In Spring 2022, Tim Lindgren and I designed and taught Design Thinking & Creativity. This course is a requirement for students in the Applied Liberal Arts Bachelor’s Degree in the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College. Spring 2022 was the first time that the course was offered to students.
Course Description
This course is meant to help us expand our creative toolkit for engaging with an increasingly uncertain and complex world. We'll explore methods to think creatively with others, practices to fostering individual creativity, and ways to expand our thinking beyond just the brain with technologies, other people, and our bodies.
We will take a "reflection-in-action" approach that's typical of design and the arts: try things, reflect on what happens, repeat.
This will give us opportunities not just to learn about design thinking and creativity but also to design our thinking and learn about ourselves. This will mean intentionally reflecting on how our minds work and assembling the resources, methods, and practices that will best support creativity and learning in our lives.
Course Outcomes
Practice Reflection-in-Action: Be able to describe the basic methods and mindsets of design thinking - Looking, Understanding, Making, and Adapting - and apply them to contexts that are meaningful to you.
Engage Your Extended Mind: Know how to think well outside your brain by getting ideas of your head, enlisting your emotions and your body, and collaborating with other people
Design Your Thinking: Craft a personalized approach to design thinking and a toolkit of individual practices to support your creativity
Connect the Dots: Develop a practice of connective thinking that helps grow new ideas and fosters integration between design thinking, your other liberal arts studies, and your own experiences.
Live the Questions: Develop a practice of creative inquiry and curiosity that allows you to respond to ambiguity, iteration, and learning-by-doing.
Course Topics & Schedule
Our course was organized into modules with bi-directional links to different types of course content, including assignments, projects, notes, and media for the course. This organization allowed students to navigate the course either linearly or non-linearly.
Unique Aspects of This Course
Hybrid Modality
The course alternated meeting synchronously in-person, synchronously online, and asynchronously. Each week followed a similar rhythm where students would:
Become introduced to the module’s topic
Meet in person or online synchronously for discussion and collaborative studio time.
Synthesize and apply the aspects of Design Thinking they had put into practice to their individual notebook activities and practices
Reflect on their learning throughout the module and set goals for the future
The Course as a Collaborative Design Project
Everything from the projects that students worked on to the content we explored in class was shaped by students. Students added additional media to our shared class notebook and directly edited pre-existing, instructor-created pages with their own thoughts, connections, and contributions.
Technology & Co-Constructing Knowledge
A key idea of our course was that taking notes is a creative practice that allows us to grow our ideas over time and develop our individual creative processes.
For that work to happen, it’s important that information doesn’t become siloed so that students can make connections across modules and track their growth. Thus, instead of relying only on our University’s Learning Management System, Tim and I build this course to be responsive, collaborative, and grassroots-designed using the technology Notion.
We created a shared class notebook and also had students keep their own individual notebooks using Notion.
The class notebook was a place for all students to share thoughts about the key ideas of the course and make their learning visible. We positioned it to our students as a collaborative text with a layer of our related notes that continually grew as our learning in the course evolved.
