Educating for innovation 2024 report

educatingfor innovation

© 2024 Aalto Design Factory

research team

Tua Björklund

Vikki Eriksson

Sara Figueiredo

Floris van der Marel

graphic design

Anna Kuukka

photographs DFGN community

ISBN: 978-952-64-9648-1 (printed publication)

ISBN: 978-952-64-9649-8 (electronic publication)

Introduction

Foreword

Innovation and creativity top the list for organizational, educational and national goals alike. We live in an innovation economy 1 and are in acute need of sustainable solutions to the issues we face in our societies and planet. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that the World Economic Forum survey² found that the need for creativity increased most of all skills. Yet already a few years ago, more than 3 out of 4 CEOs reported struggling to find the creativity and innovation skills they need3 .

Higher education is seeking to rise to the challenge. With origins in medical education, problem-based learning has spread wide as a student-centered pedagogical approach to supporting interdisciplinary learning4. Designbased education takes a similar approach with an added focus on creating: applying theory to creating artifacts, systems and solutions 5 In the context of learning development and innovation skills, both problem-based and design-based education are often organized in a project-based manner. Typically, this means learners exploring different representations and alternative solutions to real challenges, iterating and interacting in teams to produce an outcome.

However, balancing different needs and varying resources is not easy in practice, and educators face a wide array of choices within such active learning approaches. Indeed, there are perhaps as many ways to organize problem-, design- and project-based learning as there are educators.

In this report, we take stock of the pedagogical choices and collaboration practices implemented to make educating for innovation work,

hoping to shed light on different tactics in different contexts. Rather than offering a turnkey solution that inevitably fails to meet specific needs, we benchmark current practices in project-based learning across the globe to inspire and support local learning and experimentation. Together, we can learn from one another and co-create effective ways to foster the skills and capabilities we need for the future.

Prof. Tua Björklund Director of the

Aalto Design Factory

Dr Vikki Eriksson Head of Research

MA Sara Figueiredo Researcher and DFGN Strategist

MA Anna Kuukka Design Coordinator

Dr Floris van der Marel Researcher and Designer

References:

1 R.K. Sawyer (2006). Educating for innovation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 1(1) 41- 48.

2 World Economic Forum (2023). Future of Jobs Report. Based on a survey study of 803 companies globally.

3 pwc 20th CEO survey (2017). The talent challenge: Harnessing the power of human skills in the machine age. Based on an interview study of 1,379 CEOs globally.

4 A. Aarup Jensen, D. Stentoft & O. Ravn (2019). Interdisciplinarity and Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education: Research and perspectives from Aalborg University. In Innovation and change in professional education, 18.

5 S. M. Gómez Puente, M. van Eijck & W. Jochems (2011) Towards characterising design-based learning in engineering education: a review of the literature, European Journal of Engineering Education, 36(2), 137149.

The study

This report is based on interviews with 54 educators across the globe. Conducted by Aalto University Design Factory researchers in 2024, the hour-long interviews explored different practices in problem-, design- and projectbased learning used by the interviewees in the institutions of 33 Design Factories.

Most interviewees worked as directors, professors or lecturers in their institution, often having multiple roles. Their experience in higher education ranged from none to over 30 years, representing a variety of career pathways and roles in relation to learning and education.

The interviewees consisted of an equal number of women and men who came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and multidisciplinary combinations.

27 women 27 men

~700 years of collective teaching experience

Human Resource

Management

Public Relations

Marketing Management

Business & Management

Information & Knowledge

Management

Business

Analytics

Pedagogy

Psychology

Humanities & Education

Social Science

Computer Science

Chemistry

Biomedical

Human-Computer Interaction

Graphic

Engineering & Technology

Electrical

Math

Industrial

Management

Industrial

Design & Arts

Architecture

Multimedia

Design Factories are…

Each Design Factory has its own flavor to innovation and co-creation. However, their culture and practices typically emphasize collaboration and hands-on experimentation, with at least one of the three complementary foci: interdisciplinary learning in student programs, industry-academia collaboration to enhance real-world application of learnings, and fostering entrepreneurship. Since the founding of the first Design Factory in 2008 in Finland, Design Factories have grown into a global network of 39 (and counting) platforms. For more information, check out dfgn.org!

Interdisciplinary learning

Interviewees mentioned the importance of bringing students from different disciplines (and cultures) together to challenge disciplinary assumptions and increase innovation potential. Some Design Factories were open to all faculties, bringing together up to 17 different disciplines. More often, however, specific disciplines were brought together, such as different design disciplines, or design, business, and engineering, or design, occupational therapy, and nurses.

Industry collaboration

Industry collaboration was often highlighted as a way to provide opportunities to students to better understand how their learned skills, knowledge, and abilities connect to real-world situations. For example, some mentioned making technology more relevant to society through their programs.

Entrepreneurship

Several Design Factories have dedicated resources to support applying for funds, business development, and product manufacturing guidance. They perceived their Design Factory also as an incubator supporting venture creation.

Participating Design Factories in the Global Network

Design Factories interviewed for the study number of interviewees, 54 total

1. Aalto Design Factory

Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

2. Sino-Finnish Centre

Tongji University, Shanghai, China

3. Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

4. DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub

Duoc UC, Santiago de Chile, Chile

5. CERN Ideasquare

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

6. Design Factory Korea

Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

7. Porto Design Factory

Porto Polytechnic, Porto, Portugal

8. Future Design Factory

NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands

9. METU Design Factory

Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

10. Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá

PUC Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia

11. NYC Design Factory

Pace University, NewYork, USA

12. RTU Design Factory

Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

13. UPV Design Factory

Universidad Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

14. Design Factory NZ

Wintec, Hamilton, New Zealand

15. Warsaw Design Factory

Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

16. Fusion Point

ESADE, Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya and IED Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

17. Kyoto Design Lab

Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, Japan

18. Cali Design Factory

PUC Javeriana, Cali, Colombia

19. inno.space Design Factory Mannheim

Hochschule Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

20. Sandbox

University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

21. Design Factory @SIT

Singapore Institute of Technology

Singapore

22. HAMK Design Factory

Häme University of Applied Sciences. Hämeenlinna, Finland

23. St. John’s University Design Factory

St. John’s University, New York City, USA

24. Hannam Design Factory

Hannam University, Deajeon, South Korea

25. Design Factory Shenkar

Shenkar College, Tel Aviv, Israel

26. Oper.Space

University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

27. Design Factory London

Brunel University London, United Kingdom

28. nandin Innovation Centre

ANSTO, Sydney, Australia

29. Design Factory Aveiro

PCI - Creative Science Park Aveiro Region

Aveiro, Portugal

30. Viikki Food Design Factory

University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

31. VILNIUS TECH "LinkMenų fabrikas"

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania

32. Design Factory Pforzheim

Hochschule Pforzheim, Pforzheim, Germany

33. Design Factory Stuttgart

ARENA2036 , Stuttgart, Germany

34. iCubo UDD

Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago de Chile, Chile

35. Design Factory Nantes

Université de Nantes, Nantes, France

36. SEIUNISA

University of Salerno (UNISA)

Salerno, Italy

37. Design Factory Manchester

Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom

38. Forge Design Factory

TUS Limerick School of Art and Design, Limerick, Ireland

39. Design Factory Birmingham Birmingham, United Kingdom

Prioritizing capabilities for 2027 & beyond

Reported emphases in design, problem and project-based teaching relative to the World Economic Forum reported top 10 priorities for workforce development initiatives*.

“ We have to stop educating and preparing students for current positions. We have to prepare them for future positions that we can’t describe yet.

‒ Ton de Winter, Future Design Factory, Netherlands

“ We need to foster intellectual curiosity, asking questions, being curious, being interested, being excited about novelty, wanting to know more. And to counterbalance that with critical thinking, helping students to go back and forth between these two steps.

‒ Luca Iandoli, St. John's Design Factory, United States

*World Economic Forum (2023). Future of Jobs Report. Reskilling and upskilling priorities in the next 5 years, based on 803 companies across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions.

14% Empathy & active listening

Empathy, building rapport, & approaching diverse perspectives, with an open mind were essential for the multinational, multicultural & multilingual collaboration required in innovation efforts.

14%

Resilience, flexibility & agility

Resilience, grit, adaptability, being comfortable with ambiguity & uncertainty were the most common emphases across interviewsachieving creativity & innovation go hand-in-hand with changes & failures.

11% Design & user experience

Many educators focused on teaching the design process, design thinking, user-centered design or speculative design as pathways to innovation, & emphasized taking the users’ perspective.

11%

Leadership & social influence

Learning agency & taking initiative, as well as motivating & convincing diverse collaborators, were key goals. more prominently then in specific projects & tasks within courses.

Innovation was front and center in almost all goals, in addition to which many educators also targeted creativity overall, exploration, & creative confidence.

9% Analytical thinking

Educators highlighted fostering critical thinking & systems thinking in particular to enable future-oriented thinking.

Curiosity, being openminded & being willing to venture outside of one’s comfort zone & learning to learn were seen as fundamental in designbased learning.

9% Sustainability & responsibility

Although sustainability & responsibility did not make the list for organizations in the World Economic Forum study, educators highlighted understanding impact & responsible innovation as a key competence they were aiming to foster.

Some courses aimed to educate AI as a tool

9% Motivation & self-awareness

Self-discovery, finding one’s own way & understanding one’s own role were often combined with the autonomy & collaboration typical in this type of education.

Problem crafting

Students come first

Across all interviews, one principle was clear in project-, design- and problem-based learning: students come first . Everything in such education is for their benefit. When collaborating with industry, educators were committed to ensuring that students are not perceived as cheap subcontractors but as central figures and, in some cases, also involved in the problem design process. This also influences how courses are crafted and how problems are scoped and tailored.

In some courses, students select from a range of problems provided by industry, empowering them to choose issues they are passionate about and fostering deeper engagement and ownership. In other courses, students identify industrial partners and collaboratively design the problems, enhancing their real-world experience and networking skills. Some courses also allow students to identify and define the problems themselves, encouraging creativity and independent problem-solving.

