Virtual Events

Design is increasingly applied as a concept in business and society. However, while a profound question, how we design our lives can seem a challenging, even amorphous or elusive notion. To support a systematic approach to life design, Stanford University have developed an approach called Designing Your Life, which aims to provide a set of resources for systematically applying concepts and principles from design thinking, often used in product and technology development, to designing one’s life.  Designing Your Life is not envisioned as a prescriptive methodology but rather a range of approaches that can be adapted to support a hopefully more informed understanding and enactment of career and life aspirations, goals and plans.  Designing Futures is a new programme at NUI Galway, funded by the HEA’s Human Capital Initiative, which aims to contribute to students’ rounded, holistic development by coordinating a range of innovations to enhance their educational experience. These include a developmental support service for students, Success Coaching, as well as Designing Your Life. The focus of Designing Futures is to enhance our graduates’ employability, through promoting greater engagement with civic society, community and enterprise during their studies, while enhancing their overall education and preparedness for life in the challenging future now emerging, post-pandemic.  

This talk will explore the potential of design thinking and Designing Your Life at NUI Galway.  Learn more about the framework, tools, and most importantly hear from our colleague Dr. Marc Hunsaker about how they integrated this wonderful programme at Berry College.  We will also hear from the Student Success Coaches about how this is playing out at NUI Galway and some initial feedback from the early prototypes. 

Vertically Integrated Projects are longitudinal research projects addressing grand challenges in which UG students, often led by PG students, work in teams under the supervision of academic Principal Investigators.

Students can take a VIP as an elective in one or several semesters, as their curriculum allows. VIPs were developed at Georgia tech and over 40 universities around the world have adopted them. They provide students with the opportunity to engage in a significant research project, learn and practise valuable professional skills and provide PIs with “free” manpower.

In the NUI Galway model, students will be trained in research methods centrally, freeing up PIs to focus on mentoring actual research activity.

Faculty from any and all disciplines are welcome to propose VIPs.  Proposals for VIPs that involve input from several disciplines are especially welcome. The student applications will be managed centrally, enabling PIs to choose the best mix of students for their VIP from the pool of applicants. This event will provide examples of VIPs in other universities and some possibilities for VIPs at NUI Galway, and explain how VIPs will be managed.

The Designing Futures programme is developing a set of for-credit transdisciplinary electives that enable students to develop “skills for life”: professional skills that will help them achieve their potential in their professional and personal lives. A special feature of these classes is their diversity: students from across the university learn together from academics drawn from across the university. In co-developing and co-teaching these electives, academics also learn from this transdisciplinary experience, and discover colleagues with similar research and teaching interests but from very different disciplines, and who bring very different and enriching perspectives to topics of mutual interest.

This briefing session will feature the experiences of the class coordinators of the first two transdisciplinary electives to run: Introduction to Sustainability and Megatrends, and plans for further roll-out of additional electives.