Sweet Briar College Magazine - Fall 2018

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FACULTY PROFILE CORE 110: LEARNING BY DESIGN sbc.edu Design thinking is a phrase that describes one way that human beings can approach problem-solving. Sweet Briar isn’t the only college that teaches it, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what it really means. “I had no idea what it was when President Woo came on board,” says Joshua Harris, assistant professor of music. “But when I learned more about it, I knew it would be relevant to what I do. Artists sometimes get paralyzed thinking that they have to create a masterpiece, but that’s not true. Iteration is part of composing and there’s a lot of overlap between creative arts and design thinking.” 6
FACULTY PROFILE CORE 110: Design Thinking is the first class in the College’s Leadership Core Curriculum. It was team-taught by four faculty members: Josh Harris, music; Christopher Penfield, philosophy; Jessica Salvatore, psychology; and Kaelyn Leake, engineering. One reason it’s the first course in the core is because it can be applied to so many different fields. Kaelyn Leake, assistant professor of engineering, says that although there’s already an engineering design process, design thinking can be complementary and both processes are based on similar principles. “I think anyone who truly learns design thinking will see their field in it,” she says. All of the faculty teaching the class went to Stanford last winter to train at its design school. For them, design thinking is as much about defining problems as solving them. In order to design anything, you first have to know what problem you’re trying to solve, a skill Jessica Salvatore, associate professor of psychology, says can be applied to almost every aspect of college. For example, she says, “It’s a universal experience to be assigned a paper for a class and to not know where to begin because you can’t describe the problem you’re trying to research. If students can learn to define problems, they’ll be able to apply that skill to every project in every class they take, as well as to the professional problems they’ll solve after graduation.” Penfield agrees. “You can’t solve any problem until you identify the issue,” he says. “Learning to locate, identify and define the problem is an important first step in becoming a problem-solver.” One thing that makes design thinking at Sweet Briar different is that it’s a required course that everyone has to take. “We often heard from the students that the class didn’t feel ‘like college,’ so clearly, it’s not what everyone is doing,” says Salvatore. “I’ve never heard of anyone teaching a framework of defining problems in a systematic way to every single student in an incoming cohort. That makes it different.” For students, although the class may have been strange at first, it was worth doing. “I really did enjoy the class,” says Iris Williams ’22. “The subject matter is relevant to my engineering aspirations. The process was a little slow at first, but it was worth learning about it in depth.” Perhaps the most defining part of design thinking is that it is an iterative process. You talk to someone and empathize with them. You define the problem. You come up with ideas for solving that problem. You build a prototype of that solution and then you test it. But the process doesn’t end there and it’s not linear. Sometimes you think you’ve defined the problem, but during the testing phase, you discover some unthought-of aspect that changes the way you think. Sometimes you test something and it doesn’t work, so you have to come up with new ideas and develop a new prototype. Sometimes your idea works great, but during the process, you discover a different problem you want to solve. To be sure, design thinking has its skeptics. Salvatore was a skeptic until she took the Stanford course. Penfield notes that critics sometimes say that “design thinking doesn’t involve a moment of critique,” but he argues that critique is an inherent part of the iterative process. “It’s important to know when, in the creative process, to apply that critique,” he says. On the first day of class, the students were given a box of items: aluminum foil, tape, pipe cleaners, sticky notes, Play-doh, string, popsicle sticks, straws, colorful circular stickers and more. At first glance, such a box might seem like materials for summer camp, but the items were tools that the students used to prototype designs. On the day that we visited, students were using the materials to test their ideas fall 2018 7
Page 1 and 2: SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE
Page 3 and 4: Fall 2018, Vol. 88, No. 2 This maga
Page 5 and 6: Students from across the curriculum
Page 7: THE ARTS Carrie Brown teaching “T
Page 11 and 12: THE ARTS HOW DESIGN THINKING HAS LE
Page 13 and 14: ALUMNAE PROFILE In this picture, ta
Page 15 and 16: ALUMNAE PROFILE working in Sweet Br
Page 17 and 18: ON THE QUAD A group of Sweet Briar
Page 19 and 20: MEET THE CLASS OF 2022 ON THE QUAD
Page 21 and 22: ON THE QUAD The weekend came with t
Page 23 and 24: ON THE QUAD fall 2018 21
Page 25 and 26: ON THE QUAD ALUMNAE SURVEY OVERVIEW
Page 27 and 28: ON THE QUAD Sweet Work Weeks, which
Page 29 and 30: ALUMNAE PROFILE experience that was
Page 31 and 32: ALUMNAE PROFILE Sweet Briar taught
Page 33 and 34: ALUMNAE PROFILE “My parents are t
Page 35 and 36: HISTORY Quad Road in 1935 I was als
Page 37 and 38: GIVING 2018-19 Sweet Briar Fund Pri
Page 39 and 40: • Successfully implement 10 new c
Page 41 and 42: ALUMNAE BRIEFS Alumnae Artists Come
Page 43 and 44: ecologists in exploring the chemica
Page 45 and 46: CLASSnotes 1947 Linda McKoy Stewart
Page 47 and 48: there and doing things in town as w
Page 49 and 50: Karen Steinhardt Kirkbride is delig
Page 51 and 52: dear friend. ou may remember that s
Page 53 and 54: Richmond’s Class of ‘60 met for
Page 55 and 56: MLHA with sons 40 years apart at se
Page 57 and 58: much of the summer there, and also
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sister and her husband who live on
Page 61 and 62:
Catherine Porter ’68 with classma
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percentage was higher (looks good o
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next Memorial Day. Mimi continues t
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Happy hour Friday night, Reunion 20
Page 69 and 70:
heading back to smoke in Montana. D
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equipment, toys, and games once aga
Page 73 and 74:
Cassandra Smitth Babbitt and Becky
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you for being true SBC Sisters! Kee
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so from what we knew, but I do try
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1983 celebrating the marriage of He
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Dianne Hayes Doss ’93 on a family
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Stephanie Pearson Davis and family
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ing my new work! Looking forward to
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Ashlee Mays Kidd ‘09 with her hus
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Eleftheria Treklas ’12. Katherine
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Start Planning Your Legacy In 1899,
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Sweet Briar College Magazine - Fall 2018

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