Build Design Challenge: Collaborating, Defining, Affinity Mapping

Friday, October 29 found us gathering in groups around our clients and sharing all our insights into the client’s life. Culling all those observations and then organizing them into clusters through affinity mapping will help us identify pain points, opportunities, or needs that we can solve to help the client and their neighborhood develop intoContinue reading “Build Design Challenge: Collaborating, Defining, Affinity Mapping”

Build Design Challenge: Day Three

We’re on our third day of Build.org‘s Design Build Challenge. There’s plenty of time to join. Check out the website! What’s most impressed me about Build.org’s work on this year’s challenge is just how real Build University is trying to keep the experience to the Design Thinking methodology. Today’s work on empathy is excellent andContinue reading “Build Design Challenge: Day Three”

Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education

At the beginning of the year, I discovered that a local design firm in my neighborhood was opening an incubator/maker/presentation/learning space in a turn of the 20th-century woollen mill. Dubbed Flux, the space was exactly what I have been trying to create in my own school, only about 7 times bigger!   So I had toContinue reading “Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education”

Brains, Cheetos, and a Theory of Creativity

(The final installment of my blog posts about the B.Phl Innovation Festival. Here’s the first post.  Here’s the second.) On Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019, 31 of the 54 students enrolled in NOVA Lab attended the third day of the first annual B.Phl Innovation Festival. While our trip was somewhat shortened (traffic on the abominable SchukyllContinue reading “Brains, Cheetos, and a Theory of Creativity”

Philadelphia’s B.Phl Innovation Festival

A few weeks ago one of the students in NOVA Lab informed me of an innovation festival being hosted in Philadelphia.   After checking it out on the web, I was convinced this would be a place for our students to learn why innovation and design thinking were so important to the economy they’d soon beContinue reading “Philadelphia’s B.Phl Innovation Festival”