Reinventing College: A Design Thinking Course in Higher Education
In the national conversation about innovation and strategy in higher education, Design Thinking has emerged as a hot topic. Which is no surprise, since Design Thinking and its allied disciplines including Lean and Agile process methodologies are now part of the default practices for problem-solving and collaboration in fast-moving tech and media industries.

Design Thinking has been a bit slower to gain a foothold in higher education, but not in the programs with which I am affiliated at Southern Oregon University. Many of my colleagues in the Communication program and in our interdisciplinary program in Emerging Media & Digital Arts employ some form of Design Thinking/Lean/Agile, and it shows up all across our curriculum. Meanwhile, in the Communication program, we have just hard-numbered a Design Thinking course that I have taught four times in the last two years in a two-credit weekend workshop format.
One of the challenges I had in the design of this course relates to the scale of my application of the Design Thinking methodology. It’s relatively easy to bring in sticky notes and sharpies and do relatively quick-and-dirty collaboration projects using exercises inspired by Design Thinking. See Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo for some great examples.
But in the design of this course, I sought to push myself and my students harder to craft comprehensive solutions for complex problems, even given the hackathon-style tempo of our three-day workshop.
The most helpful resource for me, of course, proved to be the templates and other resources devised by Stanford University’s d. School, and I relied on them closely as I designed the workshops. Using the d. School framework gave me a pre-built structure that will also prove useful to any students who encounter Design Thinking in their professional lives.

The d. School’s resources provided both vocabulary and tools to help me and our students engage with basic Design Thinking concepts and principles including Beginner’s Mindset, ethnographic interviewing, Story Share & Capture, Affinity Mapping, Empathy Mapping, prototyping, and more.
If you want to see what all this looks like in syllabese, I encourage you to browse down and see a slightly abbreviated syllabus for the most recent workshop, including links to the decks I use to organize each day’s activities.
WELCOME TO COMM399 — DESIGN THINKING
This hybrid course uses the emerging practices of Design Thinking to explore the future of higher education. During a fast-paced opening weekend, students will apply techniques of qualitative interviewing, visual brainstorming, rapid prototyping and guided collaboration to interrogate the past, present and future of SOU. Based on the weekend’s preparation, students will continue to collect and synthesize qualitative data, and complete prototypes/proposals/reports suitable for presentation at Southern Oregon Arts & Research or other key stakeholders of SOU.
DESIGN THINKING
This edition of COMM399 will be taught using the principles of an emerging problem-solving methodology called Design Thinking, which has been popularized by global design firms such as Ideo and XPLANE, Stanford University’s d School, and other prominent companies and institutions. Students will work collaboratively to propose, prototype and test practical solutions to real problems that address the challenge of rethinking higher education in the 21st century.
TEXTBOOKS
This edition of COMM399 has no required textbooks. We will have a variety of online readings posted via our Slack channel.
ASSIGNMENTS
W1 — Opportunities & Challenges At SOU
Please prepare for our weekend workshop (Jan. 27–29) by writing and submitting a short essay about a specific experience you have had during your time as a student at SOU.
For a top score, your post should narrate a story about your SOU experience. This assignment entails writing about one experience, but reflect carefully on your time at SOU to work up a good topic. When has SOU fulfilled your expectations? When has SOU fallen short? How did SOU help you to succeed, or present a challenge that you had to overcome? How did you respond to a complex situation? How did it work out for you in the end? For example, don’t say: “I love SOU because I got to win a national sports championship here” or “I hate SOU because I live in a crappy dorm.” Instead, provide a rich account of your SOU experience, and let us know how that sports championship or that dorm shaped your personal development at SOU.
Please submit an essay of 400–500 words describing your experience. Please focus on creating a polished submission. This is not a formal academic paper, but your writing must feature minimal errors of grammar and spelling to achieve a top score.
W2 — Daily Participation — EMPATHIZE
In-person participation, 12–4pm, Jan. 27, DMC 120/121.
W3 — Daily Participation — IDEATE
In-person participation, 9am-4pm, Jan. 28, DMC 120/121.
W4 — Daily Participation — PROTOTYPE
In-person participation, 9am-1pm, Jan. 29, DMC 120/121.
W5 — Interview 2.0
Using the techniques described and practiced during our weekend workshop, complete at least one more SOU student interview and submit the content of that interview here. You should paste the transcription of the interview in the text box provided with this assignment, and also upload your best single photograph of the person. In your interview, you should present your team prototype, solicit feedback, and respond to that feedback in your final project submission.
W6a — Happy Hour
We will meet for pizza, beer and soft drinks at Creekside Pizza in Ashland from 6–8pm on Mar. 16. This is an optional “assignment,” but also recommended as a good opportunity to ask questions and coordinate with your teammates before the final deadline for submitting your projects the following Sunday.
W6 — Solution Prototype/Pitch Document
During our in-person sessions, students will research, design and prototype projects that deploy real-world solutions to the challenge of Reinventing College. After our workshop, students will refine their prototypes and prepare a final proposal that pitches your idea, including concrete illustrations of your prototype. Although pieces of this document are recommended to be completed collaboratively with your groups, you also have the option to do a solo submission. Each student must submit a complete document, even in the cases where you are using shared content, and each student is individually accountable for the final product submitted. More details available in class on Sunday, Jan. 29. PLEASE SUBMIT THIS DOCUMENT BY SHARING A FILE ON GOOGLE DRIVE ONLY. SHARE TO PALMERE@SOU.EDU.
