KEENzine5

We began with a set of course learning objectives that incorporated the entrepreneurial mindset using a studio-style pedagogy that fit the desired experiential nature of the course. We ran a pilot section of the course with 17 brave students using the design theme: Accessibility on Campus. What Could Go Wrong? Fifteen weeks and six working prototypes later, certain things became obvious from our trial run: The nature of students’ customer interactions and the quality of customer input they used to drive their designs led to projects that seemed a bit artificial and perhaps, not very meaningful. Even given their familiarity with the customers they chose, trying to assess what value meant to their clients proved challenging for the students. We began to think about how to address these issues. Where could we find “real” customers? Enter Services to Enhance Potential (STEP) with the key to unlocking our “real” customer dilemma. STEP is a local non-profit agency whose mission is to provide training and support to people with disabilities in order to place them into meaningful employment. STEP Director, Steve Slayton, was initially looking for a way to partner with a university as part of the Source America Design Challenge. We jumped at the chance to provide our students with the opportunity to design assistive technology that impacts the lives of real customers. To deliberately bring the 3C’s front and center in the students’ projects, we drafted more focused learning objectives. The students are made aware at each phase of the design process that they will be assessed both on the technical aspects of their projects as well as on their mindset development. These assessments are woven throughout the course deliverables in both team and individual assignments. Before every team presentation, we provide guidelines and grading rubrics that incorporate the relevant KEEN Complementary Skills as a means to demonstrate how they have exercised the 3C’s. We also require individual writing assignments that summarize the journey through the design process while reflecting on how each portion of the project has helped develop the entrepreneurial mindset. We require specific examples and discussion of each of the 3C’s in these reports. W i t h t h e i n t e n t i o n a l emp h a s i s o n m i n d s e t development and with real customers now available, we prepared for full implementation of the course. With a fresh, new design theme – Accessibility in the Workplace – our own curiosity led us to the question: “Can we pull this o•?!” TREAD ing Into Unknown Territory Curiosity: To strategically equip our students for this partnership, we had to lay the groundwork for curiosity by supplying some context for the significance of accessibility. First, we set the historical context of the disabilities rights movement, by viewing an excerpt from the “Lives Worth Living” documentary. 1 We then put our students in the shoes of their customers, using an accessibility simulation exercise. The simulated disabilities that the students experience include mobility, dexterity, vision, hearing impairment, and autism. We reinforce curiosity by asking the students to predict the most di›cult aspect of dealing with a particular disability. As they return from roaming around campus, completing a list of tasks associated with specific impairments, we ask them to reflect on their experiences. We were amazed at how seriously the students took to their tasks. For example, we asked the students experiencing our campus for the first time in a wheelchair to go to the second floor of the engineering building. The problem, there is no elevator in the building. How did they overcome this obstacle? By carrying their classmate piggyback up the stairs! For most students, the exercise proves to be a real eye-opener to the unanticipated struggles their customers may experience. Each of the above activities prepares students for their first meeting with their customers. During the meeting, students must intentionally exercise curiosity to identify opportunities for design to help STEP workers better perform their jobs. They seek out and recognize these opportunities using ethnography and painstorming. These specific methods help students tune in to the pain points that the worker may be experiencing or even perhaps working around. This leads to real opportunities for making connections and creating value. • Students won’t seek out customers. They opt to use their friends as their clients. • Determining customer needs is di›cult for students. • Students don’t automatically recognize when they are exercising the 3C’s. 19