Challenge-Based Innovation

Pop-up Challenge example: At the intersections of the maker/thinker/doer spaces in the future DI HUB with the University Housing & Culinary Services environments (in which students from any major might be spending time in the building to each their breakfast, lunch or dinner), the DI Team will set up teaser or ‘pop-up’ challenges that encourage passers-by to manipulate a designed object or add a written/visual element to the glass walls. In this way they would functionally be working across time and with unknown collaborators to iterate and communicate on possible solutions to tricky problems like “how can we help under-privileged children in urban food deserts gain access to healthy/fresh foods?” As the conversation develops in the space, the DI Team would leave messages to encourage students to come and check out the DI HUB spaces and see if they can create an innovative food delivery and supply system.

For a shorter-term DI Challenge, students who have participated in the early DI Fellow training via distance learning technologies, individual students participating from each of the LaunchNET university locations, the KSU Regional Campuses and other national universities could come to the Kent Campus for a long weekend to utilize the range of spaces, facilities and tools in the Creative Cauldron to devise an intervention-style technology to disrupt the potential for human trafficking. Psychology, business, digital science, sociology, communication and information majors could be placed into cross-disciplinary teams and first engage in ‘reframing’ exercises to see if there are potentially some radically different ways to perceive the challenge. From there, they may utilize the visualization technologies present in the future DI HUB to help conceptualize some augmented reality approaches with subtle trigger images to help notify authorities to potential human trafficking activity.