Regardless of the way students and projects are matched, crafting problems relevant to students and suitable for multidisciplinary collaboration is a key consideration.

Real challenges motivate

“ We started with challenges created by our teaching staff who have experience in technology transfer, and had worked in companies or startups ‒ so we had the knowledge internally how to create realistic challenges. But then, we started working with hospitals and companies, and we realized that motivation, interest, and final results of the projects were better with an external stakeholder because they perceive it as real.

‒ Ramon Bragos, Fusion Point, Spain

Empowered students are the best students

“ Having a robust industry partnership is highly advantageous, because they won’t scrutinize the process. This CEO that we worked with agreed on the importance of prioritizing the learning outcomes for students, while allowing considerable flexibility in the project's execution thereafter. This approach not only reinforces the students' commitment to the project but also enhances their performance. When industry partners extend respect and autonomy to students, it fosters a sense of empowerment, leading them to exceed expectations. We don’t need to remind the students of their responsibilities ‒ they will naturally go above and beyond.

‒ Agnes Xue, Design Factory @SIT, Singapore

The spark between projects partners & students

“ In the Product Development Project, sponsors come pitch their projects to students. This way students can see what kind of people the sponsors are and they can explain everything in their own words, answering the students’ questions. When you read something from a paper, it's always a challenge to fully understand it. It's really important that they have the chance to meet the people and talk to them. Sometimes it may work the other way around too, something that looks super interesting on paper may, after meeting the people, make them realise that no way, this is not what we want ‒ and you’d rather realize this from the get-go than only when the project has already started.

‒ Kalevi Ekman, Aalto Design Factory, Finland

“ We encourage students to look for the companies themselves, because it is part of their learning process. I could do it, but it’s not the same, it’s not their process. It is very interesting for them when they find their own partners. Normally, I step in during the last part of the process, because I have to handle the formal agreements with the university. I write the agreements and take care of all the processing at the university. But the conversation and outreach are done by the students.

‒ Fanny Collado, UPV Design Factory, Spain

Students identify industrial partners & design the problem

“ I asked students to identify a problem in their neighborhood. I said, okay, you are living in a city, village or dormitory and for sure you have some small everyday problems, or maybe your family has some problems. I start this challenge by having them identifying some small social problems. Once they have identified a problem, I ask them to brainstorm many solutions. Depending on the course, I then ask them to describe the problem along with a number of possible solutions.

‒ Piotr Palka, Warsaw Design Factory, Poland

Students design the problem

Students select the problem brief

“ We usually have five or six stakeholders each term, with different project briefs. The stakeholders present their projects, typically offering two or three different topics each. The students then select what they are interested in, or sometimes they reject the projects entirely and we say goodbye, because no one is interested in your subject. That's a unique aspect of our processes and course objectives, and it’s why we have five or six meetings with the stakeholder before they meet with students, to help scope suitable topics.

‒ Arzu Gönenç Sorguç, METU Design Factory, Turkey

Problem characteristic

Designing problems for courses is one of the first challenges in problem-based learning. What makes a problem effective? What elements should it include or exclude? While there is no perfect formula for problem-based education, certain essential characteristics were repeated across interviews. Although it may be difficult or even impossible to meet all these criteria, they provide a checklist to consider when crafting challenges:

1 Crafting problems to provide room for exploration

When collaborating with companies, there must be an effort in challenging students with complex problems that don't lead to obvious solutions. While this approach may result in less polished outcomes, it fosters deeper learning and growth.

Offer freedom to students

When the problem triggers more autonomy and direct interaction with stakeholders, students are more motivated, leading to better results and higher grades. The goal is to promote ownership and build confidence.

Prioritize student learning over project outcomes

Mirroring the real world with a manageable scope

Consider prototypable physical or digital components

Develop complex problems

Challenges should be complex and multifaceted to support large teams, enabling students to address challenges through diverse sets of skills, tasks and angles. Companies are advised to provide broad challenges, ensuring the project offers a meaningful learning experience rather than simple outsourcing.

The problem should allow for prototype creation, enabling students to gain hands-on experience and understand the process of building something.

Align problem feasibility with course objectives

Balance problem specificity & flexibility

The balance between specificity and flexibility is delicate. Broad problems can enable students to explore solutions beyond the partners’ predictions and expectations. Although broader challenges often result in insights and concepts rather than concrete solutions, this approach was often considered valuable.

The problem should be feasible for the team size and composition, aligned with the course duration, and in line with the number of credits allocated for the course.

Ensure problem relevance to partners

Projects should be chosen based on high interest or significant pain points for the partners to promote their commitment, active engagement and investment in the process and outcomes.

Integrate sustainability into the problem

Create forward-looking problems

3 Ensuring relevance all

around

Anticipate future trends to create forward-looking challenges that provide students with more freedom and space for creative thinking instead of focusing on immediate solutions. It can also relieve pressure and encourage more bold thinking.

Design problems that go beyond disciplinary silos

Including sustainability concerns in problems was highlighted by multiple interviewees to encourage thinking about long-term impact and develop key competences for the future. Sustainability was also popular amongst students - though finding suitable partners could sometimes be challenging.

In problems tailored with public service, the emphasis shifts from profitability to meeting users' needs and promoting the general good. Many educators valued developing students’ social awareness.

Incorporate social awareness into problem development

Problems should require an interdisciplinary approach, avoiding those that are overly technical, highly specific, or confined to a single field, mimicking real world challenges that students will encounter after graduation.

The problem should be broad enough to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling all team members to contribute with their respective expertise to the learning process.

Craft problems suited for multidisciplinary teams

Navigating the process of designing problems

Tailoring problems from an educator perspective

Crafting effective problems is a balancing act that requires understanding various problem characteristics and their associated challenges. Learning goals played a key role in determining the right fit.

“The brief is always focused on how we can build competency, how we can incorporate new design thinking or design-related methods to enhance their practice, and how we can apply methods, like prototyping, to facilitate communication across diverse disciplines.

‒ Anita Kocsis, Design Factory Melbourne, Australia

Most educators were using fairly open-ended challenges in their courses and programs.

“ One of the challenges we face in the Product Development Project course when seeking new assignments from companies is that their interests do not always perfectly align with ours as a university. There is an ideal brief that is open enough. As I often say, if a company knows exactly what needs to be done step by step, then we as a university or as a student course are not the right partner. Then they should approach a professional design consultancy or engineering consultancy because they are professionals, they know what to do. Our challenges should be more open, so that even the companies don't know exactly what they are looking for or what the problem is exactly.

‒ Kalevi Ekman, Aalto Design Factory, Finland

However, having too broad and open challenges might not lead to the best learning in a short course. Open-ended problems can also lead to ambiguity, lack of direction and potential friction within student teams. Even in more narrow scopes, one thing many educators were looking for was incorporating user needs already at this early stage, going beyond technical aspects to the underlying issues.

“ Sometimes the topics are not so well defined. Since the project lasts for six months, if the scope is too large, it is quite difficult for the students to focus on something they can prototype, and it takes time for them to find the research question or the problem. For me, it is always a trade-off between not being only an engineering problem, and knowing exactly what we want to do, where they only have to design a prototype and test. We want the students to conduct user studies and propose something new, but it should be wellenough defined to be done in six months.

‒ Toinon Vigier, Design Factory Nantes, France

Power practices:

Pre-problem scoping

& brainstorming Brainstorm the content & direction of the problem with fellow educators to create more effective problems.

“ We want to explore the options beforehand, because we do not want to give them a challenge that is impossible. Of course, they will create solutions we did not think about, and that is expected, but we want to ensure the challenge is feasible. So, we try to first do the exercise ourselves, to see if it works and how it plays out. We like to experience the exercises and the challenge we set for students ourselves, even if only with limited time and experience. This helps to scope challenges that are attainable, but also challenging. Also, when students say something is impossible, it helps us to know it’s not and yet empathize with them when they face difficulties, so we can guide them better.

‒ Mireia Sierra, Fusion Point, Spain

Layered problems

Start with broad, human-centered concepts & progressively narrow down to specific, actionable guidelines.

“ We tend to use human-centered design as an overarching idea. We keep it not too technical since not all students are designers, and not too theoretical either.

Human-centered design is our starting point. We encourage looking at the big picture first and then narrowing it down. For example, McDonald's had an interesting challenge which was Happy Meal toys for the future, making them sustainable. The overarching brief was very high level. The secondary brief was considering the restrictions like avoiding certain materials and exploring alternatives, whether it is a physical toy, a digital one, or something completely different. We wanted a flexible approach, like a river. You can't stop it, but you can guide it. So we don't want to restrict people too much so they don't innovate, but they still need to be kept in the barriers to ensure the usefulness of the project. We emphasize starting with a big picture idea, blue sky thinking, and then come back down.

‒ Ryan Smith, Design Factory London, UK

Embracing complexity

Go beyond traditional design thinking to address substantial, real-world challenges like the SDGs.

“ Given that IdeaSquare is a facility at CERN dedicated to stimulating the minds of young innovators, a challenge within the philosophy and methodologies of IdeaSquare Planet mirrors the characteristics of a complex problem. Such problems typically lack straightforward solutions, require balancing various trade-offs, and often resist a clear definition. This is similar to the nature of the issues addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are inherently complex and cannot be easily resolved through a design thinking approach. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for them. This is what I consider to be a truly meaningful challenge in our context. In practising i2Planet, we create narratives for

students that encapsulate complex problems in a manageable way, and we engage these young innovators in a process of selfdiscovery to understand and reason through these complexity issues while developing the necessary individual and team skills for it.

‒ Pablo Garcia Tello, CERN IdeaSquare, Switzerland

Tailoring problems with sponsors

Aligning industry and university needs in problem design requires negotiation and compromise. Initiating collaborations can be difficult, but experienced partners make it easier. Though industry partners may start out skeptical, they often come to value students' innovative insights, which enhances their ability to co-design problems effectively.

