Education is a collaborative social effort to better prepare, equip, and empower humans to design and enable better futures. In this pursuit, I have created, taught, and co-led graduate courses at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health (HSPH), Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), IIT Institute of Design (ID), and Lucerne School of Art and Design (LSAD). I have also created executive education for senior leadership in corporations, foundations, and public sector. Below are short descriptions of the graduate courses I have created and their respective institutions.
Cities for Well-Being
Worldwide, urban developers and government institutions are exploring holistic approaches that can promote healthier, happier, and more prosperous lifestyles. This course presents to students a new model that can support organizations across sectors to incorporate considerations of the diversity of everyday experiences into urban interventions that can contribute to the well-being of urban dwellers. (HSPH)
Design for Social Innovation
While public health has made tremendous improvements in countless lives, many of the most perplexing health problems remain unsolved. Often these seemingly intractable problems are caused by behaviors driven by culture, emotion and other factors that are difficult to measure. This course exposes students from Harvard and universities in the Boston Area to advanced design frameworks and methods that can provide a complementary approach to the science of public health. (HSPH)
Sustainable Systems
This course exposes students to the complexity of sustainable development. Through case studies, students explore systems design approaches and key concepts of industrial ecology, circular economy, and system-thinking, and learn on how environmental performance approaches can inform more sustainable design practices. (ID)
Sustainable Solutions Seminar
Even though it is well acknowledged that the unprecedented interconnectivity of the world economy, the global society, and the natural environment has a direct impact in the well-being of communities, change makers still struggle to understand how this condition should be incorporated into new livelihoods. In this course students learn key principles and concepts on complex adaptive systems and systems design to explore value creation in new economies through multiple innovation lenses. (ID)
See Change, Sketch Tomorrow
This course exposes students to two design models that can help organizations integrate considerations of human behavior, resources flow, and organizational strategies into infrastructural interventions. Students learn a new methodology that connects the models, helping teams identify patterns of behavior and resources flow at the population level from personal experiences and transform them into value creation opportunities. (ID)
Leading Teams for Public Impact
Scalable leadership requires working with and through others. Teams have become the preferred working unit for organizations and governance, addressing policy innovation and multi-sector problems. As community problems increase in scope and complexity, delivering change via teams is increasingly necessary. The purpose of this course is to help individuals succeed in leading and managing teams in public and private settings using design knowledge to frame social problems and explore systemic solutions. (HKS)
Innovation Lenses
Despite notable advances that discourses around sustainability-centered innovation practices have achieved, they are still leaving an exponentially growing environmental and social degenerative footprint. This course introduces students to eight lenses capable of advancing sustainability- and equity-oriented efforts. (ID)
Sustainability Challenges
Even though design has developed approaches that helped specific organizations meet the perceived needs of their selected market segments, environmental concerns and structural social barriers are yet to be incorporated into the field’s practices. This course exposes students to systemic and behavioral design frameworks that can help organizations link social, ecological, and technical aspects into their strategies, operations, and offerings to reach sustainable and equitable solutions. (LSAD)