Students in one of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’s most popular courses, Product Innovation Lab, partnered with Hape, an international educational toy company, during the spring semester, designing toys for preschool-aged children that incorporate imaginative play and compounds like slime, playdough and kinetic sand.
As an introduction to hands-on, team-based product design through the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, the course has students work in small teams, each tasked with turning an idea into a market-ready product in the space of a semester. Volunteer industry mentors act as “lab instructors,” working closely with students each week to help them overcome challenges. The final presentation, “PLAYsentations,” showcased each team’s final concepts through a live theatrical performance in front of a packed audience on May 7.
While the final presentation might be a little out of the ordinary, the overall course is structured to represent teamwork in the workplace, providing students with collaborative experience applicable in almost any field. The course attracts students in a number of majors, from mechanical engineering to design fields.
“Part of the value of a course like this is teaching you how to effectively communicate with others, to overcome those challenges in a positive way so that as you build and and cross these hurdles, you become stronger as a team,” says Nicolas Donoso, a product design major. “It's a really valuable skill.”
Donoso says even the theater presentation has been a valuable learning experience:
“One of the key things within design is telling a compelling story, and I think that the presentation structure really helps you understand and distill your idea down to that core story and communicate that effectively.”
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- Architecture and Design