Balancing partner requirements with course feasibility requires setting realistic problems that align with timelines and learning objectives, with enough direction to start exploring the issue.

“ For example, a challenge like ‘How can we use this screw with a sensor in it?’ is not a good challenge because does not help the team to properly scope the project. Instead, something like 'How can we use drones in facility management services to inspect hardto-reach areas, ensuring greater security for people?' is more specific. It provides better framing for research and incorporates the values that the company wants to foster into this innovation, such as security in this case. This way the team is not lost and has a clear direction to start with, which then can lead to other directions. Without this clarity, the team might spend the first part of the program confused, asking each other ‘What is this about, we don't understand really what do they want’, which leads to more time spent into digging into what the company would like to know rather than what the challenge itself is about.

‒ Matteo Vignoli, Oper.Space, Italy

Power practices:

Problem summary

Prevent misalignment & manage expectations by summarising your problem into one concise sentence.

“ We mitigate this risk of misaligned expectations by including a problem statement brief in the contracts we sign with partners. In this brief, we ask them to describe their challenge in one sentence. We aim to ensure that it is sized down to a single issue, so we don't end up discovering another hidden challenge inside later on, which we might have missed due to our excitement about having this challenge. We tend to think about users and user-centered design, so when we hear about user, and we get excited and think wow, cool, we have our partner, we have a common understanding. And in some instances that was not the case, sometimes they have some additional sentences after everything about user. And we assume it is background information or another layer to give to students. But for the partners this additional layer was crucial and they want us to address those aspects and they expect us to deliver on all of it.

‒ Yana Halas, Sandbox, Estonia

Structured problem boxes Collaborate with industry to define problems using structured frameworks.

“ First, we asked the challenge givers to fill out three problem boxes: what is the problem, what facts prove that this is a problem, and what proof will show that the problem is solved. This ensures they fully understand the problem and don’t just describe the desired end solution in one sentence. In those three problem boxes, there’s no mention of the solution, just a clear definition of the problem, the facts that support it, and the criteria to measure how well the solution works. This process helps us ensure that students receive an appropriately defined problem at the start, allowing us to guide them through the course and programs according to these process steps.

‒

Elīna

Miķelsone, RTU Design Factory, Latvia

Re-scoping briefs, prioritizing problems over technology push Refine project directions to focus on fundamental issues rather than technology-driven solutions.

“ We were working with a company that wanted to improve collaboration within their R&D team. They initially wanted to focus on a specific technology, like powder compression. However during a longer workshop with most of the R&D teams, they agreed that giving the students straight away this technology

would be misleading, it would lead the team to spend weeks studying the technology. But that was not the point of the project, the objective of the project is having people to collaborate better. So we started from people, from how they collaborate, how they look for information. The technology, is not part of the challenge, it's part of the context. So we had to restructure the challenge to focus on the collaboration. This way they know that they need to start from the R&D people, but then they can use the context of this technology. So instead of starting from there, they could use that as a context and focus on the real objective of enhancing collaboration.

‒

Matteo

Vignoli, Oper.Space, Italy

Dynamic redefinition

Use 'How Might We' statements to sharpen the focus of problem briefs with the industry partner.

“ Our industry partner actually gave us too much detail, so I asked them to come with ‘How Might We’ statements in the latest iteration because they are so deeply involved with the problem. The head of the design team, he's been making toys for 20 years so he would probably get too granular. I just said, ‘Could you put this in three How Might We statements?’ That worked well, one How Might We was related to digital, one to generation alpha, and one to sustainability. Otherwise, they were giving our students everything what they received from their corporate client.

‒ Philip Rose, Hannam Design Factory, South Korea

Tailoring problems to and with students

Many interviewees discussed the importance of matching the problem complexity to the students' academic levels and the course length. For students earlier in their studies, using concrete problems with clear guidelines can enhance their learning experience by providing a structured approach to tackling the given problem.

“ In working with undergraduate students, I realized the need for a narrow problem scope. For example, instead of starting with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number six of clean water and sanitation, I choose something more specific, like designing a way to deliver water quality information to a particular population. In my experience, defining the problem within a short period proved challenging for first- and second-year university students. If they start with the larger SDG, they could spend more than half the semester just learning how to narrow things down. So for this type of student population and the one-semester format of 14 weeks, I found that a narrow problem scope works best.

‒ Andreea Cotoranu, NYC Design Factory, United States

“ If we have shorter projects, a few weeks long, you have less time to actually be able to go out, iterate and reframe. Although they still do it on a much smaller scale, we give them a more narrow scope. Because in one week, you cannot possibly explore all of the different problems related to water and sanitation, for example. On the other hand, our longest program is eight months, so they have a lot more time to explore a broad range of problems, return to problem statements and opportunity areas, and reframe. This is often a blessing and a curse because they have a lot of freedom, which can also be overwhelming. There will always be data you don’t have, don’t have access to, or don't have time to get, so you must make decisions with missing information. And that is one of the most challenging elements.

‒

Catarina

Batista, CERN Ideasquare, Switzerland

Similarly, problems can be adapted to match to students’ backgrounds. Alternatively, when the disciplinary composition of student teams isn't known in advance, problems can be customized or designed to appeal to groups that might be interested in the challenge later.

“The question to the industry is: we need a project that involves, electronics, technology, HRM, or healthcare, because our students in our Design Factory are specialized in those areas. We need to find a challenge, that creates a win-win situation for both sides, one that allows the students to earn 30 credits at the end, while also helping the client with the knowledge the students will gain. On the other hand the type of projects we get from the industry, sometimes pose challenges. For example, we have the Wadden Sea, where circular plastics are a major issue. But addressing that challenge requires students from circular plastics, from chemistry, or related fields who understand what are the PFAS problems in the Wadden Sea. If I do not have those students, we cannot effectively address the issue. So, it is a balancing act between the two.

‒ Eric Voigt, Future Design Factory, Netherlands

“ We are always measuring what we are doing with the fact we have an interdisciplinary group of students (which changes in makeup each semester). Sometimes, when we start the conversation, we do not yet know the mix and disciplines of those students. We usually begin the scoping of the project before we know who is enrolled in the course. In this case, the project was about security and safety, and it came from a team that works primarily in digital security; we went to our IT department and made an extra effort to engage that group, given the nature of the project, which might have been of more interest to that group. It is always a backward and forward process because we do not know the exact makeup of those student groups. But when we finalize the project question, we always ask ourselves, will we be able to reach a conclusion in a 15-week course? Are all students going to be able to participate fully?

‒ Margi Moore, Design Factory NZ, New Zealand

Power practices:

Problem clarity enhancement with students

Break down complex issues into manageable tasks through multi-layered activities to support students’ problem understanding.

“ Each activity was designed to help students gain more clarity from the brief. For examples, the end user and empathy activities were intended to reflect how a chosen staff member would experience that brief. As they defined a problem, we explored what that big topic really meant. Is it about the future of work? Is it about feeling content at work? Is it about having career progression opportunities? Or is it about feeling connected to your colleagues? With each layer, we kept bringing it back to the core of the brief.

‒ Carol Azzam Mackay, nandin Innovation Centre, Australia

Scoping problems with student perspectives

Include students in teaching teams to incorporate their perspectives in problem scoping. project direction.

“ When our team identifies issues, we rely on our close work with students and the unique insights from colleagues who are still pursuing their bachelor's, master's or doctoral studies. They understand the key challenges within the university. We discuss these perspectives together, collaborating to reach a consensus on the best course of action.

‒ Greta

Expert insights & geographical focus

Provide expert talks to inspire students, encouraging them to choose a familiar geographical area to narrow down & effectively address the challenge.

“ In the Challenge-Based Innovation (CBI) course, teachers or students typically review the technologies and consider which application field these technologies might fit into. It is often related to health, so one of the challenges they propose is good health and well-being, which is one of the SDGs. Students then generally contact health experts to learn more about the chosen field and narrow down their focus. But also, another way to narrow down the challenge is to choose a specific

Markūnaitė, VILNIUS TECH "LinkMenų fabrikas", Lithuania

geographical area to focus on because they are not going to solve a global problem all at once. One time I remember we advised that it is better to choose an area that at least one team member is familiar with, so they have touchpoints and better understanding. This gave really good results.

‒ Laura Wirtavuori, CERN Ideasquare, Switzerland

Discipline-specific tailoring

Customize problems to suit various disciplines & directions.

“ In the Global Design Challenge – Ford, a collab led by Design Factory London and Hannam Design Factory, I appreciate how the client project was scoped with three distinct directions. One direction is more design-oriented, another is more suitable for a business solution, and the third is more technology-focused. Offering multiple directions allows students from different academic majors to engage effectively. For example, a challenge centered on a business plan might not fit well with the humancentered design curriculum, but incorporating a design or technology component makes it more suitable. This flexibility in presenting industry challenges with various directions is highly valuable.

‒ Andreea Cotoranu, NYC Design Factory, United States

Artificial Intelligence as a tool to bridge disciplines

Use artificial intelligence to help students without a technical background understand & work through technical problems.

“ Many of the topics from our interdisciplinary semester course are more technically oriented. As a result, people coming from communication or marketing backgrounds often have more difficulty asking the right questions or fully grasping the concepts, especially in the initial understanding and observation phase. This semester, we tried using AI tools as homework, allowing students to experiment with chatbots and learn about the topics in a fun way, helping them gain more background and information.

‒ David Reichert, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Encouraging collaboration

Offering value beyondstudent engagement

Typically the problems worked on in problembased courses and programs came from external collaboratorslarge and small companies, cities, public organizations, research institutes, and so forth. The learning experiences created different types of value to these partners.

“ Traditionally, our partner’s audience is an older generation but they have been quite interested in a project with our students to see what the current generation would be looking for in terms of an experience. They know they may not get highly polished final presentations, but rather that they will get really nice insights into what students are thinking about.

‒ Timothy Whitehead,Design Factory Birmingham, United Kingdom

Collaboration with students provides access to a younger generation’s perspectives & insights.

Offering a challenge as part of a course is a more affordable way to gather initial insights & identify possible opportunities than allocating business or human resources from within the partner organization.

