Reflection: Spring 2020

Spring 2020 marked my first semester teaching a full course at the University of Portland. Spring semester also coincides with the start of a new cohort of students in the Innovation Minor and spring 2020 is the official start of the first cohort (Cohort ’21) of students.

Fall 2019 Promotion: Building Cohort ’21

Prior to Spring semester, Fall is dedicated to recruiting students through an on campus promotion and marketing campaign. Fall 2019 promotion campaign was conducted by in-class presentations. I visited approximately 23 courses across all schools and college, focusing on first and second year students. Each visit consisted of a 3-minute elevator pitch, followed by a Q&A, and concluded with handing out a PDF flyer.

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In addition to the folder flyer, a simple 8.5 x 11 inch single page flyer was distributed to Student Activities to have posted on all poster boards across campus.

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For buildings with digital displays a 1920 x 1080 static image was provided to various administrative staff to cycle through the digital displays across campus.

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Cohort ’21

The promotion effort resulted in approximately 15 applications with several applications coming from upper class students who, because of the unfolding of the innovation courses, would be unable to complete the program. Nine students were officially approved to join Cohort ’21.

Teaching

There are four courses that make up the Innovation Minor:

  1. INV200: Introduction to Creativity, Design, and Innovation
  2. INV300: Empathy, Observational Research, and Human-Centered Design
  3. INV350: Making, Sketching, Prototyping
  4. INV400: Innovation Collaborative Practicum

INV200 and INV300 are offered every Spring semester and INV350 and INV400 are offered every Fall semester. With Spring 2020 marking the start of the innovation program, only INV200 was offered.

INV200 – Spring 2020

Cohort ’21 kicked off the “teaching at UP experience” in a great way. UP students are inquisitive, critical, and very intelligent. Having never worked with any of these students before, I applied a couple of qualitative sessions to gain a better understanding of their expectations from the course and from the innovation program as a whole. This understanding led to the adjustment of a few assignments and the decision to remove all quizzes and exams from the course. It became very clear as to why this program is designed as an “experiential learning program.” An exam is not experiential learning. The course was quickly adjusted to project-based work.

Projects

For INV200 SP20 there were four main projects and four sub-projects.

Main Projects included:

  1. Innovation Journal (weekly written journal connecting minor to major)
  2. Collaborative Physical Mapping
  3. Empathy and Design Thinking (an IoT platform with mobile app & physical device)
  4. Radical Innovation:
    1. Radical Everyday Things
    2. Radical Technologies through UN Global Issues

Sub Projects included:

  1. Impossible Remote
  2. Product Box
  3. Everyday Micro-interactions (flow diagrams)
  4. Physical Modeling (for Project 3)

Reflection

Spring 2020 was a great semester despite the last four weeks introducing quarantine and isolation due to COVID-19. The change in plans have thwarted all visions of what the experience will be for the very first cohort of students in the Innovation program. This program is founded in a time when innovation is being thrusted upon everyone. COVID-19 initiated a call to action that created and continues to create new ideas and approaches to your everyday teaching and learning experiences.


What is Social Justice at UP?

When someone discriminates against a person in a racial group, they are carrying out a policy or taking advantage of the lack of a protective policy. We all have the power to discriminate.”

What choice will we make? What world will we create? What will we be? There are only two choices: racist or anti-racist.

– Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist.

Wicked problems are problems whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior. A striking quote from the comedian and actor D.L. Hughley paints a vivid picture of America, “… America is aspirational. … Obama is what we would like to be. Donald Trump and his supporters are what we are.” (source) On January 20, 2017 Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. On May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd pushed a nation into action towards social justice.

Race is a construct of power and oppression. It is one of the defining features of being an American. It is so definitive we must purposefully strive to be antiracist, as the system of racism is insidiously engrained into each and every American citizen. Racism and other forms of oppression start at home and propagate throughout education. We are not born racist, sexist, or with any other form of discrimination. However, we are all born with ability to make choices and the willingness to make and transform the natural and artificial world that surrounds us.

The fall 2020 semester was fully remote and 100% online for the Innovation Minor. This presented a teaching and learning challenge in the face of so many wicked problems directly impacting the definition of reality. INV300 fa20 – Empathy, Observational Research, and Human-Centered Design took on the topic of social justice to develop the empathetic mindset and the continuation of exploring how to implement human-centered design methods as the core practice of innovation. This direction was driven by the commitment to abolishing white supremacy in design education by Salvador Orara, Innovation Professor of Practice, and the presiding instructor for all of the courses within the Innovation Minor.

