Twente

Emilija Banytė, 37, 48, 64

Marlen Braun, 37, 48, 64

Philippe Damoiseaux, 48, 64 Jacques Fürst, 38, 48

Anouk Geenen, 13

Fátima González-Novo, 37, 38, 48, 64

Thomas Goudsblom, 37, 64

Novianita Isnaynizhra, 37, 48, 64

Radhika Kapoor, 37, 38

Panashe Mangezi, 37, 48, 64

Julieta Matos-Castaño, 13, 19 Seth Palsgraaf, 38, 48, 64

Cristina Zaga, 19

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Manuel Garmendez, 12, 65

Antonina Johnston, 12, 65 Allyn Lottouzee, 12, 64, 65 Rudi Marciniak, 12, 31, 48, 65

Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology

Haindavi Ghanta, 38, 48, 58, 92

Vinay Manukonda, 38, 48, 58, 92 Madan Mohan Chunduri, 38, 48, 58, 92

Venkata Subbarao Mupparaju, 38, 48, 58, 92

Jyothirmai Reddybathuni, 38, 48, 58 Jayanth Upthala, 38, 48, 58, 92, 92

Virginia State University

LaQuawne DePriest, 93 Isaiah Freeman, 93

VNR Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology

Hitaarth Jainn, 38, 49

Ratna Keerthana Naduri, 38, 49

Padmavathi Nayak, 38, 49 Akkinapally Snigdha, 38, 49

To all the University Innovation Fellows, Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates and Faculty Champions who shared their projects and passions with our team

To illustrator Cha Pornea for bringing our community members to life in such a vibrant way

To our colleagues at Stanford University’s d.school for their constant support and inspiration

CHANGE FORWARD

Times of great challenge can also be times of great opportunity. In the past year, the students and teachers in our University Innovation Fellows community have been working tirelessly to improve the education of their peers and help their schools navigate the ambiguity of these times. In this journal, we celebrate these amazing people by sharing their projects and perspectives on change in higher education.