Supporting Diversity and Inclusion Efforts in Academia
for the Ivy+ Consortium
Project brief
Vice provosts from the Ivy+ Consortium* are collaborating on a multi-institution initiative to increase and support underrepresented populations along the path to faculty.
Led by vice provosts from the University of Chicago and Princeton, the group chose to approach this diversity and inclusion challenge with design thinking. University of Chicago's Design Thinking Lab led an initial workshop in July 2017 (Workshop I) to build context and define areas of opportunity.
Our team of four designers was brought on to synthesize the outputs from Workshop I and develop a second workshop focused on concept development and prototyping.
* Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, Yale
Additional team members: Sarah Braunstein, Jennifer Peterson, Jessica Lee
Synthesizing Workshop I Output
Our first task was to take the 90+ opportunity spaces identified in Workshop I, which spanned the entire academic journey from college to tenure track faculty positions. We clustered the output and abstracted them into three macro-opportunity spaces to be explored in the workshop:
• Rethinking Recruitment
Reframe institutional understanding of where talent comes from, and develop a solution that enables greater access to a more diverse pool of candidates.
• Becoming Faculty
Find ways to bridge the gap between graduate school and faculty positions, and providing support for new faculty members so they can succeed early and often.
• Building Community, Establishing Connection
Help underrepresented populations find and build communities beyond their academic departments. These communities should instill a sense of belonging, encourage the support of relevant research, and create networks of support.
Workshop Development
The workshop needed to cover context building from the prior workshop, structured ideation, concept development, and prototyping. We used the following assets to facilitate these activities.
Context building: Grounding each group’s participants in their specific topic area.
Concept Development: Idea smashing following by journey maps. Groups identified user touchpoints within the initiative and their associated experiences, benefits, and impact.
Facilitation
Considering the audience was not intimately familiar with design, we started the day with a group warm-up to highlight the pitfalls of jumping to solutions too quickly. We then split into groups, each led by a designer. My group, Becoming Faculty, ended the day with a multi-pronged initiative to address the needs of new faculty while also auditing the negative environments that may exist within academic departments at large research institutions.
Structured Ideation: Each group went through several rounds of analogous models ideation, sparking new ideas and discussion based on examples of successful strategies and programs.
Prototyping: Groups created storyboards demonstrating the experience of the initiative from a participant perspective.
Next Steps
Each vice provost will take their group's initiative back to their respective institutions to test and elicit feedback from potential participants and important stakeholders. That feedback will be integrated into a second iteration of each initiative by the UChicago design thinking lab.