Teaching design and innovation within the space of social justice at a private Catholic institution of higher education is no easy task. There are no UP-specific templates or frameworks for facilitating discussions at the intersection of race, religion, and innovation. In the face of social unrest there was no sense in designing assignments for developing empathy around trivial topics. The low hanging fruit we find today is due to their overwhelming weight of systemic impact and most often, because designers do not work in these wicked areas as often as they should.

This project seeks to foster a community of teaching and learning towards the creation of antiracist worlds, so that graduates of the University of Portland go on to be mindful innovators for the sake of basic human needs and rights; before the consideration of capitalism, entrepreneurialism, or business.

Innovation is the practice of challenging the status quo to include and serve those in need.

Project Setup

The class of students were broken up into three teams and each team had their own research objective under the larger umbrella of “What is Social Justice at UP?” Each team was assigned a Team Leader to act as a liaison between the recruited participants and to ensure the team was on track for their deliverables.

  • Team 1: Question the Question: What is Social Justice at UP?
  • Team 2: Establishing long term goals: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Team 3: Hatching Bold Ideas for Social Justice at UP

The methods for each session were guided by recipes from the LUMA Institute. Students had to construct their own scripts to conduct a session within a 1-hour and 15-minute time block. In addition, students had to be creative in using various online tools to facilitate each method to achieve the desired outcome. The image below outlines the timeline for the project. It should be noted that class was cancelled on Thursday, November 26, which was an oversight in planning that led to pushing the due date to December 3rd.

Project Learning Outcomes

  • Demonstrate your ability to work as a team to uncover qualitative insights into a wicked problem and empathize with a community.
  • Communicate with stakeholders and leadership of an organization to push them to examine policies.

Course Learning Outcomes

  • Apply the mindset, skillset, and toolsets associated with design, creativity, and innovation in contexts of their academic and professional interest
  • Develop techniques for building empathy and the ability to design for human interaction including user observation and participant interview techniques
  • Demonstrate simple sketching and prototyping skills for visualizing and communicating ideas in 2D and 3D forms
  • Demonstrate creative problem-solving within cross-disciplinary, team based environments
  • Expand their abilities and build expertise in persuasive communication through storytelling, presentation, and other communication techniques
  • Demonstrate ability to integrate, communicate, and collaborate successfully on project-based work for a local business and/or organization

Resources

Deliverables

Each of the three separate teams had to complete the following:

  1. Recruit and obtain consent forms from Faculty, Staff, and Students
  2. A written session script & MIRO board (or any other digital tools)
  3. Conduct a pilot session with fellow classmates as stand-in participants
  4. Conduct the actual session with recruited participants
  5. An analysis and synthesis report providing immediate action for UP Leadership

Each team synthesized their findings and merged their outcomes into a collaborative recorded presentation. Students chose the method of Concept Mapping to present the intricate details and high level relationships of the problem space. This presentation was delivered to the Assistant Provost for International Education, Diversity and Inclusion who is also acting Chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Inclusion (PACOI). It should also be noted that Salvador Orara is also a contributing member on PACOI.


The following images are screenshots from the student presentation. In some areas of the presentation, the student researchers present direct evidence from their respective sessions. The analysis and synthesis is the activity of connecting all of the evidence to forge a picture from a small set of Faculty, Staff, and Students at UP. In many ways this is a small mirror for UP Leadership.

According to the anonymized records, each session had at least one participant that identified as a member of the QTBIPOC community at the University of Portland. Each student research team had at least one person who identifies as white. Each Team Leader identified as she/her pronouns, where two of the three team leaders identified as BIPOC.

Opening Statement

We believe that creating a collective effort of students, staff, and faculty around social justice, rather than individual initiatives, will result in a more socially just campus. We will know we are right when we see the collective utilizing their power to put pressure on centers of power. But, this could be harmful for members of UP, if the collective does not address the community’s needs or if it loses momentum and diminishes.

Students of the Innovation Minor, Cohort ’21
Overview of the question at hand.
The State of Social Justice at UP.
An overview of the Concept Map.
Assumptions either met or not met.
Synthesis of evidence and mapping against community initiatives.
Detail of the Concept Map.
Detail of Concept Map.
Detail of the Concept Map.
Detail of the Concept Map.

