Browsing by Subject "People-centered"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Best Laid Plans… Helping Teachers Foster Intrinsic Motivation in Their Students
    (2015) Walters, Nicholas; Ganci, Aaron
    High school students suffer from a lack of intrinsic motivation to participate in class. In an attempt to combat this lack of motivation, educators often provide students with rewards for participation. However, self-determination theory—a theory of motivation— states that these external incentives contribute to students’ lack of intrinsic motivation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Design Leadership and Development with Mid-Level Leaders
    (2017) Stevens, Madison; Eby, Chad
    Design Leadership provides the needed skill set to thrive in this quickly changing world. The core competencies of a Design Leader enable strategy to become tangible, and also offer a way to look to the future and quickly iterate possible solutions of what could be. Design Leaders also have the ability to create shared understanding with all people in an organization. By creating this shared understanding -- where staff understand the goals and values of the company, and the company understands the individual goals and values of their staff, the Design Leader can help to align these values, and integrate possibly opposing ideas. By enabling people to practice their individual values at work, this can help to cultivate a positive work life. This design research addresses the question: How might mid-level leaders leverage the core competencies of a Design Leader in order to initiate a personal leadership change?
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Envisioning Art and Design Education Through the Lens of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Herron School of Art + Design
    (2021-05) Datta, Amrita; Ganci, Aaron; Napier, Pamela; Shekara, Archana
    As the U.S witnesses the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, communities nationwide are embracing the historical inequities spanning race, gender, religion and disability benefits. Higher education is equally rife with these inequities. Widespread implementation of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) can be a catalyst for peace, acceptance and equality. Despite the requirement for educators to provide aptitude on DEI efforts in order to adhere to growing student needs, resources allocated for such endeavors remain low. Of course, this further increases the barriers for faculty tasked with familiarizing themselves with a wide range of DEI ‘topics’. Articulation and commitment to DEI remains a challenge for educators. This is especially true in design education and the People-Centered Design process is perfectly poised to address these underlying issues. Implementing a people-centered design approach that puts the needs of people first can be the change in our education system that addresses complex social inequalities. Design educators can lead this social paradigm shift within academia. However, before educators can make a commitment to diversity they must first engage in foundational learning of DEI terms and definitions. This case study, conducted at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design provides a novel strategy for how this can be accomplished. Since educators have systematically transitioned into the digital world -- the outcome of this case study proposes a prototype which characterizes the need of identifying DEI strategies through a digital experience.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Uncovering Talents and Interests in At-risk Urban Youth: Co-designing a path to self-fulfillment
    (2015) Smerdel, Jennifer; Napier, Pamela
    The designer’s role has evolved greatly over the past few decades. We are no longer asked to simply create a poster or a web page, but to solve complex problems towards socially relevant topics. Through utilizing a people-centered approach to better understand complex socio-material interactions, designers are able to create meaningful change in organizations, communities, and individuals lives. This new role has opened up the door to the possibilities of how designer’s can create a significant impact on a large scale as well as on an individual level. By seeking to create a change, design researchers identify groups who can be best served with a people-centered approach. This includes those who do not have an active voice in our society and therefore are potentially forgotten. One such group is that of at-risk urban youth. At-risk urban youth are defined as "adolescents who face disadvantage determined by a level of poverty, social, and family conditions whilst living in an urban community, which hinders their personal development and success (UN-HABITAT, 2003). This can lead to a decreased sense of self-fulfillment, which is exacerbated by a lack of opportunities. The path to self-fulfillment can be reached by bringing to fruition one’s deepest interests and capacities or talents, and by giving at-risk urban youth the opportunity to uncover these, an actionable plan for their future can be developed. By employing a co-design approach, youth collaborated with one another while working with creative tools and methods. Co-design is a process in which designers and non-designers work collaboratively in the design development process to create holistic solutions to problems (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). This research explored how a participatory design approach, such as co-design, can be applied in the development of a process for at-risk urban youth to uncover their latent talents and interests and develop an actionable plan for them to fulfill their future goals. Engaging youth in the process helped to identify, select, and iterate on appropriate co-design tools and methods in order to enhance the inherent creativity in youth and guide them toward the path to self-fulfillment. With the help of at-risk urban youth, this thesis produced a new process, along with facilitation guidance tools, to help solve this social issue. In a rapidly transforming world, at-risk urban youth can be considered as the forgotten generation of our time. By challenging ourselves to rethink and redesign the process in which youth are accessing their future goals and bringing them to fruition, we are able to pave the way for future social innovation.