MDI Capstone
Guiding students through real-world projects with industry collaborators.
THE Course:
As the practical backbone of MDI, the capstone courses push students to apply the innovation process to a semester-long project with a real-world “client.”
Timeline:
Taught twice: Spring and Fall ‘21
MY ROLE:
Instructor, project finding and scoping, course structure and schedule, “client” liaison, participant recruitment, printing services
Students in the MDI Collaborative Capstone I (INTER-HE 940) posing for a picture to be included in the “Thank you” document for those interviewed.
On Monday, September 13, 2021, fifteen MDI students gathered for day one of their new design challenge:
How might we improve the reach of diabetes self-management education in Wisconsin, specifically among the Black population?
It was “Looking In Day,” and they were about to get a primer in diabetes—what it is and how to manage it—from a leading researcher in the UW School of Pharmacy, Dr. Olayinka Shianbola. For many of them, it was the first time they had heard much about the disease at all.
A lesson in health equity from Ms. Carola Gaines & Dr. Susan Passmore.
Ten weeks later (11/17/21), after an intensive human-centered design process, those same students stood in front of their project sponsors to show prototypes for four potential solutions—newly designed websites, a podcast, a diagnosis resource kit, and a community event. Two of the proposals have since gone on to impact the challenge—one as the catalyst for an upcoming grant application for Dr. Shianbola’s team and one directly improving a diabetes education program in Wisconsin called Healthy Living with Diabetes.
While impact is always a goal of human-centered design courses, the effects of having a real-world “client” go beyond the deliverable. Students get a glimpse into their future careers, gain insight on the many barriers to the design and innovation process (many of them challenges with people or structure, rather than tools or technology), practice professional communication, and see a project from start to finish, adding to students’ personal portfolios. This particular topic also allowed us to explore equity-centered design in the highly-constrained, systemically racist space of healthcare.
For the last four weeks of the semester, students chose between focusing on designing futures, which allowed them to dabble in speculative design, or designing emotions, which challenged them to create an experience that resulted in empathy for the people they interviewed about diabetes. Like equity-centered design, speculative design and designing for empathy are two burgeoning and important areas of design that graduates of the MDI program should be familiar with.