Capacity to innovate

Recognise & explore societal impact

Novel groundwork for future intellectual property or patents may result from student work.

“ It's a community of stakeholders and experts with whom we've been working with over the years, and we are trying to leverage and further develop the relationship we have with them. We call it Fusion Community, and we have a person dedicated to developing this community. Her role is really to develop, curate, and foster the network of stakeholders with whom we work.

‒ Laura Bellorini, Fusion Point, Spain

Partners become part of a community of partners and experts managed & grown by the hosting Design Factory.

“ We choose partners who are really open to innovation, and therefore are looking for new ideas. Also, partners who are interested in working with students, because they understand that they could represent future human resources.

‒ Mariaelisa Nappi, SEIUNISA, Italy

Partners may have an opportunity to grow their own communities by recruiting students.

Community building

Partners are able to explore challenges that have a societal impact irrespective of their core organizational focus.

Partners are able to take part in training or networking events hosted at & by the Design Factory. This includes taking part In existing course sessions & having events tailored to specific partner needs.

Finding industry collaborators

A network of educational organizations can attract stakeholders through various strategies. Participants shared the main ones they found useful.

Local & partner research hubs

Internal networks such as the DFGN & SUGAR networks

Current industry trends or needs

“ Our theme connects to the use of big data. This is something that companies are really trying to explore, so it's very relevant to them. We just needed to identify their need, and based on that, we were able to craft our programs

‒ Elīna Miķelsone, RTU Design Factory, Latvia

Leveraging what you have

Individual networks of faculty & staff

“ In the early days of our Design Factory, we leveraged our university’s different research institutes, collaborators, partnerships teams, business development, and industry engagement teams. Industry partners might approach the university and go, ‘Hey, we wanna do something like this,’ and this project trickled through the university systems and landed on our door. Equally, we would also approach various institutes and groups within the university and seek projects. For example, our student teams have worked with MedTech Victoria (located at our university) on new product development of medical assistive technologies for people living with disabilities.

‒ Aaron Down, Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne, Australia

University contact such as development research

University contact points development & research units

“ At the kick-off, we ran a session introducing the whole design thinking process in an hour, so that everyone in attendance could experience it. This year we had participants from industry, who participated in the kickoff to understand how they could collaborate with us.

‒ Scarlett Spiegeler Castaneda, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Events such as project kick-offs & hackathons

“ In one case the students found a union with which they wanted to collaborate. Working students realized that there is a problem in the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh with many of the workers getting mesothelioma. It’s something you can get as a result of asbestos contamination. The students found the union for workers, themselves..

‒ Mireia Sierra, Fusion Point, Spain

Students recruiting so that they can find partners that inspire them

Word of mouth such as verbal endorsements from past students, industry collaborators

Design Factory tours

“ We worked with a council, which was exploring the future of libraries, and had multiple libraries to consider. The leadership team were willing to commit to this project but they needed buy-in from the staff who would be in direct connect with our students and who would work with us during the project. The best way for them to achieve that was for us to run a quick design sprint their team. This got them on board quickly.

‒ Elna Fourie, Design Factory NZ, New Zealand

Online platforms so that events & projects can be promoted

General & customised training sessions so that potential partners experience the value first hand

Growing what you need

Tailored interaction

Developing industry engagement that works for your course

When working with real-world clients and industries during project-based courses, it's essential to manage partner interactions thoughtfully. Try to avoid overwhelming partners with requests from multiple teams or individual students. Regular interaction, such as a halfway show and networking events offer valuable opportunities for students and sponsors to connect. Although physical contact points may be limited, maintaining digital availability ensures continuous engagement and effective partnership throughout the course. Throughout the network a range of student-sponsor interaction frameworks exist.

Multiple sponsors, multiple benefits

“ We are doing product development projects for HAMK and Forssa campus students, so information and communication technology with a bio-economy focus and sustainable development students. We have this problem of how to improve the condition of this lake in Hämeenlinna. There

were two sponsors for the same problem: the local conservation association and an organization that deals nationwide with every lake in Finland. So, there's a multi-stakeholder perspective that this is very important from many levels to tackle this problem. I very much liked their interaction because they came to all these meetings with the students as a team. In the end, they were also present together and gave feedback from the two perspectives, basically the national and the local perspectives, on how the student projects advanced. What surprised us was that for this product development, another challenge was electronics. There was another association whose role was to manage the recycling of electrical waste in Finland. This association was also physically present in the first and last meeting, as we had hoped, but after the project was finished, they actually asked all student teams to come forward and told them how important this was. He gave a small prize and said he would be in contact and hire one of the students to implement this project in their association. And that really happened. This sponsor really amazed all of us and made them feel they're doing critical work and their work has really significant meaning for this association.

‒ Jari Jussila, HAMK Design Factory, Finland

Industry interaction can motivate students because it's real, but harsh feedback can also crush a team. Ensuring teams have the means to make sense of the feedback is essential after student-industry interactions.

Sponsors incorporating the project into their own project management system.

Multiple formal planned interaction points planned as part of the project. Can be face-to-face & digital.

Few planned meet-ups with additional face-to-face sessions as needed.

“ People who work in the real world are not teachers, and they are not used to, for example, giving feedback in an 'academic way', so to say. They will be honest. So we had teams who presented their idea to the brand representative, and the representative said, 'No, because it doesn't go with what we do', and the student team had to start all over. Even though sometimes it's frustrating, they have learned more because failures teach us way better than successes, especially when working for someone honest. And I've seen whole teams whose ideas have been rejected, and then the second idea they develop gets complimented. Through this process, they cried, were angry, and frustrated ‒ and then had a massive success in the end! Those are the best ways to learn because they remember how bad the first proposal was, how they came to the end, and how much they have improved.

‒ Catalina Oyarzun, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub, Chile

Not all interaction is easy, or good. Placing students at the centre of planning can help navigate difficult situations.

Limited planned meetups with additional communication throughout the project (email & WhatsApp).

Limited planned meet-ups with sponsors invited to all course events, lectures & workshops.

Industrial collaboration might limit the flexibility that is needed by the course and the students. Consider the different options that will support student learning the most.

“ We decided a few years ago not to collaborate with industry during the yearlong projects. We found the companies would often prefer students to work on something specific, and so it wasn’t really design thinking, it was incremental innovation or process improvement.

‒ Paul O’Toole, iCubo UDD, Chile

Constraining creative freedom of teachers & students

Mismatch between project type & industry

A mismatch between the project type and partner may impact the viability of the relationship. If different things are valued, student learning must be prioritized.

“ What is usually very difficult when you're working with a company or an organization is to find a common point between the value that you want to create with your solution and the value, of course, for the client.

‒ Manuela Procopio, Fusion Point, Spain

Sponsors only present at project kick-offs & at the final presentations.

Fewer, or less structured contact points

Building a pool of externalcollaborators

Working with a university helps build a vibrant community among partners, fostering collaboration and shared learning. These communities are a valuable benefit for participating partners and can give Design Factories a strategic tool to recruit new sponsors and encourage long term engagement. Many interviewees reported creating lighter forms of interaction to get to know the community of educators and students as a starting point.

Empowering students to make the connection

Recruitment offered another angle to cultivate relationships, with immediate mutual benefits for students, educators and companies alike - yet building longer term relationships that could lead to partnerships. In addition to faculty organizing meet-and-greet types of events, students can take the lead in building relationships. For example, students developed a matchmaking event to complement the gala of a project-based course in Stuttgart:

“ We talked with our student assistants on how the end-of-the-course gala could be brought to the next level, and they came up with the idea of “Tindustry”. This is a reimagined job fair, with a few-minute 1-to1 interviews between students and industry. Like Tinder! The students know that it can’t be boring if students created it and students are moderating it, and it helps our industry partners to see that this is from students to students. It’s an opportunity to meet and win over the talent of tomorrow.

‒ Scarlett Spiegeler Castañeda, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Starting small with visits & talks

Many times the first step in building relationships was inviting a company to visit a single class, starting to build familiarity. This also broadened student access to industry and external experts. In addition to visiting talks and company visits, some courses used ondemand workshops and experts, while others reported organizing regular open events ‒building broader ties with potential partners.

“ When we frame the challenge, we try to contact experts working around those topics to come do a session for us. And then the students can contact them afterwards. So it engages them also in the course, even like they just came as an expert. And sometimes they come to the final presentation, they become more engaged with the course.

‒ Manuela Procopio, Fusion Point, Spain

Repeated exposure

Whatever small steps are taken, a key to relationship building is making a habit of it. Regular opportunities for lighter interaction can help to keep collaboration front in mind even when its not the time for more intensive partnering.

“ Quite a few of our projects have come from industry partners who we initially engaged with in other ways. Our current industry partner is a large organization, which does work globally and this is our first project together. But our relationship with them started years ago. We invited them to come to things like galas and industry networking events or asked someone from the organization to be a speaker at an event.

‒ Elna Fourie, Design Factory NZ, New Zealand

A story of love & frustration

3 key strategies to grow meaningful sponsor interaction:

Talk, talk, talk

Focus on developing clear channels for communication to ensure expectations remain aligned, from informal chats to formal discussions.

“ We have partners that come more than once to meet the students, depending on the kind of project. For example, we are starting a project that is related to a tool for the forest industry. This tool is so big that this partner prepared not only the brief for the project but also a visit for all students to see the process they want to improve. So, some of the partners work a lot with us, and others only at the beginning and end of the conceptualization, and to see the team creations at the end of the project to give them feedback. We encourage the partners to choose one group outcome at the end of the project and develop it professionally. We try to make a win-win situation. We give them a lot of possibilities and they provide us with time because students don't like to feel that they work for free for another organization or entrepreneur.

‒ Karin Wolter, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub, Chile

“ We put all the partners around the table, and we said ‘this is what we want our students to learn and this is want we need them to achieve’.

‒ Toinon Vigier, Design Factory Nantes, France

2 Play matchmaker

Ensure the sponsor intent and expectation clearly aligns with the nature of the course and course deliverables.

