Archive: Around Town

Wells College has opened an Innovation Lab, offering a class in design thinking, under the auspices of its new Center for Business & Entrepreneurship in the Liberal Arts. Although still in its infancy, the Wells College Innovation Lab will attempt to solve real-world problems, locally, globally, and within the Wells community.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving that is fast, cheap, and that yields breakthrough results. Its process depends upon ethnographic understanding, and the rapid building and testing of low-tech prototypes. Developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, design thinking has already spawned a host of businesses, books and lectures. Yet, says the Innovation Lab’s course instructor Tracy Brandenburg, undergraduates outside of Wells have a difficult time learning this problem-solving technique.

“To the best of our knowledge, Wells College is currently the only school in the nation where an undergraduate studies design thinking as part of their business curriculum,” she says. Brandenburg trained at Stanford’s famous “d.school.”

When Wells announced plans for a Center for Business and Entrepreneurship in the Liberal Arts, Brandenburg—a visiting associate professor in Spanish—recognized the potential for an incubatory space like the Innovation Lab. She also says Wells is a perfect fit for design thinking, because the College emphasizes humane action and an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Design thinking relies upon collaboration by individuals with diverse skills and viewpoints, and has resulted in such developments as $25 premature infant incubators for use in Nepal.

Brandenburg hopes that individuals from Wells and the local community will suggest problems for students to tackle, yet stresses that the Wells College Innovation Lab, while attempting to solve problems, is primarily concerned with producing innovators. To that end, the innovation lab itself was designed to facilitate the creative process. It features numerous whiteboards to capture ideas, movable furniture to allow the space to be manipulated, and foam “sugar cubes” that have multiple purposes, ranging from seating to prototyping.

Additionally, Brandenburg stresses that the lab, while a requirement for business majors, is open to all students in any field. “We hope to teach Wells students how to successfully approach problems in any discipline,” she explains. “Design thinking is great for business, but once it’s learned, it can really be applied to produce fun and innovative solutions in any facet of work or life,” says Brandenburg. “I’m really proud that Wells can offer this to students.”

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