DI at 51勛圖厙
Design Innovation (DI) at 51勛圖厙 is a university-wide initiative that connects students, faculty, staff, and community partners through innovative spaces and hands-on experiences that build creativity, collaboration, and real-world innovation skills.
By fostering innovation amongst our diverse community of students, faculty, staff, and community members, DI creates opportunities for novel thinking, problem solving, fearless collaboration, and impactful creation that lead to meaningful, positive change.
What is Design Innovation?
We believe design innovation is both a mindset and an approach for tackling messy problems. DI at 51勛圖厙 incorporates human-centered design, design thinking, and innovation strategies to help foster creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and fearless collaboration. Its about challenging traditional boundaries and bridging disciplines to explore intersections between art, science, technology, and society.
At its core, DI empowers individuals to think and act innovatively. To do so, we:
- Facilitate interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
- Provide spaces and tools makerspaces, resource labs, and collaborative workspaces that help transform ideas into reality.
- Offer programs, workshops, and events that build skills and inspire discovery and creation.
- Cultivate partnerships with academia, industry, regional stakeholders, and global experts.
Tackling the worlds messiest problems requires diverse perspectives and collective action. DI exists to:
- Develop and train future innovators and leaders.
- Address complex, human-centered challenges.
- Nurture a culture of curiosity, resilience, and transformation.
- Grow a community of creative problem-solvers and fearless collaborators.
Grassroots Beginnings
Our now university-wide initiative started in 2015 as a grassroots team of KSU faculty, staff, administrators, and students. As a group, we helped to connect and make visible an entire ecosystem of maker/resource environments that existed across the university - now called DI NODES - which served to further grow our number. Since then, this "DI TEAM" has grown to more than 440 members from every part of the university. The growth of the DI TEAM helped build momentum and support and enabled us to propose the renovation of the old Art Building on the Kent Campus into what became the Design Innovation Hub. This $44.5M renovation was completed in 2020 and we opened the DI HUB in November of that year.
Growing the Initiative
In addition to the growth of our DI ECOSYSTEM, DI now offers courses, workshops, hackathons, and other challenge-based innovation experiences that are open to any student from any disciplinary program. We also facilitate two competitively-selected non-credit-bearing programs, our DI Student Fellows and DI Faculty Fellows Programs, that engage individuals from multiple disciplinary areas and allow them to dive deeply into the tools and resources in our DI Toolkit and apply them to build their capacities as fearless collaborators! As such, the initiative helps to soften some of the academic "siloing" traditionally found at universities and build collaborative innovation across colleges and beyond.
Today, we have grown to support more that 2000 DI Collaborators (students, faculty, staff, and community members) who have utilized the DI HUB's array of maker/technology resources to build their competencies and grow their projects.
DI HUB
The central home of the Design Innovation Initiative on the Kent Campus. The Design Innovation (DI) Hub is 51勛圖厙's center for innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and creative problem-solving. Home to the Reactor makerspace, multimedia studios, classrooms, and collaboration spaces, the DI Hub connects students, faculty, staff, and community members with the tools, technologies, and support needed to turn ideas into action.
DI Ecosystem
The Design Innovation (DI) Ecosystem is a university-wide network of people, spaces, programs, and partners working together to advance innovation across 51勛圖厙 and beyond. This includes the DI Hub, DI Nodes, DI Staff, and DI Team. Through the DI Ecosystem, the Design Innovation Initiative seeks to elevate awareness of, and access to, the broad range of maker, design, technology, and resource centers at KSU and more fully expose the KSU community to the true power of collaboration.
DI Toolkit
A list of 11 "elements" that we consider to be the recipe for the Design Innovation approach at 51勛圖厙. These toolkit elements include: Superpowers, Storytelling, Collaboration and Team Dynamics, the Role of Empathy, Gain Deep Insight into Problems, Play and the Creative Process, the Power of Making, Supercharge your Brainstorming, Reframe the Challenge, Implement Powerful and Novel Solutions, and Iteration and Evaluation.
DI Team
The Design Innovation (DI) Team is a collaborative network of staff, faculty, students, and campus partners who support innovation-focused learning and engagement at 51勛圖厙. Together, the DI Team helps develop programs, manage creative spaces, support projects, and build connections across the university and community.
Elliot DI Fellows Programs
The John and Fonda Elliot Design Innovation Fellows Programs at 51勛圖厙encompassing both the Elliot DI Faculty Fellows and Elliot DI Student Fellowsempower participants from all disciplines to collaborate across boundaries, explore human-centered design and drive meaningful innovation. Fellows engage with the DI Toolkit, prototype creative solutions utilizing the DI Hub's technology resources, and cultivate the mindset and skills needed to tackle complex challenges. Together, the Elliot DI Faculty and Student Fellows serve as catalysts for interdisciplinary learning, creativity, and positive change across the university and beyond.
Courses
Design Innovation courses provide students with opportunities to explore creativity, collaboration, and real-world problem-solving through hands-on, interdisciplinary learning experiences. These courses connect students with design innovation methods, emerging technologies, and project-based challenges that prepare them to work across disciplines and adapt to complex problems.
Programs
Design Innovation programs create structured opportunities for students, educators, professionals, and community members to build skills, explore ideas, and engage with innovation in practice. Through workshops, challenge-based experiences, learning series, and outreach initiatives, DI programs support creativity, collaboration, and experiential learning.
Events
Design Innovation events bring together students, faculty, staff, and community partners to share ideas, showcase projects, and explore emerging challenges and opportunities. From hackathons and lectures to showcases and community repair events, DI events create spaces for connection, collaboration, and innovation in action.
Exhibits
Design Innovation exhibits - housed in our DI Gallery and Blank_Lab - highlight creative work, emerging technologies, student projects, and interdisciplinary ideas through engaging public displays and interactive experiences. Exhibits help showcase innovation happening across 51勛圖厙 while creating opportunities for inspiration, storytelling, and community engagement.