SCD Chronicle #1: From Silicon Valley to a Dorm Room
I’m building a dorm room in my office. I’m constructing a loft bed, hooking up a PS4, and hanging some posters — in the quietest, most corporate building I’ve ever worked in. I’ve asked for a standard-issue student desk and the most uncomfortable chair the facilities staff can find.
Why? Empathy. It’s the reason I’m here.
I started college in the fall of 1988. I packed up the car, waved goodbye to my folks, and drove off with my older brother to Champaign. I was too cool to have my parents come with me. I moved into my dorm room on the first floor of an all-women residence hall and began my college experience with excitement, anticipation, and some fear too. Though I would never have admitted that, of course.
Thirty years later, I feel like I’m starting college again — again with a mix of excitement, anticipation, and a hint of fear. After working as a design consultant for 20 years, I moved from Silicon Valley back to the Midwest for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch the new Siebel Center for Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
No big deal, just defining the future of multidisciplinary education and design thinking.
I like to think I’m cool and with-it, but even using those terms is dating me. I’m pushing 50 and savvy enough to know I haven’t been cool in years. But I have learned something really important over the last 20 years helping big companies imagine futures and then put them into action: It’s not just about knowing what’s cool or having your finger on the pulse of the latest thing.
Describing a trend doesn’t deliver a good program or class or product. Studying the research on 20-year-olds’ relationships with their phones is illuminating, but it’s not the goal.
Instead, it’s all about knowing how to get a real understanding of people’s worlds and their lives. The sweetest pair of Nikes won’t do that — until you walk in somebody else’s. And that’s what we’re up to with the dorm room.
Human-centered design is more than what we’ll teach through the Siebel Center for Design; it’s the approach we’ll use to plan and implement the new center and its programs. We’re going to devise ways to constantly connect with people and their experiences, and we’re going to train students, no matter their major, to do the same as they tackle society’s biggest challenges. Whether they’re interested in finance or the environment or social services or human rights or Formula 1 cars or anything else, a human-centered design perspective is going to serve them well.
Building and working in a dorm room reminds me that an undergraduate experience is more than just coursework. It’s the emotions of leaving home. The negotiations of living in close quarters. The unmade bed and the unexpected conversations. The blank canvas of a cinderblock wall that I’ll cover in posters and define myself to anyone who walks in.
I’d like to think that I’m self-aware enough to know that making my office a dorm room isn’t going to make me a freshman again. But bringing back those memories of freshman year is going to help us battle the assumptions we have about undergraduate education, and it’s going to help us understand what’s going on in people’s lives.
So it’s time to immerse myself in students’ experiences.
Let’s be honest, students change, places evolve, and the skills we need will be different in the future. And the new building we’re moving into won’t be complete until 2020. Despite all that — in fact, because of all that — we’re building the Design Center to the specs that we learn through experiences like creating a dorm room as an empathy exercise. Together, we will build something great, because we will be obsessed with exploring what it means to be a student who wants to have a positive impact.
We don’t know everything, but we do know this: The Siebel Center for Design will always be human-centered, with eyes and ears to real experiences and the meaningful things we can learn from them.
When you create with that principle in mind, you create something that will thrive.
Rachel Switzky directs the Siebel Center for Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining Illinois this year, she spent more than a decade at the global design company IDEO.
