New Directions New Connections
Glowing ideas and collaborations in the arts and humanities at UD are sparking novel educational opportunities for students, industry and the public. We introduce only a few of them in the pages ahead.
Giving University of Delaware students "the opportunity to think in a different way" lies at the heart of the Delaware Design Institute (DDI), according to Provost Tom Apple.
Since Apple and Janet Hethorn, professor and chair of the Department of Art, initially discussed the idea about three years ago, DDI has rapidly taken shape. Based in historic Taylor Hall on the Newark campus, the institute today boasts meeting spaces and a "Collab Lab" equipped with white boards, design tools and comfortable chairs, where people from different disciplines can come together to share ideas and develop opportunities.
All seven colleges and more than 20 departments at the University are involved in the institute, which facilitates collaboration across disciplines and encourages the use of "design thinking" in finding creative solutions to complex problems.
"Everyone wants to do interdisciplinary work, to address the messy problems, the big problems in today's society," Hethorn says. "In order to do so, we need to learn to interact with people differently. Faculty may not know people in other departments, so we're a matchmaker of sorts, and we want innovation to be the outcome."
As Hethorn explains, every project supported by DDI must include faculty and students from more than one discipline, as well as an external partner with a problem to be solved, such as a private company or nonprofit organization.
So far, DDI has helped to launch projects ranging from the creation of a three-acre sustainable teaching garden at Tyler Arboretum, to an online site for sharing business process management approaches. More recently, as you'll read here, a DDI team put their creativity to work imagining products in the home of the future in response to a design challenge from one of the world's technology giants: Xerox Corporation.
Janet Hethorn
Professor and Chair,Department of Art