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Students on campus need more space to work on projects. These spaces will not only meet that need, they will also improve the innovative culture by giving students a home base, a hang out spot, where innovative communities can form.
In order to accomplish this goal, a group in the engineering school is starting an initial space in order to prove demand and bolster support. In the near future, we hope to expand the space and form multiple spaces, encompassing the entire scale of prototyping fidelity and providing the lowest posible barrier to entry to students in all schools at Pitt. After the development of the makerspaces in the engineering school, additional spaces across campus with easier and more versatile accessibility to students of all majors is necessary to continually foster growth in design thinking and creative confidence for all students without unintentionally segregating student groups based on major or location. In this sense, mobile lab spaces that encourage low-tech, immediate solutions to all manners of creative problems, as well as collaboration of thought and ideals across different areas of study are required to come up with the next generation fo innovative and sustainable solutions with the constitution of multiple perspectives.
== <span style="font-size:large">Milestone #1: Find and Create a Space (Completed Jan 1st 2016)</span> ==
Using funding hopefully aquired from Milestone #5, we will scale up our proven management structure and launch additional spaces around campus
== '''Initiative #2: Expand mobile creative labs for easier accessibity and diversity''' ==
Collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute and multiple schools across campus, agents of innovation will be leading the development and integration of mobile creative spaces within student communities to instill generalized and technical design projects and initiatives based on case-by-case, topical choices made my collaborations of the creator lab development teams as well as affiliated active student communities.
Creator labs will focus more on the versatility and educational strength of the design thinking motif by providing models and methods that not only serve as bases for prototyping and ideation, but also the focus and subjectivity of different areas of study, including the natural sciences, engineering, expressive and visual arts, law, writing, public health, education, philosophy, etc. In particular, creator labs will allow creative and innovative students and thinkers from each school and club or organization across campus to experience not only generalized applied education on design thinking, but also focused learning and applied methods based on their field. Focused learning and methods within the framework of the creator lab will emphasize constitutive ideas and thoughts as a result of collaboration of multiple fields and areas of study within the parameters of a single field.
For instance, engineering concepts may fare very well in fostering new methods of problem-solving and solution conception within the scope of theater and the visual arts, provided enough guided investigation and collaboration is executed such that it is clearly shown that the problem parameters of the theater/visual arts framework coincide with the concepts and creative processes of the engineering framework.
At the start of development (February 2016), the mobile creator lab concepts are conceptualized and elaborated with under the guidance of the University Innovation Fellows spring 2016 cohort, the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute, and student leaders and liaisons of multiple clubs and organizations that serve as great potential for change-making hosts of the mobile creator labs. Aakash Sudhakar (current University Innovation Candidate) serves as the main student leader of developing and integrating mobile creator labs within the Pitt community.
== Initiative #3: Develop student networks for enhanced creative sustainability ==
As a mirror to the objectives of Intiative #2: Expand Mobile Creative Labs For Easier Assibility and Diversity, it is important for students across campus who have versatility and experience in design thinking and the creative processes, especially within the scopes and frameworks of different majors, to have a community where they can come together with other like-minded students and students with minimal experience in design thinking and creative confidence to collaborate and refine thinking and problem-solving models. Much of what the University Innovation Fellows program does is a generalized framework for which to apply into specific problems and scenarios, but much of the success of those potential applications is very difficult to know as the student problems across campus can be difficult to identify, track and codify within the design thinking and creative confidence frameworks.
To help develop and institutionalize a program that would better allow agents of innovation across campus to be aware and able to assist with these student issues, it is important to allow much of the power and ability of these problem-solving abilities to be in the hands of student leaders, activists and representatives throughout the Pitt community. Developing a mentorship network that focuses on student-to-student interaction and topical problem identification and solution scenarios serves not only as a type of exercise for refining design thinking and creative process models, but also encourages further investigation in areas of the Pitt student community that may be affected by issues outside of the immediate awareness of the University Innovation Fellows program.
At the start of development (February 2016), the student creative network concepts are conceptualized and elaborated with under the guidance of the University Innovation Fellows spring 2016 cohort, the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute, and student leaders and activists across campus in the form of the ideation of a new club called the Pitt Master Minds network, inspired by a statement by Andrew Carnegie that a Master Mind is a "coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose." Aakash Sudhakar (current University Innovation Candidate) serves as the main student leader of developing and promoting the use of design-based student creative networks within the Pitt community. It is important to note that the potential club will be affiliated with organizations and groups outside of Pitt, including mentorship networks and other Master Mind groups that can help provide problem scenarios and creative topics to direct Pitt's Master Mind network in innovative and constructive directions.
= Strategy #3: Increase awareness of I&E in the Arts and Science Progrograms =