Closing Statement

We need to amplify the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion work that is already being done within various UP organizations because their previous efforts have been compartmentalized. With collaboration between organizations, the community will be able to make unified progress towards a socially just campus.

Students of the Innovation Minor, Cohort ’21

  • Students of the Innovation Minor Cohort ’21:
    • Mia Aguilar, Communication Studies / Sociology ’23
    • Riley Dehmer, Mechanical Engineering ’22
    • Elizabeth Diaz-Gunning, Civil Engineering ’22
    • Ethan Figueredo, Computer Science ’22
    • Julia Hanly, Nursing ’23
    • Hannah Kelly, Theater ’23
    • Raphaelle LeBlanc, Organizational Communication ’22
    • Justin Manahan, Marketing ’22
    • Audrey Sauter, Computer Science ’23
    • Cooper Sloan, Mechanical Engineering ’22
  • Salvador Orara, Innovation Professor of Practice | Director of Innovation, presided as Lead Researcher

Critical Incidents

Storytelling is a natural human act. Stories connect us to history. Stories connect us to possible futures. While there is much to be said about stories and history, it is our connection to possible futures which is of primary focus. For centuries cultures have thrived and failed in the creation and sharing of stories. “Critical Incidents” is specifically focused on stories that connect us to that which we don’t understand. 

As technological advancements and specifically Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) impact the creation of products, services, and experiences within the artificial world, there is a topic of interest supported by a challenge by Philip van Allen: 

“There is an urgent need to develop generative and effective methods that explore the consequences of design choices when creating AI systems, including consideration of the new ecologies they create. This is an interaction-design meta-task– not just designing for AI, but also designing HOW to design for AI.” 

Philip van Allen, Animism in Design: Creating an Internet of Quirky Things

Developing A.I. is the new surrealism. It is the chaotic work of inventing reality by juxtaposing supernatural experiences alongside the attrition of products, systems, and services that support the same human needs and wants within everyday life, all through the curation and attenuation of data. A.I. has already found its way into our lives and soon it will become more prevalent in ways that seemingly make our lives better, fitter, happier, and more productive. In the context of higher education, there should be a call to have a basic understanding of how A.I. will impact professional ventures and the everyday futures our students will find themselves living in.

This is design as inquiry. It is a hyper focus on the emotional impact of technology and thereby shedding light to value and meaning of such implementations. “Critical Incidents” are snippets of larger stories. While not explicitly tied to one another, these vignettes do take place under the lens of everyday life and represent strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and the threats of A.I.. The outcomes of this project questioned the true definition of societal needs, the future of engineering specifications, and the communication tactics needed in order to understand the ideas of the future and how to create a seat at the table in shaping it. 

Project Setup

Students were given a description and example of critical incidents from Universal methods of Design by Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington. Typically used a method of qualitative research, the method was assigned as mode of inquiry and speculation – we used it to create something rather than uncover factual data. In addition to the description of the method a brief introduction to using Adobe Illustrator was also provided. None of the students in the class had taken a graphic design course.

Learning Outcomes

  1. Students will develop an understanding and a point of view of the future applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning 
  2. Students will gain simple sketching and prototyping skills for visualizing and communicating ideas in 2D and 3D forms 
  3. Students will expand their abilities in persuasive communication through storytelling, presentation, and other communication modalities 
  4. Students will be exposed to specific technologies for prototyping machine learning models 

Resources

  • Marenko, B., van Allen, P., (2016). Animism in Design: An Internet of Quirky Things. (Web) www.1984boldideas.com
  • Martin, B., Hanington, B., (2012). Universal Methods of Design: 100 ways to research complex problems. Develop innovative ideas, and design effective solutions. Rockport Publishing.

Deliverables

  • Every week each student was to submit 1 critical incident of any context and any pre-existing or fictional thing.
  • All critical incidents were submitted as 8.5×11 inch PDF documents.

All submissions were compiled into an 8.5×11 saddle stitch booklet with a simple typographic treatment, a written Foreward, and a Reflection statement by the instructor of the course (Salvador Orara).

The booklet was then printed by the UP Campus Print Shop.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the entire course and project was conducted remotely online during the Fall semester of 2020.


Critical Incident by Mia Aguilar, CST/SOC ’22
Critical Incident “Spot” by Max Montagna, CST ’23
Critical Incident “Smart Kitchen” by Evangeline Muyano, Mechanical Engineering ’21