The Center for Design Thinking brings together design thinking innovators to discuss how to design for wellness in higher education at the annual Design Forge conference.
Leaders in design and higher education met at Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking on March 13-15 for the annual Design Forge conference focusing on health and wellbeing. This year they welcomed 40 guests in person and 85 virtual participants to share stories and research-backed strategies for redesigning higher education to support holistic wellbeing.
The event began with a session on Wednesday night open to the surrounding community at the Elon Community Church as part of the Power + Place Collaborative. The two facilitators, Visitor Udoewa and Savannah Keith Gress from the Liberation Collective, led a session utilizing social presencing theater. Participants physically expressed how they felt stuck as individuals and moved throughout the space to get unstuck as a community. Insights from this evening together will be put together in a report shared with the community this spring.
The opening keynote presented by kinesthetic practitioner and researcher Andrea Mecquel and design and engineering professor Rafe Steinhauer showed how we can design with our bodies in mind. “It’s not as important how we sense information. The essence is how we interpret it and integrate it into our bodies,” said Mecquel.
They led the group in an interoception workshop connecting what our bodies sense and what we think in our minds. One participant noted that “I leaned in, closed my eyes and I realized I feel so many more things with senses I don’t usually use. I felt pressure but I underestimated some of the things in the process.”
Tyson Glover ’17, who was a founding student catalyst for the Center for Design Thinking, has been a part of every Design Forge conference, first as a student and then as a guest and supporting staff. This year he found himself in front of the podium presenting his own experience on intentionally designing physical spaces, such as classrooms, to foster the engaged learning.
Glover recently opened the Shift Retail Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, a place for all students to develop an idea from start to finish and present it to the community. He enjoyed, “creating a space where everyone was welcomed and failure is encouraged” and hopes to incorporate the success into discovering what the future classroom of higher education looks like.
To conclude the first day, Shanice Webb was the HealthEU wellness speaker at an event open to the rest of the Elon community. From there, participants went to one of six different breakout sessions focusing on a different aspect of wellness according to Elon’s HealthEU initiative.
On the final day, two colleagues, Dawn Bohn, a professor of food science and Saadeddine Shehab, director of the Siebel Center for Design, shared how they combined disciplines to redesign a capstone course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bohn received some negative feedback from her course in 2018 and united with Shebab to incorporate more human-centered design thinking practices to increase her students’ engagement.
Two presenters, Liz Chen and Melissa Eggleston first met at the Design Forge conference two years ago and have been working together ever since. This year they presented their joint research on trauma-informed design and how to account for trauma in research. They recommend having counseling resources available for participants and being prepared for anything.
“Whenever you ask an open-ended question, you need to be ready to hear the worst possible answer back,” said Eggleston.
Eugene Korsunskiy closed the conference with an uplifting keynote about designing with joy in mind. “My thesis is that joy is an important catalyst of rigorous work or teaching and learning, and it plays a critical role in liberation,” Korsunskiy says.
He ended the session in the same way he ends all of his classes: a moment of zen. By reflecting on everything that has happened and socking it all in, everyone was able to leave the conference feeling better than when they started.
More information about the conference, including recordings from each session can be found on the Elon by Design website under Design Forge 2024.
