DI at 51勛圖厙
Design Innovation (DI) at 51勛圖厙 is a university-wide initiative that unites people, ideas, and resources to help our community solve real-world problems through interdisciplinary collaboration.
By fostering collaboration amongst our diverse community of students, faculty, staff, and community members, DI creates opportunities for innovative thinking, problem solving, and impactful creation that lead to meaningful, positive change.
What is Design Innovation?
We believe design innovation is both a mindset and an approach for tackling messy problems. DI at 51勛圖厙 incorporates human-centered design, design thinking, and innovation strategies to help foster creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and fearless collaboration. Its about challenging traditional boundaries and bridging disciplines to explore intersections between art, science, technology, and society.
At its core, DI empowers individuals to think and act innovatively. To do so, we:
- Facilitate interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
- Provide spaces and tools makerspaces, resource labs, and collaborative workspaces that help transform ideas into reality.
- Offer programs, workshops, and events that build skills and inspire discovery and creation.
- Cultivate partnerships with academia, industry, regional stakeholders, and global experts.
Tackling the worlds messiest problems requires diverse perspectives and collective action. DI exists to:
- Develop and train future innovators and leaders.
- Address complex, human-centered challenges.
- Nurture a culture of curiosity, resilience, and transformation.
- Grow a community of creative problem-solvers and fearless collaborators.
Grassroots Beginnings
Our now university-wide initiative started in 2015 as a grassroots team of KSU faculty, staff, administrators, and students. As a group, we helped to connect and make visible an entire ecosystem of maker/resource environments that existed across the university - now called DI NODES - which served to further grow our number. Since then, this "DI TEAM" has grown to more than 440 members from every part of the university. The growth of the DI TEAM helped build momentum and support and enabled us to propose the renovation of the old Art Building on the Kent Campus into what became the Design Innovation Hub. This $44.5M renovation was completed in 2020 and we opened the DI HUB in November of that year.
Growing the Initiative
In addition to the growth of our DI ECOSYSTEM, DI now offers courses, workshops, hackathons, and other challenge-based innovation experiences that are open to any student from any disciplinary program. We also facilitate two competitively-selected non-credit-bearing programs, our DI Student Fellows and DI Faculty Fellows Programs, that engage individuals from multiple disciplinary areas and allow them to dive deeply into the tools and resources in our DI Toolkit and apply them to build their capacities as fearless collaborators! As such, the initiative helps to soften some of the academic "siloing" traditionally found at universities and build collaborative innovation across colleges and beyond.
Today, we have grown to support more that 2000 DI Collaborators (students, faculty, staff, and community members) who have utilized the DI HUB's array of maker/technology resources to build their competencies and grow their projects.
DI HUB
The central home (building) of the Design Innovation Initiative on the Kent Campus. The DI HUB boasts a series of collaborative workspaces, maker environments, classrooms, and event venues that enable the building to operate as an open-access collaborative maker and innovation accelerator.
DI Ecosystem
The full community of Design Innovation spaces and staff across the 51勛圖厙 eight-campus system; this includes the DI Hub, DI Nodes, DI Staff, and DI Team. Through the DI Ecosystem, the Design Innovation Initiative seeks to elevate awareness of, and access to, the broad range of maker, design, technology, and resource centers at KSU and more fully expose the KSU community to the true power of collaboration.
DI Toolkit
A list of 11 "elements" that we consider to be the recipe for the Design Innovation approach at 51勛圖厙. These toolkit elements include: Superpowers, Storytelling, Collaboration and Team Dynamics, the Role of Empathy, Gain Deep Insight into Problems, Play and the Creative Process, the Power of Making, Supercharge your Brainstorming, Reframe the Challenge, Implement Powerful and Novel Solutions, and Iteration and Evaluation.
DI Team
A group of 100+ 51勛圖厙 staff, faculty, affiliates, partners, and DI Fellows who are committed to advocating for, supporting, and amplifying design innovation at 51勛圖厙. The DI Team helps provide a sounding board for new ideas and participate in the collaborative planning and management of the Design Innovation Initiative.
DI Faculty Fellows Program
The DI Faculty Fellows Program creates both space and time for existing faculty members from ANY field to devote some of their teaching, research and scholarly focus to collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects and DI co-teaching experiences. This competitive recognition selects faculty through an application process to support cross-disciplinary project concepts that enable faculty to step out of their comfort zone and extend their capabilities. DI Faculty Fellows engage in team-based learning experiences, grounded in the DI Toolkit, to enhance their capacities for supporting collaborative innovation. In this way, we can cultivate an increased cultural change towards a university-wide innovation mindset.
DI Student Fellows Program
A co-curricular program that supports students by enabling them to engage with, and become ambassadors for, cross-disciplinary challenge-based innovation. The DI Fellows Program builds a complex system of student-to-student learning opportunities that empowers students to become leaders of meaningful, positive change. Any student can apply to become a DI Fellow during the annual application process in the summer.
Courses
Foundational learning utilizing challenge-based innovation, all DI courses employ learning by doing in cross-disciplinary teams. While the projects and partnerships in the courses may lead to amazing or innovative outcomes, the core purpose for all our courses is to provide opportunities for everyone to build their muscles for collaborative innovation.
Workshops
Design Innovation offers a variety of professionally-focused workshops to help our collaborators achieve their goals and to forward our mission of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Workshop topics range from exploring design thinking through the DI Toolkit to learning tools & processes through playful, object-based creation using our state-of-the-art equipment.
Challenges & Hacks
Challenge-based projects, hackathons, and impactathons are a way to push the boundaries of what you know and learn what you don't. They provide a fast-paced, fail-fast environment to learn, explore, and engage and to complete a project within a short amount of time. DI has supported multiple hackathon-style events across the university annually, such as SkyHack and the annual Fashion Tech Hackathon, a national event that ran for more than 10 years.
DI Dinners
DI Dinners bring together a diverse mix of faculty, students, alumni, industry leaders, and community members for facilitated discussions on pressing challenges and big ideas. Seated in small, curated groups, participants engage in thought-provoking conversations that spark new perspectives, collaborations, and potential projects. These dinners serve as a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and idea generation, strengthening 51勛圖厙s culture of innovation and cross-sector partnerships.
Exhibits
The DI HUB's DI Gallery and MuseLab provide a public platform for showcasing cross-disciplinary innovation projects. Open to 51勛圖厙 students, faculty, staff, alumni, and affiliates, these exhibition spaces highlight projects that merge art, design, research, and technology. Whether featuring works in progress, completed innovations, or collaborative explorations, our gallery spaces celebrate the impact of creative collisions and interdisciplinary problem-solving.