“ Because our students focus on user experience they should always be able to put the user in the center of the problem. However, because we are part of a computer science institute, we often have partners that come to us with problems that may have nothing to do with user-centered design. Aligning the problem and the nature of the course is essential.

‒ Yana Halas, Sandbox, Estonia

“ The first event I organized was really interesting, because it focused on matchmaking between the students to facilitate team formation, as well as students and partners. All our partners had their own stands, and the students could speak to them and get to know them better.

‒ Mariaelisa Nappi, SEIUNISA, Italy

3 Focus on recurring collaboration

Investing in longer term relationships will allow you to build a culture of collaboration and open-minded exploration.

“ The creation of a relationship beforehand is what works. When you find a new partner, it can be really hard to offer a great challenge. But, if that sponsor or partner is already a friend or ally, it's really quite a smooth process. You can be completely open about your objectives.

‒ Diana Ospina, Cali Design Factory, Colombia

The end can be a beginning

Recurring collaboration as a way to develop meaningful partner relationships may seem daunting to achieve, but you can start by leveraging your project finalization activities and events.

Final project presentations, end galas and other events that signify the end of a project offer exciting possibilities to strengthen relationships with sponsors, and even form new relationships.

An end gala for problem or challenge based projects, attended by students, sponsors, and teachers, offers significant benefits. It provides a platform for students to showcase their work, receive constructive feedback, and celebrate their achievements. This event also fosters networking opportunities, enabling students to connect with potential employers and industry experts, thus enhancing their career prospects. For industry partners, the gala offers a firsthand look at emerging talent and innovative solutions to real-world problems. Teachers benefit by witnessing the practical application of their curriculum, gaining insights for future initiatives, and strengthening partnerships with industry and other stakeholders.

Final presentations

“ For the final presentation the students presented their results, their website and all the interfaces with the partner right there in the classroom.

‒ Nicolás Espinoza, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub, Chile

Final Gala with sponsors

“ When we organize the closing event for our semester course (winter or summer gala), we invite other people who are not involved yet. This allows us to show them the end results and interact with them.

‒ David Reichert, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Public exhibitions & publicity

“ The Catapult project that students completed still had an impact long, long after the course was over. The actual competition was in July in the Netherlands, and the entire team of students traveled there with two cars, a trailer and a 200 kilogram catapult. However, after the competition, the catapult was featured in multiple public exhibitions, including at the National Museum of Modern Art, the Science Museum and even at a medieval festival.

‒ Kalevi Ekman, Aalto Design Factory, Finland

How do we leverage the buzz around the end of a project?

1

Invite potential future sponsors to the final presentations and gala.

5 Invite local press to join the gala.

6 Share images, student thoughts and sponsor insights on social media (with consent).

2

Invite current sponsors to a networking event planned to coincide with the gala or final presentations.

3

Offer to host a tour for members of sponsor organizations to discuss the benefits of taking part prior to the gala.

4

Arrange a meet-up to coincide with your gala or final presentations to get like minded individuals to attained. This is also a great opportunity to invite current sponsors as potential speakers.

7

Capture student insights & reflections on the skills they developed to aid in future recruitment of students & sponsors.

Supporting students

Forming student teams

Student team formation practices varied across

Design Factories,

influenced by the number of students, their familiarity with each other, and available resources. Distinctions emerged between providing more student autonomy (discussed on this spread) and more teacher control (next spread). Proponents of increased student autonomy argued that it helps students identify their preferred collaborators and reflect on team compositions. In contrast, greater teacher control could prevent popularity contests and encourage students to step out of their comfort zones. The resource intensiveness of both approaches varied, resulting in a range of practices from easy-to-implement to more complex ones, depending on your needs and capabilities.

Adding supports

More resource-intensive supports enabling students to form teams autonomously often took the form of facilitated workshops or networking events. Student and project lists could be published beforehand to help students prepare for these events, and supports enabling industry partners could be asked to be present to clarify the challenges they provided.

Matchmaking event for students and partners

“ We did matchmaking between the students. So there was this wall with papers that had team recruiters, so people who were searching and offering ideas. It was interesting, because on one side of the venue, there was the matchmaking between students and on the other side, all our partners had their own stand, and the students could move from one side to the other to match with the teams and also to speak to the partners and get to know them better. So that was interesting; crazy but funny. We guided the students on the side of the matchmaking and also on the side of the partners. We gave all the information before the event just to clarify how it worked. Mainly the matchmaking was guided, yes, thanks to the wall of team recruiters. That was the main help, let’s say, because all the students went in front of that wall and could find all the information.

‒ Mariaelisa Nappi, SEIUNISA, Italy

Adding constraints

Students can form their own teams with some constraints, such as requiring specific discipline or gender distributions, or matching students' expertise with others' learning interests. Shared practices included team formations within the classroom as well as between sessions.

3-day team formation

“ With 30 students, we always have six challenges, and we publish the challenges at the start, at the first day, when they come to university. They can read them and form their opinion about it. Then, the second day we have the presentations of the owners of the challenges, the clients, for the entire morning. Students can ask questions, talk with the client, and we have one-on-one sessions for students and clients. We ask the students to come up with questions, so that they really can dive into what the challenge is all about. Then, on the third day, we ask the students to sign up for a project and (for extra credits) if they want to be the project manager. We ask the students who are the project manager, 'What kind of team do you want to create? What kind of skills do you need? Hard skills, soft skills, how do you see the team developing?' And so, we help the project manager to create a team.

‒ Eric Voigt, Future Design Factory, Netherlands

Leaving students in charge

The least resource-intensive method of studentled team formation is to leave students fully in charge. While in these practices teachers encouraged finding complementary qualities and considering the necessary skills for specific project briefs, they largely left the team formation process up to the students.

Form teams based on introductions

“ I introduce myself and let them introduce themselves: name, semester, something personal. Then, I tell them ‘by Wednesday you have to have your four teams defined’. Usually, they find their way to do that. And when that doesn’t happen, for example, some people would say, ‘Can we be a team of five?’. And I start to negotiate with them because there would be another team of only three. Or, for example, by Wednesday someone said, ‘Look, I still don’t have a team, can you please help me?’, and I then help them to find a team where they can fit.

‒ Lucas R. Ivorra Peñafort, Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá, Colombia

Assessing personality or motivation

The most resource-intensive method of teachercontrolled team formation involved gaining a deeper understanding of the students. Best practices included using surveys and in-person interviews to gather insights into personality traits, preferences, and motivations. As a result, teachers, sometimes with the help of a psychologist, formed teams where students' learning was prioritized and teams were more balanced.

Forming a party like in Dungeons and Dragons

“ They'll do what we call an identity kit where they basically say, ‘this is my name, this is what I do, this is some of my work, this is what I can do, and this is what I need to learn’. And they bring that like a Word document, very simple. And then we try to mix and match those kids. Because this kid knows a lot about Photoshop and this kid knows nothing about Photoshop. Let's see how they work. Or this kid is very good at leading and this kid is not that great at leading. What if we put them together and see maybe they can learn from each other. We take a lot of inspiration from roleplaying games, like Dungeons and Dragons. That's where you do your character sheet. You try to approach it from, 'What do these kids like?' Okay, they like role-playing and all that stuff. Okay, let's do it like this. What would be your character in this team? Right? And what are your strengths or weaknesses? If you put someone with certain strengths, someone else with weaknesses and you try to put them together, sometimes you get some really great stuff.

‒ Fernando Pinto, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub, Chile

Psychologist assessment

“ In Concepción, we use a psychologist who has come up with a simple methodology. That person looks at the CVs, interviews the students briefly, and then puts together a team. There is some kind of science there. She’ll put together a team and she will say this team should work better than another team due to the way that they behave. In Santiago, we work with a professor from University of Chicago and he invented some kind of methodology that we use. The students have to fill in a questionnaire. There’s some research done that this methodology is based on.

‒ Paul O'Toole, iCubo UDD, Chile

Finding the weird ones

“ Each student applies through a video and a letter of intention, but that letter of intention is not very academic. We encourage them to freely explain their idea, and the weird ones are more welcome in a way. Usually, we accept 60 students from different departments, from third and fourth year, because they have knowledge to produce something tangible, but also open minds to discover new potentials. Formation of the groups, in that sense, is very critical. The very first thing that we carefully examine when we check the application, this is the first thing, can we form the groups.

‒ Arzu Gönenç Sorguç, METU Design Factory, Turkey

Forming diverse teams

Teacher-led team formation was also used to ensure diversity in terms of disciplinary background, nationality, or problem-solving abilities. Some practices involved intentionally increasing the team size to ensure sufficient representation from each discipline. Especially when projects were more explorative rather than technical in nature, diverse perspectives were prioritized.

Interdisciplinary & intercultural

“ We ask students to send us the challenge they would like to work on with their study program, semester, and background. Then, one of our working students creates the groups. So it is as diverse as possible, because we have three different universities involved and we would like to have someone from every university, also from abroad. So he has all the information and he really puts effort in and time.

‒ Scarlett Spiegeler Castañeda, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Tower project revelations

“ In the early days, rather than having student interviews, we just ran a workshop with all interested students and do the marshmallow tower project, with the sticks. We observed how different teams or individuals work, and then we picked and mixed and matched rough teams.

‒ Anita Kocsis, Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne, Australia

Forming random teams

Random team formation was shared by interviewees not just as a way to save resources. It can be considered a best practice for several reasons: to better reflect real-world collaboration where team members are not chosen, to promote meeting new people, to avoid popularity contests, and to demonstrate that friend teams are not always the most effective.

Randomly assigned

“ We've tried self-selected teams in the past, but that becomes a bit of a popularity contest. The high achievers go together, which creates a fantastic team, but then you realize that you've lost half the year group because they will be lower-achieving teams. So at the moment, we just randomly assign students into teams. Of course, all approaches have their pros and cons.

