BEIL0007 is offered for the first time in March 2014 as part of the suite of courses under the Built Environment Interdisciplinary Learning (BEIL) initiative. This new course introduces both design and non-design students from the Built Environment degree programs to ‘design thinking’: a creative problem solving process that involves empathic understanding of users, problem reframing and definition, idea generation, and prototyping and testing of ideas, as prerequisites to arriving at meaningful, responsible and sustainable solutions in response to real-world problems. Weekly activities build capabilities in using ideation and innovation strategies to achieve more imaginative and human-focused outcomes. The course culminates with a ‘sustainable innovation challenge’ that integrates the specialized skills of the cross-disciplinary student teams. In the teamwork that occurs, students are expected to contribute the unique insights, theories, methods, communication forms, and other prior skills from their own academic specialization, in order to enrich the learning of their teams as they cooperate and collaborate on assessment tasks. BEIL0007 is convened by Dr Mariano Ramirez, Senior Lecturer in the UNSW Industrial Design Program.
