Design@Brown
speaking & facilitation | education design | advocacy & service design
Transforming cross-disciplinary design education at Brown University through advocacy, advising, and ongoing support.
Role
Student, Researcher, Author, Presenter
Later lead Design@Brown student group
Created with
Design@Brown team
Deb Mills-Scofield and Mike Donohue
In the fall of 2018, I joined a group of Brown students passionate in pursuing design while in a liberal arts institution and making design education more accessible to Brown students. In the fall semester, we conducted an independent study to propose to the School of Engineering and make the case for formal design education at Brown. Over the next years at Brown, I led the Design@Brown student group, facilitating mentorship and advisory opportunities for students exploring design, crafting curriculum for and introductory course in design engineering, and advocating for University leadership to offer design as a standard educational concentration. My work continues as an alumni advisor, course project mentor, and workshop facilitator for Brown students.
About the project
The report
During the fall group independent study, our mission was to put together a report and call to action for the University administration. Our goals included understanding the need for and interest in design within Brown students and faculty, understanding what a design curriculum could look like, proposing a design curriculum for Brown, and proposing a five year strategy plan for implementation.
To clarify our mission and ensure that our audience could understand where we came from, we began the entire process by defining design. The definition we created is:
"...the action or manifestation of creation that is supported by planning or technical logic of some kind. In short, design is creation with intention"
From there, we divided our exploration into different categories including making the case for design as a discipline, the current state of design at Brown, what design looks like in other institutions, and the industry and aftermarket for designers.
Along with working collaboratively with my peers to organize our report and guide our discussions, my major responsibilities were to write about “Why Design is Important and Aligned with Liberal Learning,” to create the foundational design curriculum proposal and implementation process, to write the final call to action, and then create a style guide for the final proposal including creating visuals and compiling all content into one cohesive document. When the final report was complete, I lead the effort to condense the 63 page document into a digestible <10 page document.
Development
“The School of Engineering is in the unique position of being able to implement these suggestions and serve as the home for design at Brown and as a model for other schools. Ultimately, it comes down to this: for Brown to educate and release true changemakers into the world, our students, whether in engineering or not, need to be able to understand and apply effective problem-solving, empathic creation, and engagement in the interdisciplinary study of design.”
— Call to action I wrote for our final deliverable
