100 Minutes of Human-Centered Design
Courses
ENG 100: Engineering Orientation
ENG 300: Engineering Transfer Orientation
ENG 177: Grainger First Year Experience Projects
Collaborations with the Grainger First-Year Experience team began in the Fall 2018 semester and became a cornerstone of my curriculum development work while at the Siebel Center for Design. Creation of the 100 Minutes of Human-Centered Design set of activites served as a model for how to integrate design into first-year courses across campus. This content would later be adapted by the College of Applied Health Sciences and College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science.
Collaborating Instructors
Gretchen Forman & Dr. Joe Bradley
Semesters
Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020
As a student, I was hired to be an Engineering Learning Assistant, upperclassmen who facilitated their own sections of ENG 100: Engineering Orientation, the required first-year experience course for engineering students at the Grainger College of Engineering. For my senior year, I was promoted to Head Engineering Learning Assistant for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. This coincided with my other position as an intern at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD). Given my involvement in both the Grainger Engineering first-year experience (GFX) and SCD, I worked with the GFX Program Director to pilot a new project in my section of 15 students. This initial pilot over the 8-week course was extremely successful and the collaboration with the GFX team became a cornerstone of SCD’s curriculum development efforts. The curriculum package we developed would later be dubbed “100 Minutes of Human-Centered Design” and eventually scaled to more than 30 sections of ENG 100 (over 600 students), more than ten sections of ENG 300, and opened the door for deeper integration into ENG 177: GFX projects, a 10-week course in which teams of entirely first-engineers design and engineer some solution to a challenge they identify in the world.
CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
For ENG 100, I worked closely with the Program Director of GFX to design several modules spread out over the course of 8-weeks guiding students through the basics of human-centered design (HCD). We carefully selected project topics and focused on the process rather than the product. Students worked in teams of four to six and were expected to conduct several interviews and ultimately design a very low-fidelity prototype (e.g. sketch, pipe cleaner model, simple computer mock-up) of their concept by the end of the course. The Program Director stipulated that in-class activities could take up no more than 100 minutes of time over the 8-weeks, challenging me to distill human-centered design to its essentials. Ultimately this class would serve as a basic introduction to HCD, with students delving deeper into the process as they progressed through their undergraduate experience.
IMPLEMENTATION
After piloting with my own section of 15 students in the Fall of 2018, the content was iterated upon to add more guidance on topics like “Creating a good ‘How Might We…?’ question” and “What does synthesis look like?”. The Program Director had me create formalized lesson plans and prepare training for new student facilitators who might not be familiar with HCD. We then expanded to 19 sections of ENG 100 while also expanding to include the 7 sections of ENG 300, essential ENG 100 for transfer students. Using feedback from those who taught the content in Fall 2019, we created a more robust training for new student facilitators and provided more thoroughly scoped project topics. The program director was happy with the success of the expanded pilot and approved further expansion for the Fall 2020 semester. The 100 Minutes of HCD content was adapted for a hybrid in-person and online content given the Covid-19 pandemic and was deployed to 35 sections, including several sections that were joint courses with the University of Illinois’ partner institution the Zhejiang University-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute (ZJUI). The 2020 pilot was again met with success, with a smoother experience for both students and student facilitators given the multiple iterations on the content since Fall 2018. The long-term vision was to eventually expand the 100 Minutes of HCD activities to be a part of every section of ENG 100 (roughly 100 sections every year).
Early development with ENG 100 opened the door for us to expand collaborations to include ENG 177: GFX Projects, a 10-week project course in which freshman students identify a challenge and design a functional prototype solution. Working with the faculty instructor and two other SCD team members we completely restructured the course to facilitate students through a human-centered design process of developing their prototypes. In the Fall of 2018, the faculty instructor handed the course over to me and the other SCD team members to teach two sections, while they observed and prepared to teach the content themselves in the following years. The initial pilot was successful, with the faculty instructor reporting this as one of the most innovative sets of prototypes he had seen from student teams in years. For the Fall of 2019, we refined the content for the faculty instructor to lead instruction, with design assistant support from myself and one other SCD team member. Again the integration was successful, with one student team even taking their prototype for a hand dexterity game designed to support rehab in Parkinson patients on to the Health Make-A-Thon, a competition sponsored by the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. In preparation for our third iteration of this collaboration in the Fall of 2020, I adapted the lessons of ENG 177 into a video series to facilitate the transition to a hybrid format given the constraints of Covid-19. These video lessons were also designed to be generalizable and serve as an initial prototype for an Introduction to Human-Centered Design MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), that SCD could deploy to broader audiences.