Legacy of Innovation Projects
Empowering students to become confident innovators who care through community-based innovation projects.
“Innovation will be the single most important factor in determining
America’s success through the 21st century.”
- Council on Competitiveness
Infographic by Tablet Infographics
We need innovators to solve current and future problems.
Even though students are spending record sums for college degrees, there are gaps in their educational experiences. Many students are graduating unprepared to succeed and thrive in todays workplace. Old ideas and training are no longer enough. The shift in focus from efficiency to innovation is critical.
Every student builds their capabilities as innovators. Throughout three semesters, students collaborate and innovate with professionals who care on a real project for real people with immediate impact and feedback using the hurly burly innovation framework. Together we upload the fundamentals.
“Working on a real project with professionals increased my confidence exponentially. It’s been an amazing experience; opening my eyes to the importance and interplay between field research and innovation.”
“This experience was a lodestar for me; the first time I felt my work mattered.”
“During our first semester of the program we learned and used Lighting Anthropology to discover what people feel, need, want, and actually do in the classrooms we were designing. My fellow students described their current experiences as“Zombie-like, boring, blah, bland, sterile, old, dysfunctional, cramped, crowded, dreary, and dead”. Listening to what they were saying inspired me to not only improve upon the current experience but to strive to create a “flagship” experience, a classroom experience that would become a model for classroom design nationwide.
This experience has brought me back to early design classes at RISD where collaboration & creativity always went hand in hand. Where one idea built upon another and the end result was a design larger than the whole and brighter than the highest creative moment. We dreamed together then applied the harsh reality of a building–bidding schedule & forced the idea into the grinder and out came pure gold! The passion & experience of the students trying to create a better learning environment while still in the school was the driving factor & genius lightning stuck time after time. It truly was collaboration and creativity at its best…and was great fun along the way!!!”
