Dishsoap for clean water: how the design of everyday objects can promote happiness

This project began with the question: What keeps us from achieving sustainable happiness, happiness for ourselves and future generations? I have chosen to focus on the citizen/consumer conflict which occurs when our consumer choices are incongruous with our moral obligations to society. This conflict is a consequence of the market systems that are in place and consumers’ lack of a critical understanding of these systems. Thus, with this project, I am attempting to make these systems more transparent. Looking at economic approaches like price adjustment and awareness-raising strategies I have focused on the latter. Drawing from the history of semiotics and experiential pedagogy, I applied pedagogical principles to an everyday consumer product, in this case dish soap, in order to help consumers understand, through the use of the product, the product’s ecological benefits and how their own consumer choices affect environmental health. The name of the emerging product is Clean: dish soap for clean water

Collaborative innovation program: A Creative conspiracy for cross-college collaboration at the Rochester Institute of Technology

The 2007 inaugural address of RIT’s ninth president, William Destler, highlighted the breadth and diversity of curricular offerings at RIT from business, engineering, and computing to design, fine art, and craft. In his address, Dr. Destler included this challenge: “What if RIT students [in addition to their discipline-specific courses] had the experience of working on complex societal problems with students from different majors on teams in...a cross-disciplinary effort to find real solutions?” The authors of this paper took that challenge to heart. In the 2008- 2009 academic year, we wrote and taught a collaboration curriculum that was hosted by the RIT Honors program but open to all RIT students. The outcome of this program is an integrated “innovation suite” comprised of the following components: 1. learning outcomes and curricular models for innovation, 2. innovation activities, 3. collaborative learning environments, 4. collaborative technologies (IT and other), and 5. community-university partnerships. This integrated suite of innovation components will continue to grow in the new Center for Student Innovation at RIT

Teaching and learning innovation and invention

Each quarter at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), our course on innovation and invention gathers undergraduate and graduate students from as many disciplines as possible and attempts to do something none of us (including the instructors) knows how to do. Our methodology, modeled after business startups more than traditional academic courses, produces interesting inventions and remarkable learning experiences. We will report on the first four offerings of this course at RIT, and speculate on why it works as well as it does. Class begins by presenting students with a stimulating but vague challenge that can engage all the participants (e.g., “build a multi-person multimedia computer that surrounds people”) and then mapping and connecting students’ interests and expertise. Sub-projects form, develop, die and/or expand, through student collaboration and peer problem solving, as the class pushes toward an ultimate deliverable in which all participants can feel ownership and pride. Relatively unstructured and unpredictable multidisciplinary problem solving experiences can complement traditionally structured and predictable intra-disciplinary curricula. By collaborating across disciplines, students can deepen their understanding and broaden the application of hard-won discipline-specific knowledge and expertise. They can also learn to enjoy and endure the fine art of improvisational innovation and invention