Sweet Briar College Magazine - Fall 2018

THE ARTS
DID YOU KNOW?
The term “design thinking” was probably coined in the
1960s. IDEO, perhaps the company best known for
developing consumer products using design thinking
tools, was founded in 1991. Stanford University
launched the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, better
known as the d.school, in 2005.
sbc.edu
for a better study space. Using the items in that box, they
prototyped things as different as a calming spa space to a
smartphone application. According to Hank Yochum, associate
dean of academic affairs, “You could probably find a box
similar to that in many offices at Google, and there are a lot of
people over there making a lot of money using the tools we’re
teaching our students.”
The faculty noted that a lot of people don’t think they’re creative.
Design thinking, Leake says, is a framework that allows
people who might not feel creative to come up with innovative
ideas. “It’s not about a creative moment of inspiration,” says
Penfield. “Anyone can use this process to work collaboratively
and come up with innovative ideas and breakthroughs that
they might not have come to otherwise. It’s a set of skills that
is not often taught in a structured way.”
The class is pass/fail, and as a result, doesn’t have an impact
on a student’s GPA, but that’s by design, says Lynn Rainville,
dean of the College. “Solving problems is a process that by
definition involves failure,” she says. “We don’t want our
students to be afraid of that or to be concerned that failing to
solve an assigned problem will have a negative impact on their
grade. We want them to fail — and we want them to learn
from those failures.” In fact, taking risks and learning from
failures is one of the primary goals of the class.
Students in the class work in teams. Salvatore says the
notion of teams — not just “groups” — is important. For
students, group work can be an annoyance, but Salvatore
explained that the projects they were doing could not be actually
done by an individual — she used the example of raising
a barn: even if she wanted to, she could not build a barn by
herself, just like the projects the students were working on
in the class. Unlike a group, a team is a collection of people
focused on a common goal, and everyone on the team has a
sense of identity and a shared mission. During the course,
students worked in several teams, and some of the students
acknowledged that they didn’t always get along with other
team members, but that, too, is a learning experience in itself.
Learning to work with others wasn’t the only skill the students
learned. Because the first step in the process is empathy,
students had to learn to talk to someone and really listen to
what they had to say. While the students were practicing empathy,
they were also learning interviewing and listening skills
— and that’s before they’d solved any problems at all. CORE
110 gives students an opportunity to learn these skills so that
they’ll be prepared to go into the workforce and collaborate
with people of various skills and knowledge. And they’ll be
able to work effectively with those people and come up with
truly innovative solutions.
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