‒ Timothy Whitehead, Design Factory Birmingham, United Kingdom

3 Norms to establish

#UnlockYourPotential

Some best practices reflected self-guided learning. For example, some described not providing canvases, or any specifics for projects or assignments, so that students need to figure it out by themselves and justify their decisions. Other best practices leveraged the element of surprise: for example, telling students in the first meeting they should manage the meeting, or jumping in randomly in team spaces to ask questions or provide nudges rather than scheduling meetings in which they need to formally present.

Leave them alone

“ My light bulb moment was very early on: the more you leave the students alone, the better it works. You just provide this rough scaffolding, which is design thinking, and then you avoid lecturing in this kind of normal formal course structure, which is a bit confusing for the students. My biggest epiphany is problembased learning only works when professors are not involved. You might just come in every now and again as a facilitator to stimulate an idea. You might come this Friday, you know they're there, they know you might pop in and

say, ‘How is it going?’, but it's not scheduled. And I found that worked really well. Whereas if I said, ‘I'm coming at this time,’ then it turns into a very formal presentation. Sadly for my job, the less involvement we have, the better it seems to go. Or the more casual or the less systematic our involvement, the better it seems, yes.

‒ Philip Rose, Hannam Design Factory , South-Korea

It's not about what the teacher wants

“ I use the GROW model of coaching. I explain what we are doing and why I’m not giving examples. I push them because students can be very narrow-minded. They are very young because I’m talking about students who don’t have work experience. They're often focused on one solution, and it’s the solution the teacher wants, or the students are afraid of doing things which are not wanted. And then it’s difficult to tell them we don’t want anything. They have to decide; they have to show us what is necessary and not what is wanted.

‒Dirk Loyens, Porto Design Factory, Portugal

#TakeWhatYouNeed

While many learning activities provide a structured approach to tackling design challenges, several educators emphasized the importance of allowing students to take what they need. This approach was applied to various aspects, including the design challenge, the design process, the suggested schedule, available resources, and guest lectures from experts. These best practices reflect a belief that overregulated courses might hinder students’ ability to explore and are less likely to leverage students’ interests and existing skills.

Freedom for confidence

“ They don’t need to ask if they need materials or machines or something. They can also take these machines or tools to their homes openly, and that helped them to commit with the project. Now, we saw more confidence in the projects carried out with the industry. The students don’t have fears when they ask the management and directors of design what they want, or just begin to work. I think the open material policy allowed them to work with responsibility. This is the key element in the model that we are testing.

‒ Ricardo Rugeles, Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá, Colombia

Financial or material resources

“ Most of the groups are working in prototyping, because this is a technical university. They never have enough money to cover their prototyping. So they have to look for the industry to cover some of the prototypes they are working with. So the industry collaboration can happen in two ways: 1) some are giving them money, another sponsorship, or 2) they are giving some materials for them to work with for their prototyping.

‒ Fanny Collado, UPV Design Factory, Spain

#DareToAsk

Best practices emphasized the importance of creating a space where anyone can bring or share ideas at any level of development. Respondents shared various ways to reduce hierarchical barriers, such as using icebreakers, implementing open door policies, and welcoming unscheduled visits at any time. These practices promote an environment where students and others can seek guidance and support at their own pace.

Being visible

“ The more involved you are as teachers, not giving solutions but being there for the students, that is reflected in the outcomes. I'm not saying that it's because the teachers would be saying great things or being very knowledgeable, which they surely are, but I think showing the students that you're there and you care what they're doing somehow leads to good outcomes. We have a lot of different interests here in these courses. There are teachers from different universities with various learning outcomes, technology providers, a company ‒ so it's really, really a lot. Thinking through the process ahead of time and discussing every step of the way so everybody is aware what is going to happen and when, that's important for good outcomes and a good learning experience for the students.

‒ Laura Wirtavuori, CERN Ideasquare, Switzerland

3 Ways to facilitate Structured sessions

Educators highlighted the value of structured sessions to elevate students’ work and learning experience. For example, they would organize a debate between students before the submission deadline to critique and elevate each other’s work, flip the classroom, or facilitate reflexive action workshops in which the question “Why are you doing this?’ is continuously repeated. Others emphasised the importance of having several planned touchpoints, either at specific time intervals or clearly linked to submissions, in order to reduce the barrier to ask questions and promote taking more initiative.

Flip the classroom

“ I used the flipped classroom approach. A lot of our students are part-time, so to schedule time just to meet proved to be difficult. So I thought, you have to attend the class, so let’s use that time so that you can work with your team with a little bit of facilitation on my end. The flipped classroom worked really, really well. We have a little manual here, so the typical class was like this: Next week we’re gonna talk about topic X, e.g. ‘What is creativity’ and ‘Misconception about creativity’. In class, there’s no lecturing ‒ we discuss. All students are asked to do all the assigned readings be-

fore class to prepare for the discussion. So I prepare a couple of questions as icebreakers and then I’ll let them interact. The typical structure is three hours per week. The first hour is for the flipped classroom, the other two hours are for teamwork.

‒ Luca Iandoli, St. John's Design Factory, United States

Weekly stand-up

“ All student project managers have this weekly stand-up, where we discuss what's going on this week, what's the planning, and what they need. The students really like it, because it gives structure to the whole process, and we listen to the students, so if they have problems with this phase, iteration, research, testing, then we help as teachers. We are always there, and it's really hands-on for us as teachers. That benefits the students, and also benefits us, because we see what the students are learning.

‒ Eric Voigt, Future Design Factory, Netherlands

Sharing Mentors

“ The mentors are helping and checking in, not only in their own team, but also in other teams, because it sometimes helps them to understand what's happening in other groups, and sometimes they have some specific knowledge set or competencies that they could give to other groups. Previously, all the teams were pretty separate, so you do not share your mentor, but we introduced a speed dating round with other mentors, and we saw great results out of that, and mentors started to appreciate their own teams, because they saw, ‘Oh, our team is not so active, they have not reached the destination’, and when they are going through other teams, they feel, ‘Oh, my team is wonderful, they are doing everything perfectly!’ There are so many benefits when we are collaborating on various levels, not only industry and students, but also industry, student teams, other teams, other mentors, and so on. We are really now boosting cooperation between the teams to get better results.

‒ Elīna Miķelsone, RTU Design Factory, Latvia

Design tools

A popular best practice to support students involves facilitating the learning of design methods and principles. Examples include conducting lifeline exercises, creating complex personas that require interaction with stakeholders, and making the problem context more extreme. Additionally, educators emphasized the importance of validating emotions of confusion and stress, and sharing personal examples, preferably from professional innovation and design experience.

Exploring solutions through extremes

“ We did a checkpoint with the students that they have to present their ideas. And the ideas were boring. We were like, ‘We need to spice this up!’ So we had the idea of giving them a “humongous” challenge. To give you an example, one team was doing microplastics in water. So the challenge was ‘You have to empty the lake of Geneva of microplastics in six months.’ And you have to answer to how you're going to do it, how much energy it is going to cost. You have already a time frame, six months, and how many microplastics are there. And we give them like three, four hours to solve it. And then you can be creative and think freely as long as you’re not breaking the laws of physics. And you have to also back up your assumptions. And for example, this team came to me and they were like, ‘We found nanotechnology that cleans washing machines with nanobubbles of microplastics. Can we apply that to the lake?’ And I was like, ‘I don't really know, but let's check. It's a closed environment... How many of them do you need?’ And they developed the assumptions and made the calculations. And actually, a lot of the results that the teams came out with that exercise was also the same as the final idea. Even in the meantime, they iterate. So that was funny to see. And I think it was a very useful exercise.

‒ Mireia Sierra, Fusion Point, Spain

Prototyping coach

“ We have a dedicated Prototyping Coach on staff to support students from all discipline backgrounds who may not be familiar with prototyping and making approaches. They are there to support that technical literacy and knowledge to prototype and make. I know this support is very heavily utilized in our health stream ‒ where students are coming from non-design backgrounds. They’re prototyping for the first time, they’ve never made something, so they get taught and empowered or equipped with those skills.

‒ Aaron Down, Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne, Australia

Reflection in action journaling

“ We get our participants to do a reflective journal. So with the reflective journaling, we get them to, reflect in action, capturing observations, insights, etc., and then they can go back and reflect in action through processing, what that means. So we ask them ‘What?’, ‘So what?’, and ‘Now what?’ We don't mark it or anything like that. So it is very up to them. But they're each given a journal at the start of the session and throughout the workshop, there'll be like a little kind of symbols on the slides that will say ‘You could reflect on this.’ And then we encourage them to every now and again pull out the journal and do that sort of second layer, the layer of reflection and take some more notes in the journal.

‒ Carol Azzam Mackay, nandin Innovation Centre, Australia

Virtual & physical prototyping

“ We have the makers' facility, which has a laser printer, 3D printer, and some other prototyping tools so they can make something fast with some rough shape to express their ideas. We also teach them programming in Blender or other accessible 3D programs, like 360 Fusion or Rhino. Those programs seem challenging to handle, but they can follow them easily when we teach them the core features.

- Hyun-Kyung Lee, Design Factory Korea, South-Korea

Documents

Although lower in frequency compared to structured sessions and design tools, some best practices reflected providing supporting documents (and some educators mentioned desiring these but not having yet developed them). These documents typically provided guidance for the project kick-off to establish shared understanding and project expectations, guidelines on how to interact with industry, reflection questions to capture the progress, or small assignments that would provide the backbone of the final report.

Progress documents

“ We mostly check that everything has started smoothly and that there are certain documents and so forth that have been completed. Next, we look more at the project planning and that document, what is the stage. And then before Christmas, we want to meet the team and their sponsor together so that before the Christmas break, we can ensure that there are no major problems on the table. When everyone is going away over Christmas, we don't want anyone to have too many sleepless nights thinking about these things.

‒ Kalevi Ekman, Aalto Design Factory, Finland

It takes a village - collaborating to coach student teams

In most examples of project-based and designbased learning, teachers took on a role of coaching and facilitating. In addition, many interviewees shared examples of leveraging colleagues, alumni or entire communities as coaches to bring more perspectives for students to consider ‒ as well as help shift the narratives in classrooms.

