Design Thinking as Research Pedagogy for Undergraduates; Project-Based Learning with Impact

In the Design Thinking to Meet Real World Needs course at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), faculty members recruit an internal university or external community-based organization to pose a vexing question to the class. To address this question and develop an original hypothesis or problem statement, students collect data. The students then derive multiple innovations to address the problem. The innovations are tested and transformed to validated solutions through a repeated process of data collection and critique. As a course final, the students' results are disseminated publicly as a community call-to-action. Thus students engage in learning through a process that parallels undergraduate research. Pursuing an authentic research question through a multidisciplinary lens (Hakim 1998; Henne et al. 2008) allows students to find not only their academic voice (McNary-Zak and Peters 2011) but also their entrepreneurial voice.