Starting in the Fall, my girlfriend, partner and general ‘best-thing-ever’, will be teaching a class together at the School of the Art Institute. It has the fancy title of “Innovation Workshop” and it’s a seven week continuing studies class, mixing degree seeking and non-degree seeking students.
Funnily enough, at this point there’s no one registered for it, but hopefully in the next few weeks there’s been hundreds of people clamoring for pearls of wisdom. I’m waiting patiently for the right moment to shout, “Come on people, this class isn’t going to teach itself you know!”
I work as a designer at IDEO, which is leader in the field of design and innovation and when I was approached by the head of the school of continuing studies for the SAIC it quickly became clear that I would need some help. And this is where my partner in crime comes in. Class, meet your co-lecturer, Sara Cantor.
Now Sara works as a Researcher and Retail Planner at RTC, a retail design and strategy company. Also, with her Masters in Design Planning at the Institute of Design, she is not only uniquely positioned to talk about innovation strategy, but she still maintains many of the principles from her graduate degree.
What I’m excited about with this class is the opportunity for Sara and I to work together in a completely new way (teaching as opposed to running a business together). I’m looking forward to seeing how our fields of expertise, namely design and research, will play together to create a fair and open discussion about innovation. And lastly, I’m really excited to see how our students will be.
Our hopes are to open the students’ minds to an understanding that innovation and design are powerful forces and they are shaping the world around them everyday.
