Innovation and Human-Centered Design

3 units

This course provides an overview of approaches to design thinking - a process of identifying, creating, and implementing solutions. Healthcare needs a human-centered design approach to navigate the blurring of lines between product and service, provider and patient. Through an experiential approach, students learn methods for understanding users' needs and requirements, synthesizing complex information, identifying guiding principles for design, generating ideas, prototyping, and communicating solutions. Emphasis will be placed on how to build stakeholder personas and requirements as well as how to map their emotional experience with a process to gain more insights than a quantitative analysis alone. Students explore the role of this process through readings, case studies, lectures, and project-based learning.