Increasing the quality & quantity of feedback

“ The international mentoring we’ve set up works really well, so that I’ve sat in the corner as an observer first in the sessions. Normally, if I walk into the room, I have to give an opinion from the beginning because you're the center of attention. The students turn to you and you're like, what are you working on, then someone has to explain it, then you give your opinion. But the mentoring kind of allows you to be a fly on the wall for an hour, before picking up the session after the mentor has given their feedback. This allows me to reflect and make my feedback much better, I find that quite an effective mode - to first watch someone else give their comments and then following up with mine.

‒ Phillip Rose, Hannam DF, South Korea

Having many cooks in the kitchen does, however, take some effort to coordinate and sometimes some smoothing around the edges can be called for.

Pooling insights

“ What we do is we have one Miro board that is for the students to track their progress and explain their development of the projects. And then another board with the coaches. So after all the coaching sessions, the coaches write their comments there. And then usually we make a summary and then share it with the teams. We also meet together with all the teachers and coaches after each coaching session, reviewing together all the teams, so even the ones you are not coaching yourself, thinking of how can we support them better. It's very time consuming, but it helps to for everyone involved in the course to have a better overview of what are we doing. And then people is more engaged, like the teachers are more engaged and they feel more part of the course. So they are more motivated also. So it's an investment of time, but it's very worth it in my opinion.

‒ Manuela Procopio, Fusion Point, Spain

To help create and sustain a community of eager and capable coaches, different types and formats of training had also been created for coaches.

Offering multiple pathways to coaching

“ We have PhD students and working students as mentors in all of our sessions. And what has helped to get them or find them has been to make the coaching training we do visible, that people are right away seeing it on our webpage. They broaden their professional skills and get a certificate from us. We also have a special offer that our professional design thinking training has a much lower price for those who are mentoring, because then they invest time afterwards in mentoring for a semester or two. We are also happy to involve PhD students or other university employees to collaborate in mentoring without the training. Because we say in the beginning, if you want it, and if you want to work with students, and if you can listen to what the head coach or moderator is saying, then it’s all you need to get started. Then after trying coaching they might say that, OK they would like to learn more about why and how we do this, and then join the training.

‒ Scarlett Spiegeler Castañeda, Design Factory Stuttgart, Germany

Facilitating peer-to-peer learning

“ It started from an idea presented at the Design Factory Global Network Week, from talking about how people actually coach teams. This question sparked a project with two other Design Factories ‒ Design Factory Stuttgart, and Sandbox from Tallinn. Together we developed the first coaching program. We ran a pilot in March 2023 and it worked so well that participants said ‘we want more of this!’. But running programs like these can be very resource intensive to we focused locally first. This led to the development of peerto-peer sharing on a voluntary basis where local coaches teach each other what they know, and we share our experiences. Since then, we have a community of around 40 - 50 coaches, and we run a training session every 2-3 months during which one of them share their knowledge, experiences and what they do in the class with the teams. It's a platform to make coaches feel more connected to us.

‒ Laura Bellorini, Fusion Point, Spain

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Ways to broaden access

Spaces & resources

Most Design Factories provide students with access to their spaces for project work. Best practices in this category include offering building access outside regular working hours and providing resources for heavy, technical prototyping. This could involve granting access to all research spaces or allowing students to apply for additional financial resources. Beyond prototyping and development, several educators also highlighted the importance of creating access to resources for establishing business ventures and forming patents, including training and venture idea grants.

Combining working & learning

“ Seidenberg Creative Labs is a part of our Design Factory. It's evolved into being a student run and mostly student managed enterprise with two or three projects every semester. Students need jobs, they need to make money, and this is a way for them to do it. Once they've had a Design Factory experience, what do they do next? Well, this was a next step to take the skills that they've learned. And so we use those funds to pay for the study, travel abroad, and pay these students the minimum wage. And it gives us a chance to teach Design Factory practices to these students. But it also means that they don't have to travel far off campus, that they're doing a technology job, not waiting tables or some other things.

‒ Jonathan Hill, NYC Design Factory, United States

Infrastructure for testing & development

“ We do not have a Design Factory dedicated to the students in our campus, but we use our research centers and Departments' labs as infrastructure for startups that want to develop their new

technologies and test prototypes. On the other side we at SEIUNISA connect Teams with the ecosystem of innovation, both at local and international level providing additional expertise in Venture building. So, we are the institutional platform of University of Salerno through which emerging students' startups can make real their innovation.

‒ Roberto Parente, SEIUNISA, Italy

Faculty

While having teachers available throughout a course is crucial, access to other faculty members was also highlighted as beneficial for enhancing student learning. This was often achieved by mentors or educators connecting student teams to professors or other experts based on their specific needs. Additionally, some practices involved bringing researchers and faculty from other departments together for students to meet, either at the start to introduce themselves and present opportunities, or at the project midpoint to collaboratively work on more developed design challenges.

Connecting across departments

“ We have different design departments and the campus of Shenkar is very small. However, people do not know each other. In the first lessons of the semester, I ask a representative of each department to share a little bit what they are doing in the department. And this is quite amazing, because they employ different methodologies. And they have different tools. And I see the faces of students which are amazed. They say for example, ‘I didn’t know you have 3D printers.’ So all of a sudden, they realize that. Many times, the best part of the course is not that they learn new things, but rather that they have new friends. And that they have visited other departments. I’m giving them the permission

to go to the other departments and to work together. So this is for them a very inspiring experience. Just to know, get new friends, get help, so they learn how to get help from other departments.

‒ Assaf Krebs, Shenkar Design Factory, Israel

Industry

Simplifying access to industry representatives was frequently mentioned as a best practice to support students. This could involve having them present at the start, such as when choosing the challenge, or arranging for their availability to be interviewed within the first week. Industry experts could also be integrated during the course, either as co-teachers or as participants in teacher-facilitated workshops.

Industry as teachers

“ We have a community event called Sandbox Toolbox. We bring in professionals who share tools or methods that they use in their everyday work-life. Usually, we do not have too much time to go into these methods during the courses. This has been working quite well. These people work in the industry ‒ design agencies, IT companies etc. The methods vary from physical prototyping to lightning decision jams.

‒ Maria Laanelepp, Sandbox, Estonia

Co-creating with students & community

“ Before, the university and the local community were very separate. Through community-based participation project named Open you space, we opened the door and invited local community people to Design Studio and co-creation workshops. We believe that building the equality, community connection and social cohesion are the foundation of urban resilience.

‒ Minqing Ni, Sino-Finnish Centre, China

Getting facultyonboard

The majority of learning experiences discussed in the interviews involved at least some amount and form of co-teaching. This had the benefits of creating an in-built development mechanism, creating opportunities to spar, drawing from a more diverse set of perspectives ‒ and it could even lower the threshold for students to approach educators, as you might “click” better with one person or another. Yet co-teaching was often not an institutional norm, and demands more time and introduces more uncertainty for teachers. As such, many interviewees reported making a conscious effort in not only finding an motivating industry partners, but academic collaborators as well.

Becoming a familiar face through events

“ We had a series of evening events over Design Week, called Design Impact Conversations. They were in held our galleries across 3 campuses, with drinks and nibbles. The series was beneficial for staff, researchers and our students, but as they were open to the public, it also felt like something that you just want to go to and be involved in! There was a short presentation delivered by each speaker and then open conversation followed. It was the conversation that really turned into the feature piece. Everyone wanted to engage, to share and dive into discussion. It helped to get the word out and give visibility to some of our other activities at FORGE DF. It was a good opportunity for a broader range of our staff, research community, students and the general public to get to know us.

‒ Rebecca Marsden, Forge Design Factory, Ireland

Building buy-in through external cheerleaders

“ We took our senior staff to Aalto to meet the team there, so they saw the benefit from a strategic point of view. And then we took working staff like me and my colleague who saw how it was run day to day. That's your best bet. You need to see it and you need to see someone who's done it well. And actually having staff and faculty from Aalto sharing best practices and actually taking the time to come and meet is useful as well. So you need other people to be your cheerleaders from other institutions. And I’ve then done the same for other institutions, kind of like vouching for that this is a good idea and it’s worked elsewhere. It’s PR, isn’t it?

‒ Ryan Smith, Design Factory London, United Kingdom

Making co-teaching work in practice

Inspire with disagreement

“ My co-teacher Assaf and I challenge one another. My paradigms are not accepted by him, and his paradigms are questioned by me. So we decided to leverage this phenomenon and said, 'Let's do it in front of the students without embarrassment.' We did it with ethics in development ‒ no rehearsals, come with your truth, and we're going to debate in front of the students. Okay, so I brought an exam question that I do for my information technology class, a multiple-choice question, and I asked, 'Which one of those four items is not ethical?' Assaf jumped in, and said, 'All of them are not ethical!' 'Assaf, you’re ruining my exams.' 'Yes, but we promised each other that it's gonna be open and honest.' I said, 'Yes, okay.' It was beautiful. He made his points. I made mine. The students were in between. But it was very fruitful because the students saw that there's no one truth, one paradigm that fits all. No, the world can be interpreted. You can interpret reality and situations, and this is what we are bringing to the class, that there's no one truth. You have to be very openminded.

