Empowered by Design

What if everyday services worked better for everyone?

A trip to the library. A bus ride across Cincinnati. A hospital check-in. Everyday services shape how people participate in their communities — but they do not work equally well for everyone.

Empowered by Design is a studio-style course that takes everyday life in Cincinnati as its laboratory. Throughout the semester, we will explore public and for-profit services through field trips across the city. With each experience, we will learn to move beyond our individual perspectives as the basis for decision-making, develop a critical eye for assessing the systems behind everyday interactions, understand services as cohesive journeys, and use these insights to redesign services so they are more understandable, inclusive, and empowering.

Our experiential learning will be informed by scholarship in social innovation and service design. Perspectives, mindsets, methods, and tools introduced through complementary readings will provide new lenses through which to examine everyday interactions. Drawing on the collaborative approach of service design, we will systematically analyze the relationships among people, systems, organizations, spaces, and technologies.

Empowered by Design does not require any previous design experience. Students from every major are welcome. Bring your knowledge of health, technology, business, education, policy, the social sciences, communication, the arts, or another field, and learn how to apply it collaboratively to address complex social challenges.

Informed by the field trips and working as part of an interdisciplinary team, you will investigate a real service, identify where people encounter obstacles, and develop a proposal for redesigning the experience to give a wider range of citizens greater agency. Rather than solving a hypothetical classroom problem, you will learn to recognize how everyday systems distribute access, opportunity, information, and power. You will conclude the semester by pitching your proposal to professionals from the public and private sectors.