Priorities:Boğaziçi University Faculty Projects
Contents
Project Name: Design Thinking on Campus and Beyond
Project by Faculty Innovation Fellows Candidate Burcu Rodopman
Why is this project important to you, your department, & your Fellows?
Design thinking enables people to come up with useful ideas together, to test them and to build/create actual products and services in a short time. This project is important for me and everybody because design thinking provides an utmost useful tool to bring about change and improve life at school, in the classroom, at home and at work.
Description
Design thinking can be used in many ways and in many areas. My mission in this project is putting design thinking at the center stage in a campus environment and exploring areas where design thinking can be used for teaching, research, career development and life management. The elements of design thinking give numerous ways to create multiple versions and implementations of almost everything, on campus and beyond campus.
Design thinking involves a specific mindset. The project starts with design thinking essentials. They are foundational; they are design thinking in its purest form and help to implement design thinking anywhere and everywhere.You are immersed with its promise for creative thinking and problem solving, opportunity discovery and project implementation. Next, the project will focus on specific areas that are important on a university campus. University campuses are where students learn, where students experience life and creativity, where students plan their careers, where students learn to be professionals and go on to life & work after graduation. University campuses are also home of faculty members, who teach students, engage research and create an atmosphere of knowledge and wisdom.
The project involves a program in which design thinking essentials are introduced to stakeholders, ‘stakeholders in learning’. Then, it explores different aspects of learning that happen on campus. I will try to develop a methodology for each of these aspects and also a program with lots of information, exercises, cases, games and learning opportunities. It will be to the point, practical, useful and fun, too.
Design Thinking Essentials Design your Learning -Students Design your Career- Students, college and beyond Design your Research- Graduate students and faculty Design your Life & Work life after college- Everybody
This project will also help the other fellows’ projects, because all of them can benefit from design thinking methodology. I am also planning to document the entire process, develop a greenbook and tell the story of ‘design thinking on campus and beyond’ as many times as possible. I will share my take-aways on design thinking in the form of white papers, chapters and conference papers. The project will be a design thinking in action itself.
Stakeholders served
- Faculty members
- Students, alumni, researchers
- Managers and people at work
Key Milestones
- December 2022: Stakeholder meeting on design thinking and specific learning areas
- March 2023: Design thinking kick-start
- June 2023: Designing and preparation workshops
- September 2023: Design Thinking Workshops
- December 2023: Assessments and Feedback
- March 2024: Sharing insights with stakeholders and wider community
An Innovation Portfolio
- Design thinking essentials program details
- Workshop outline and information
- Relevant exercises and games
- Teaching plans and guides
Project Name: Embedding Creative and Entrepreneurial Thinking into School-Wide Curriculum
Project by Faculty Innovation Fellows Candidate Oğuzhan Aygören
Why is this project important to you, your department, & your Fellows?
Analytical thinking and critical reasoning are weighed heavily in higher education and the creativity component is missing. This project will enable faculty and students to embrace creativity as a valid and applicable practice instead of relying solely on analytical thinking.
Description
Faculty from all departments will be introduced to design thinking and creativity tools. In order to do that, it would be great to coordinate with UIF fellows to organize workshops and pop-up events in professors' classes. Also, meetings with faculty who want to be change makers will be welcomed to the team. Brainstorming sessions will be held where moonshot thinking will be employed allowing crazy ideas to be flourished, embraced, built upon. While doing that, rituals need to be established with a feeling of community and a safe environment. Trust and rapport must be built and nurtured. So, we must produce actionable insights and solid outputs no matter small.
At the end, more faculty will be championing creativity and change among campus and employ the tools they learn into their curriculum and start experimenting with their students. So, we will achieve to change the perception of entrepreneurship as a broader term for change making and experimenting instead of making money as a greedy capitalist. Unfortunately, many academics are skeptic at entrepreneurship since they see it in classic economic terms. So, our main aim will be to fix this perception, introduce them to solid tools and help them employ in their curriculum.
Stakeholders served
- Faculty members interested in change-making
- Change-maker students and broader aspiring students
- Decision makers in the rectorate and management positions
Key Milestones
- December 2020: Stakeholder meeting with a wider audience to attract as partners in crime
- March 2021: Faculty fellows program
- June 2021: Realization of creativity as a missing component in the curriculum
- September 2021: Implementing creativity as part of requirements
- December 2021: Assessment of students and faculty
- March 2022: Sharing of the results within other faculty in the university
An Innovation Portfolio An important tenet of our community of practice is that we share all materials with peers so they may borrow, build on and replicate the activity, findings, and/ or impact on their campuses. Please describe the artifacts you intend to include in your portfolio and publish on the universityinnovation.org wiki. This may include curriculum, slides, facilitators guides, tictoc/run-of-show documentation, activities, worksheets and more.
Faculty fellows program curriculum: A faculty education program on change-making and creative thinking Creativity exercises: Self-realization exercises for individual reflection Rituals: Fun activities to define the community
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