‒ Yigal David, Shenkar Design Factory, Israel

Complementary teachers

“ All studio courses are taught by two teachers, usually, or ideally, one who has more professional experience, and one more methodological or driven by teaching and learning best practices (planning, building and using rubrics, uploading grades to platforms, translating opportunities into quality feedback). So, you try to pair those types of teachers, the professional and the academic, and you make them work together. These studio courses tend to be more flexible in terms of planification; these are projectbased-learning courses, so when results are not meeting the course expectations, teachers will extend due dates another week or so to improve on that project and ensure proper learning, then they adjust the rest of the calendar and sacrificing the least possible of the program.‒ Matias Ferrari, iCubo UDD, Chile

Refreshing through new interactions

“ Interactions with other universities or different groups, something that lasts for a week or more, are very refreshing and inspiring for students. They're quick ways to awaken, see things differently. Whenever we do that, it helps the remaining academy period. We do it often, not only with DFGN, but our university also belongs to a very big network of Jesuit universities ‒ there are many worldwide. And I also love getting in touch with people from other countries and doing things with our students and our teaching teams. ‒ Jose Gonzalez, Cali Design Factory, Colombia

Offering training & scaffolding to dip your toes into project-based teaching

“ We have a huge hackathon called Semana Diagonal, where the whole undergrad community takes part for three days. Students act as solvers and teachers as mentors. Teachers have to design new and exciting learning experiences just for that week.And we’ve found out that there are some people with the passion to do PBL and co-teaching, but they don't necessarily have the tools for that. They’ve never done that before. They are used to do their traditional, disciplinary teaching. And even if they're super passionate about it, when the time comes of, okay, let's do this, they're quite anxious because it's so new to them. So the lesson here is you should teach the teachers and train the trainers, because it's really impactful on the experience for the students.

‒ Diana Ospina, Cali Design Factory, Colombia

“ It comes down to training. When you come in as a new member to one of the interdisciplinary modules, you first come in as more of an assistant, a helper. Whether you're a professor or an early careers researcher, just first time lecturing job, everybody does it, which is important. We have like 4 or 5 staff in the modules because they’re quite big, 200 students or something like that. Then we're all speaking sort of a common language.

‒ Timothy Whitehead, Design Factory Birmingham, United Kingdom

Building shared understanding

It takes time to learn one another’s way of working, and misunderstandings can also happen between teachers. Here, regular meetings and shared materials helped to get on the same page. Some institutions have made an effort to have an annual cycle of joint reflection while other communities simply made a habit of sharing experiences over monthly coffee. Leading collaborative teaching when everyone is busy can also benefit from “management by provocation”, as Elina Kähkönen from Aalto Design Factory described,

“it’s easier to protest and revise than to start from an empty table”.

Managing team crises

1 Prevention 2 Mitigation

All teamwork is susceptible to crises, particularly in creative contexts. Different practices were used to prevent, mitigate and resolve these.

“Well begun is half done” ‒ by far most crisisrelated best practices focused on preventing them from the start. Best practices include teachers setting clear project expectations, sharing common pitfalls, and providing reallife examples that showcase the value of an explorative and iterative approach, leveraging diverse perspectives rather than jumping to solutions from one perspective.

Prevention often relied on a solid team kickoff where team values and roles are discussed. Sometimes, this was supported by personality tests or by sharing team role theory to guide these discussions. These moments could also be captured in written format, either as an individual development plan or as a contract with team values and rules that each team member needs to sign.

Walk in another student’s shoes

“ First we talk about what is collaboration, play well-known games among teams, like building bridges, the egg exercise, or elevator to get to know each other. But then, the very first week, the studentshave to live like others.

For example, let's say there is one student from department of architecture and one student from electrical engineering. The architecture student goes to the electrical engineering department and monitor, take videos, see the spaces, how they work, etcetera and vice versa. So for one week, they're changing their spaces, they experience others' life, and they have to prepare a video of five minutes for

3 Resolution

us, showing how they lived, how they actually work. This is a very good one, actually, for one week, since they're always together and they try to learn how they live, it's like a role playing, but that's a very efficient way of building a team spirit, to understand each other, how they can collaborate.

‒ Arzu Gönenç Sorguç, METU Design Factory, Turkey

Being vulnerable as a teacher

“ Students do personality tests and we provide opportunities for them to have conversations about what that means in a team. It's just the 16 personalities test, so it's very straightforward. I think being able to be with the group and then talk about it; it's just about having transparency in the room. Our coach would always test himself and he would share that with the students as well. The same with any emotional intelligence stuff we did, we would sit and do that with the students as well. So, they, or we would share things about our own, like, if we had been tested, we would share that with them and use ourselves as examples. So, I think it's normalizing it.

‒ Margi Moore, Design Factory NZ, New Zealand

Empathy, multiple CEOs, & problem solving structures

“ I employ empathy within the teams through active listening exercises. Once they finish that, I explain that what they’ve done now is part of empathy. And then I give them some tools. For example, I ask the team to nominate a CEO for the team for every week, throughout the semester. There are always people who are more silent, more shy, and their voice is not heard enough. So they will get the chance to be CEO as well, and to take care of the group. So for me, this is very important practice, so everybody gets to be CEO at least once in the semester. And he is responsible to deliver the prototypes and to do the presentations and to make sure that the group has done what it needs. So in this manner, they learn that they have to be cooperative with the CEO, because they know that they will be CEO next week or in two or three weeks. So it helps them to organize. It helps the shy people to shine as well and to be able to be there. Another thing I’m doing is I’m asking them in the first lesson to come up with a structure of how they’re going to solve problems in case there will be problems. So I’m asking them to design some kind of mechanism. It can be voting, it can be arguing, it can be notes, whatever they want. But they have to produce some kind of mechanism of solving problems. Because I’m telling them, you will have problems. You will have problems of scheduling, of people who are disappearing in the middle of their process, of people who say ‘I’ve done enough, I don’t want to do this.’ So I said, I’m giving them the power to handle it.

‒ Assaf Krebs, Shenkar Design Factory, Israel

1 Prevention 2 Mitigation

Besides a good project start, several measures targeted crisis mitigation ‒ remaining aware of emerging crises and intervening before it escalates. Best practices here described regular meetings with student teams to catch toxic dynamics and work through challenges together. Additionally, attempting to identify students who had partially checked out and approach them individually was mentioned as a best practice here. Immediate intervention was not always the course of action though ‒ some interviewees described allowing crises to emerge but keeping a close eye and supporting student teams in working through them, including moderating discussions so that students can learn how to manage conflicts and crises.

Expert team dynamics coaches

“ Sometimes things go wrong; it happened a few days ago in a team. There was a big conflict and a team is not performing anymore, and in that case we support them with coaches and individualized support. We acknowledge that this is not something that they know before, so we have a training programme which is in parallel to the design programme. We have expert team dynamics coaches that are supporting the team into what they are doing. In the past we had a pedagogist that was following the teams to ensure that their learning process was happening, because you know that the biggest motivation is learning. So you need to ensure that people are constantly feeling that they're learning. Otherwise, the motivation goes down and people do not perform.

‒ Matteo Vignoli, Oper.Space, Italy

3 Resolution

Not all crises can be prevented or successfully mitigated. Best practices to resolve crises were mostly targeted at ensuring project continuation for all students involved and maximizing learning. Some interviewees described facilitated feedback sessions, conflict resolution or mediation by a counselor or coach, or writing self-reflection reports to better understand the existing dynamics. If students are unwilling or unable to continue as a team, they in some cases switch teams, but only once. In another example, the contract that team members had signed at the start of the project determines who owns which parts of the work, and team members can apply to join another team.

Quit & go for interviews

“ They have the freedom to quit a group, but they have to inform us and it has to be a an evidence-based decision. Like, ‘I’m quitting because the rest of my group is not following the contract, so, I don't want to fall and fail the whole thing, so I’m going to move to another group’. When that happens, we make them do interviews with other groups. It's basically like you quit an office, now you have to go for interviews and get a job. You have to understand that this is moving forward, so you probably won't be helping with ideas,

because the idea is already passed, and now we are in the development part of the project, so, what are you good at? How can you help a different group with your skills? Also help them understand that when joining an office, usually, you also start either from the middle or maybe at the end.

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Jorge Remonsellez, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub, Chile

Collaborative boards

“ We ask students to work with a collaborative board. When a group is not working (due to leaving, depression, not taking initiative), the first approach is try to sort it out talking. This is happening, how can we sort out the group? If that meets a dead end, we suggest to dissolve the group. Dissolve the contract and go and ask for jobs in different groups and integrate to those groups. When they break up, the question is, ‘What happens with the work that we did? Like whose work is that?’ And that's when they have the collaborative board, and we decide to share the information, so each can go to another group and take that information. Unless they established in the contract that whoever brings something to the table, owns the rights of that information. They can take the information and not share it with the other persons.

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Jorge Remonsellez, DDHUB-Duoc Design Hub,

Chile

Afterword

Learning our way forward

Education is about the future. We prepare for a tomorrow that isn’t yet here, with different institutions and studies taking stances on what should be and what is likely to be ‒ whether from the point of view of skills, jobs or impact. Creativity is in demand, artificial intelligence on the rise, and global sustainability challenges are at our door. In a fast-paced, volatile world, facing forward can be both a luxury and a necessity. We need to take action now to thrive tomorrow.

Problem-, project- and design-based learning bridges tomorrow and today. Applying knowledge and skills preparing for the future, this type of learning has an impact already now. While all learning has an impact on the learners’ capabilities, problem-, project- and designbased learning extends impact beyond the classroom. Yes, we are educating for the future, but we are also creating artifacts, knowledge and solutions to tackle issues and challenges right now. While some exercises and classes focus on analyzing and understanding challenges, most of the examples discussed by the educators interviewed for this report did not stop there. This type of learning, like design (as defined by Herbert Simon in the 1960s), focuses not on predicting but on creating a preferred future.

The interviews highlight the collaboration baked into educating for innovation. Most of the best practices emphasize and tackle the social dimension of different parties coming together ‒ from finding suitable challenges and managing expectations of collaborating organizations, to educators enlisting colleagues and alumni to craft learning experiences, and to supporting diverse students in creating shared understanding and navigating disagreements. At its best, problem-, project- and design-based learning opens doors between disciplines, organizations and nations. Higher education becomes embedded in its surrounding communities, locally and globally.

It is clear that this type of education takes time and effort. Our hope is that the examples in this report can inspire others to experiment with different ways to connect their classrooms to the outside world. Maybe there’s something you want to try out, maybe something sounds like it could help address a challenge you’ve faced in your efforts. Or maybe something here is the spark for something entirely new.

We do not have all the answers at hand, but we are learning our way forward.

research team