Design for Professional Responsibility & Business
In the first-year course for students at the Gies College of Business, we designed a three-week module focused on applying the principles of empathy and iteration to students’ professional development. The content was taught to all 900+ freshman business students in the Fall 2020 semester. This collaboration grew from my broader first-year experience curriculum design efforts and provided a different model for how human-centered design could successfully enhance these courses. Our work here opened the door to wider collaborations with the BUS x01 sequence of required courses for business students during each year of the undergraduate experience.
Courses
BUS 101: Professional Responsibility and Business
BUS 302: Principles of Professional Responsibility
Collaborating Instructor
Dr. Aimee Barbeau
Semesters
Spring 2020
Fall 2020
🌱 BACKGROUND
Building on the early success of integrating human-centered design into first-year engineering courses, I approached several other colleges at the University of Illinois about adapting this content into their course. Dr. Aimee Barbeau, the faculty instructor in charge of the first-year course for Gies College of Business, was intrigued and asked if I would join her and curriculum designers from the Center for Innovation in Teaching in Learning in helping to reshape BUS 101: Professional Responsibility and Business. Rather than integrating design through a project in which student teams designed a product or service to address a need, we crafted activities that had students apply design thinking principles to their professional development. This content was inspired by Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans and tailored to the Illinois business student experience.
🛠️ CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
We created a 3-week module centered on empathy and iteration, two core pillars of design thinking. The activities scaffolded reflection, peer feedback, and career readiness:
-
Students articulated a personal “Work View” and “College View”
Encouraged independent reflection on purpose and motivation
-
Peer feedback sessions on work/college views
Resume reflection and editing: Highlighting moments of value and engagement
Developed elevator pitches for the upcoming career fair
-
Created “Odyssey Paths” – three imagined futures exploring different career directions
Prepared to speak with three types of employers at the career fair
-
Mid-Semester: Reflect on career fair conversations and identify “Illinois Inquiries” to explore
End-of-Semester: Revisit and expand Odyssey Paths to envision the next 5 years post-graduation
Activities we implemented were adapted from the popular Designing Your Life book series by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
🚀 IMPLEMENTATION & IMPACT
The BUS 101 curriculum was delivered in discussion sections led by trained upperclassmen. To prepare them, we hosted two instructor training sessions through BUS 302: Principles of Professional Responsibility, which all facilitators take before teaching.
In Summer 2020, we adapted the new content for hybrid delivery, incorporating tools like Miro to facilitate virtual collaboration during the pandemic.
Results
The pilot was well-received and became part of the standard BUS 101 curriculum.
The pilot’s success sparked interest across the full BUS x01 course sequence (101, 201, 301, 401). The business school was in the process of designing the connective tissue between these courses, and there was strong interest in having a thread of design thinking throughout the sequence. The Odyssey Path tool was particularly appealing for BUS 401 as seniors could reflect on whether they took the paths they expected when they were freshmen, and create new Odyssey Paths as they prepared to step into the professional world as graduates.