Creating and Testing new models for learning

Recognizing that design processes offer powerful tools for transformative, high-impact learning, HEDstudio programs bring diverse students, faculty, and professionals into rigorous, transdisciplinary research. Collaborators utilize an iterative design process to create multimedia products with authentic applications that contribute to public knowledge and literacy.

RATIONALE  Students crave authentic engagement with real-world problems and their solutions, and, increasingly, interdisciplinary design offers students opportunity to work between the arts and content-based disciplines (e.g. humanities and STEM) to impact their world.

Authentic learning experiences cultivate portable skills contemporary employers wish to find in their employees—flexibility, creative problem solving, collaboration, critical judgement and communication—and tackling real-world problems motivates students and builds self-efficacy.

Interdisciplinary design can make research relevant and meaningful to diverse audiences, reducing inequality and building public knowledge. Exerting action against the post-truth paradigm that increasingly defines our time reveals the impact of art and research to students