Going Back to School
Embracing design thinking to bring together engineering and the liberal arts
Just a few weeks ago, I was pleased to be part of the Tenth Annual Symposium on Engineering and Liberal (Arts) Education (ELE) at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The symposium covers a multitude of diverse topics around the intersection of Engineering, Sciences and Liberal Arts programs. The primary audience includes industry representatives and educators from universities across the United States.
My participation in this Symposium started over six years ago, when I became involved in our IBM Smarter Planet Program through a Shared University Research (SUR) grant between IBM and Union College. The SUR grant supported the development of courses and programs which integrated arts and sciences through co-teaching and project work to deal with real life community issues.
Over the next few years, research scientists from IBM joined with Union College professors to develop and lead courses on topic areas including: smarter energy, the ethical use of data analytics, and the assessment of energy issues associated with open infrastructure sites like roads, parks and green spaces. Students in these courses benefited from reading, research and lectures. A number of the courses also included a cross disciplinary team project to address a school or community problem reflective of the Smarter Planet focus areas.
One of the most important by products of these courses was the renewed focus on education programs that integrated skills, thinking and students from engineering and science with their peers in liberal arts based programs like education, marketing and communications. Over the ensuing few years, the annual ELE Symposium brought together educators and industry members who shared similar interests in developing T-shaped liberal arts students, who understood and appreciated the value of math, computation and analytics at the core of their broader education plan.
The Customer is Front and Center
More recently, the focus has come full circle with the understanding that many of the courses, programs and shifts in learning now also focus on helping the Engineering and Science students to be better equipped to approach problems from a user’s point of view.
Capstone, team and community projects in many universities are now looking like the “3 in a box” teams critical to design project success at here IBM.
Engineering, Design and Brand Management/Marketing teams drive radical collaboration success and deliver products that meet key market defined needs. Today that focus on diverse skills and backgrounds to create team based solutions is growing in importance across many universities.
This year, several ELE breakout sessions and workshop discussions dealt with the importance of the customer perspective. Educators no longer classify communication as “just another soft skill”. It warmed my heart to hear top university educators speak about Design Thinking, and ask openly for ideas on how to create team based projects that mirror our growing IBM user-centric design approach.
Equally exciting, was the give and take between professors and industry professionals on how to bring this customer focus into our high schools, through programs like P-TECH. Building new skills, especially to support the new collar initiative promoted by IBM, will certainly grow in importance for future symposiums.
“Making a Space” for Design Thinking
As Design Thinking started to take shape across IBM a few years ago, we were fortunate to have a core group of designers in IBM Poughkeepsie participate in the IBM Design Hallmark project program. This program supports the full collaboration of engineering, design, test, content development, service and brand to design and deliver iconic customer outcomes.
At the same time, it became apparent that we needed to start sharing the design impact outside of IBM, and those Poughkeepsie designers joined me at the 2015 ELE Symposium to lead a workshop on Applying Design Thinking to Create Effective Makerspaces in Engineering. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work in one of IBM’s design studios will certainly relate to the energy in the room during that first workshop. No one was sitting down. The chatter reached a fever pitch as sticky notes covered flip charts around the room.
Maker Spaces, while certainly not a new concept to many in the workshop, took on a different meaning as participants shared ideas about the structure, content and physical aspects of current and future maker spaces. Libraries, community centers, classrooms, elementary school, summer crafts, science projects and senior or adult experiences were all part of the discussion that afternoon. Several of the ideas, as well as feedback on the IBM Design Thinking workshop, dominated discussion on the next day of the symposium.
Heating up with Design Thinking
The following year, I joined the symposium’s planning committee. As we prepared a call for papers, one area that kept coming up was the need to find a way to collect ideas on what was missing in several of the programs across the larger ELE community. Seeing an opportunity to apply IBM Design Thinking to this problem, I reached out to our Poughkeepsie designers for advice and guidance.
They met the challenge and created a workshop using a subset of IBM Design Thinking activities. Members of the Content Design and Development (CDD) team, equally vested in improving the design of customer information, joined us to help lead the workshop. The goal in 2016 was to collect and exchange ideas around what’s currently missing in the Engineering and Arts programs and to help find some new paths going forward.
For anyone living in the northeast you may remember that the dog days of summer arrived a bit early last year. Friday afternoon was sunny and HOT. The building where we conducted the Friday afternoon workshop is an historical landmark on campus. It is a stunning building with impressive architecture, but missing one key element — air conditioning. Not to be deterred, we opened windows and moved forward with the Feedback Grid and Big Ideas activities. The energy in the room reached a fever pitch, and the summer heat became a blip on the screen.
We diverged, voted, converged and then asked teams to prioritize the efforts and topics in the Big Ideas activity.
Educators from different programs, backgrounds and experiences worked on Big Idea vignettes to address the top problems along side designers who just a year earlier were sitting in IBM Design’s Austin Bootcamp.
Discussion was lively and lasted throughout the symposium; our Design Team captured all the feedback which we shared in a post symposium report. Much of that information fueled discussion for ideas and topics in the 2017 Symposium
In February of this year, IBM Studios Poughkeepsie was recognized as the 37th IBM Design Studio. Our designers, now affectionately recognized as the “Poughkeepsie Designosaurs” — are creatures that advocate for end users, good design practices and most importantly promote positive culture change across the IBM Poughkeepsie site.
Retrospective on Success
Building off the success of previous years, many of the Designosaurs joined me in designing a new approach for using design practices at the 2017 ELE Symposium. Several CDD team members, fueled by the success of the 2016 Symposium, joined our work session. The designers thought it was time to put our experience to practice in helping to collect and assess feedback throughout the symposium. As a result, we led a very successful and highly energetic ideation and retrospective exercise.
We no longer had to explain the importance of design thinking or introduce participants to sticky notes and markers. A hundred multi colored packs were in the room and outside in the discussion area. The sticky notes filled the front board, and by the time we were ready to group the ideas for discussion, we actually needed to add ten minutes to break time so we could get our job complete. Discussion was lively and feedback critical to the success of the program and planning for our 2018 symposium. As we did in 2016, the team collected and shared all feedback in a follow on symposium report.
The Ultimate Question
In addition to the retrospective workshop, I took a lead from our efforts across IBM, and encouraged our committee members to use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. While the symposium has always appeared to “hit the mark”, we all agreed using NPS would help us get a better handle on the strength of our symposium advocates or promoters.
What is the question that can tell good profits from bad? Simplicity itself: how likely is it that you would recommend this company, product or service to friend or colleague ? The metric that it produces is the Net Promoter Score. The Ultimate Question, by Fred Reichheld
With the help of our POK Studio Designosaurs, we created a survey asking ELE participants to share their feedback on the value of the symposium, as well as reasons for their score. We asked two critical questions:
- How likely are you to attend the 2018 ELE Symposium?
- How likely are you to recommend this symposium to a colleague?
The response rate for the NPS survey was close to 40% and the resulting baseline NPS was positive. More importantly, NPS respondent feedback will help the ELE planning committee form a closed loop process, by focusing on the comments from the promoters, and looking at how we can address comments from the detractors.
An increased number of presentations this year emphasized the user experience and the importance of building programs that develop more well rounded professionals from across all disciplines. A variety of the Promoter comments from the NPS survey confirmed this point.
The opportunity to interact with people inside and outside the academic world engaged in innovative change to connect engineering and the liberal arts is so very important.
Great diversity of ideas to share and support the user experience.
With this information in hand, The IBM Studios Poughkeepsie team is already looking forward to the impact it can make on the 2018 ELE Symposium.
David Hans is a manager in the IBM Studios Poughkeepsie. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
