Like the CCP from the first part of our term, the Design Challenge Portfolio is described as a portfolio assignment because it is a collection of work that you will complete over a four week period.

1.Complete an assigned activity which we’ll talk about more in a minute.

2.Write areflection that answers the question I’ve assigned that week. This is a personal reflection.It should be no more than a page in length.

The portfolio that you submit on December 4 should include an entry (reflection and documentation) for each of the four weeks.

So, that’s a bit about the ‘portfolio’ aspect of the assignment. Let’s examine what we mean by a ‘design challenge’

For the purpose of our assignment, a design challenge is a series of activities in which participants work through the stages of a design thinking process to come up with novel solutions to a stated problem.

•Design Challenges can take place in learning environments (like ours) or in organizations (as a way to enhance the problem solving capacity of teams)

•Design Challenges can take place in an abbreviated fashion (say over a weekend) or over a longer period of time. The short ones are similar to what you might experience in a hackathon.

•Usually they are highly collaborative but I’m adapting the model so that you don’t need to be too dependent on others.

•I’ll provide the problem and you’ll use design thinking (both the process and its methods) to come up with novel solutions to the problem.

•Our design challenge is a 4-week challenge. Don’t wait and try to do all of the activities at the end of the term.

Within the portfolio:

•I’m very flexible with how you display your documentation of your event. There’s no set format.

•The documentation of some activities might take more than one page or more than one slide –that’s fine.

•The most important thing is that I know what I’m looking at!Add textboxes or headings to tell me what’s happening in a picture.