After 8 years of academic administration and 4 years as a Deputy in government, Moura Quayle was asked by Dan Muzyka, Dean of the Sauder School of Business at UBC, to join his Faculty in order to introduce design thinking into the business curriculum.
Moura is a newcomer to the business school. A designer by education and inclination – the built environment kind – she has moved on to designing and transforming organizations and learning environments. Building on her experiences, she has become Professor of Thinking Strategies for the Sauder. With the support of an administrative leave, Moura visited business schools in the San Francisco Bay area, in London, in England and in Melbourne/Sydney to get informed about what was happening at the intersection of design/sustainability and business. She then spent two months at the Copenhagen Business School helping to build a strategic alliance the Sauder School of Business.
This reinvention of Moura’s professional life and the work of her passionate team led to the creation of the d.studio.
In Year 1 we experimented with several d.studio pilots and realized the value of embedding design thinking into business curricula.
In Year 2 we discovered that design thinking is just one of many thinking strategies needed by business school graduates. To illustrate this, we created a series of Thinking Strategies in Action case illustrations for posting on the web site and for use in workbooks. We are currently working with faculty members in business disciplines to further test the Thinking Strategy and studio concept. Embedding design thinking and other alternative strategies is not easy; most strategies need to be practiced in a setting that differs from a traditional, lecture-based classroom. Teaching the strategies may be best achieved through a studio-based approach, one rooted in the traditions and skills of “practice”.
In Year 3 we will explore and expand a partnership opportunity with the City of Vancouver to provide more students with studio learning experience, focusing on Thinking Strategies and application to real business problems in the post-carbon economy. We are also forging a relationship with our colleagues from Applied Science to establish collaboration across campus among faculty, staff, and students, with the following goals:
- Understand the differences and similarities in how common principles and language for design and creativity are perceived and practiced across disciplines;
- Develop a set of teaching and learning resources for design and creativity, as well as course modules for common use, that acknowledge and try to understand differing ways that design is thought about and practiced;
- Deploy some of these resources in courses that are currently taught by the co-applicants; and through all of this
- Build a focused, campus-wide Community of Practice (CoP) around “thinking strategies” and “design thinking”.
We are also working on a complementary strategy provisionally entitled the ‘b-studio’ which would offer assistance to companies, government and for social benefit groups in tackling challenging problems in a collaborative design process.
