Stories

Creative Entrepreneurship, a new 5-week, 1-credit hour course taught by Executive Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Jan Ryan, just wrapped up this October. The class, offered through the Center for Integrated Design, was the first of its kind in the College of Fine Arts and covered the essential business fundamentals for launching a new venture. We spoke with Cole Godvin, one of the Creative Entrepreneurship students, to hear about her experience.

I’m excited to share that we have an extraordinary semester planned with lots of visitors, speakers and learning opportunities for students across COFA. For those of you I haven’t yet met, my name is Jan Ryan, and I’m the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Fine Arts. This fall begins my second year of leading students through programming and curriculum designed to bring together like-minded creative students and faculty who want to change the world, embody their passion to create and challenge the status quo.

Assistant Professor of Design Jiwon Park has been awarded a Red Dot Award: Communication Design in the Brand Design category for her project, “SAIB,” which created a brand concept, logo, visual system and application for the intimate cosmetic brand SAIB & Co.

Looking through the lens of American psychologist Sandra Bem’s definition of androgyny, human-centered design asks participants to take an androgynous approach and to adopt the best of both masculine and feminine traits to improve problem-solving outcomes.

Two graphic designers turned software designers worked together for years at Etsy, where they helped build and scale the online marketplace that connects millions of buyers and sellers from nearly every country in the world today. In this dialogue, these two designers discuss their own career journeys and what they’ve learned about creating compelling shopping experiences online.

Design thinking has spread to many disciplines, businesses and cultures; however, the way design thinking is executed requires change. The “fail fast” mentality can sometimes cause more harm than good, but merging design thinking with principles from the scientific method may offer a more successful way forward.

Teaching design thinking for social innovation requires both the students and the teachers to step outside their comfort zones and outside of traditional teaching frameworks. While teaching a class as part of Southern Methodist University’s Design and Innovation Studio, Kate Canales and Gray Garmon share some of their strategies for navigating the fog of ambiguity. 

How should educators teach game design principles? The short answer is to teach the principles of play—specifically, play as a mechanism for exploring interactive systems and a means for designing game levels. 

As the human-centered design approach to solving problems in the professional world grows, so does the teaching of this approach in higher education. However, there isn’t a comprehensive guide for teaching human-centered design that is peer-curated, dynamic and adaptable within higher education. To meet this need, a group of educators propose a peer-powered research repository that shares case studies and best practices for teaching design thinking. 

Associate Dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies Doreen Lorenzo introduces the 2018 issue of the Journal of Design and Creative Technologies.