DI at 性福五月天
Design Innovation (DI) at 性福五月天 University is a university-wide initiative that unites people, ideas, and resources to help our community solve real-world problems through interdisciplinary collaboration.
By fostering collaboration amongst our diverse community of students, faculty, staff, and community members, DI creates opportunities for innovative thinking, problem solving, and impactful creation that lead to meaningful, positive change.
What is Design Innovation?
We believe design innovation is both an approach to solving problems and a mindset. DI at 性福五月天 incorporates human-centered design, design thinking, and innovation strategies to help foster creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and fearless collaboration. It鈥檚 about challenging traditional boundaries and bridging disciplines to explore intersections between art, science, technology, and society.
At its core, DI empowers individuals to think and act innovatively. To do so, we:
- Facilitate interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
- Provide spaces and tools 鈥 makerspaces, resource labs, and collaborative workspaces 鈥 that help transform ideas into reality.
- Offer programs, workshops, and events that build skills and inspire discovery and creation.
- Cultivate partnerships with academia, industry, regional stakeholders, and global experts.
Tackling the world鈥檚 messiest problems requires diverse perspectives and collective action. DI exists to:
- Develop and train future innovators and leaders.
- Address complex, human-centered challenges.
- Nurture a culture of curiosity, resilience, and transformation.
- Grow a community of creative problem-solvers and fearless collaborators.
Grassroots Beginnings
Our now university-wide initiative started in 2015 as a grassroots team of faculty, staff, administrators, and students. As a group, we helped to connect and make visible an entire ecosystem of maker/resource environments that already existed across the university - now called 鈥淒I NODES鈥 - which served to further grow our number. Since then, this "DI TEAM" has grown to more than 440 members from every part of the university. The growth of the DI TEAM helped build momentum and support and enabled us to propose the renovation of the old Art Building on the Kent Campus into what became the Design Innovation Hub. This $44.5M renovation was completed in 2020 and we opened the DI HUB in November of that year.
Growing the Initiative
DI now offers courses, workshops, hackathons, and other challenge-based innovation experiences that are open to any student from any disciplinary program. We also facilitate two competitively-selected non-credit-bearing programs, our DI Student Fellows and DI Faculty Fellows Programs, that engage individuals from multiple disciplinary areas to dive deeply into the tools and resources in our 鈥淒I Toolkit鈥 and apply them to build their capacities as 鈥渇earless collaborators!鈥 As such, the initiative helps to soften some of the academic "siloing" and build collaborative innovation across colleges and beyond.
Today, we have grown to support more that 1900 鈥淒I Collaborators鈥 (students, faculty, staff, and community members) who have access to the DI HUB鈥檚 array of maker/technology resources.
DI Toolkit
A list of 11 "elements" that we consider to be the recipe for the Design Innovation approach at 性福五月天. These toolkit elements include: Superpowers, Storytelling, Collaboration and Team Dynamics, the Role of Empathy, Gain Deep Insight into Problems, Play and the Creative Process, the Power of Making, Supercharge your Brainstorming, Reframe the Challenge, Implement Powerful and Novel Solutions, and Iteration and Evaluation.
DI HUB
The central home (building) of the Design Innovation Initiative on the Kent Campus. The DI HUB boasts a series of collaborative workspaces, maker environments, classrooms, and event venues that enable the building to operate as an open-access collaborative maker and innovation accelerator.
DI Ecosystem
The full community of Design Innovation spaces and staff across the 性福五月天 University eight-campus system; this includes the DI Hub, DI Nodes, DI Staff, and DI Team. Through the DI Ecosystem, the Design Innovation Initiative seeks to elevate awareness of, and access to, the broad range of maker, design, technology, and resource centers at KSU and more fully expose the KSU community to the true power of collaboration.
DI Team
A group of 100+ 性福五月天 staff, faculty, affiliates, partners, and DI Fellows who are committed to advocating for, supporting, and amplifying design innovation at 性福五月天. The DI Team helps provide a sounding board for new ideas and participate in the collaborative planning and management of the Design Innovation Initiative.
DI Courses
Foundational learning utilizing challenge-based innovation, all DI courses employ learning by doing in cross-disciplinary teams. While the projects and partnerships in the courses may lead to amazing or innovative outcomes, the core purpose for all our courses is to provide opportunities for everyone to build their muscles for collaborative innovation.
DI Workshops
Design Innovation offers a variety of professionally-focused workshops to help our collaborators achieve their goals and to forward our mission of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Workshop topics range from exploring design thinking through the DI Toolkit to learning tools & processes through playful, object-based creation using our state-of-the-art equipment.
DI Challenges & Hacks
Challenge-based projects, hackathons, and impactathons are a way to push the boundaries of what you know and learn what you don't. They provide a fast-paced, fail-fast environment to learn, explore, and engage and to complete a project within a short amount of time. DI has supported multiple hackathon-style events across the university annually, such as SkyHack and the annual Fashion/Tech Hackathon, a national event that ran for more than 10 years.
DI Faculty Fellows Program
The DI Faculty Fellows Program creates both space and time for existing faculty members from ANY field to devote some of their teaching, research and scholarly focus to collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects and DI co-teaching experiences. This competitive recognition selects faculty through an application process to support cross-disciplinary project concepts that enable faculty to step out of their comfort zone and extend their capabilities. DI Faculty Fellows engage in team-based learning experiences, grounded in the DI Toolkit, to enhance their capacities for supporting collaborative innovation. In this way, we can cultivate an increased cultural change towards a university-wide innovation mindset.
DI Student Fellows Program
A co-curricular program that supports students by enabling them to engage with, and become ambassadors for, cross-disciplinary challenge-based innovation. The DI Fellows Program builds a complex system of student-to-student learning opportunities that empowers students to become leaders of meaningful, positive change. Any student can apply to become a DI Fellow during the annual application process in the summer.