(see also: Fall Schedule)

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What is the popUp Curriculum?

There are a lot of nuggets of learning buried in any given course and many of them would be interesting and useful or even really important to people who will never take that course. And there are questions we have right now, today, this hour, for which "go take a course on X" is NOT an answer. I know a music professor who does an incredible piece on improvisation that would be pure gold for my public policy students. When my rapid prototyping students ask why some 3d printer filament melts at a higher temperature, I could say, "Well, that's polymer chemistry. You can take chem 1 and then chem 2 and then organic 1 and 2 and at the end of organic 2 you get to polymers…." But that's just not going to happen. Alternatively, I can call up my colleague in the chemistry department and arrange for a one hour basic introduction to plastics and polymers for tomorrow afternoon.

The popUp curriculum consists of short, independent learning sessions that are scheduled opportunistically. Most commonly they'll be 2 to 3 hour workshops, but sometimes they'll be a series of meetings over a few days or weeks. They can happen because a workshop leader happens to be in town or because an instructor has identified a "right now" skill need. Or they may occur when a few instructors realize their courses have an overlap that can be "popped out" and shared. Or faculty have identified ancillary skills that make sense at a particular point in a cohort's developmental trajectory. Or pedagogical auxiliaries such as career services can offer a training that gets extra bang when it can be "co-branded" with the popUp series. Or a field trip opportunity that doesn't fall under just one course presents itself. Or we want to take advantage of non-traditional teaching resources - such as the facilities person who is a master wood worker - that would not fit into the conventions of course-based learning.

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In this very tip-of-the-iceberg workshop we'll get introduced to Autodesk's 123Design software and learn how to design a 3D object, export the design as a digital file in STL format and then load it onto a 3D printer platform, process it for 3D printing, and then print it.

We won't become experts at any of these, but we will see what the reality behind these buzzwordy things is and we will learn the workflow involved in using 3D printing to prototype as well as learning what software we might want to learn and what hardware we might want to acquire.

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This workshop will introduce students to Autodesk's 123d Design and 123d Make software. The former allows you to create digital models of 3d objects and the latter turns these models into quick prototypes in a variety of media. We will focus on simple geometric objects and fabrication in folded paper in this first lesson. We will hint at how the output could be cut on a laser cutter and printed on a 3d printer.

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We will visit a maker/hacker space in Oakland, get to know the folks there, see what the opportunities are.

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Whether one leans toward the qualitative or the quantitative, a critical skill for the entrepreneur, policy analyst, innovator, natural or social scientist, and citizen is to be able to "size things up," either in one's head or on the back of the proverbial envelope. It's one of the most basic skills of critical thinking — before we engage in complex and time consuming analyses, we need to have a ballpark idea of what the numbers are likely to be. In this module participants will learn the importance of along with the basics of how to do "back of the envelope calculations"

We know from studies of real world behavior that we are subject to bounded rationality — we rarely have all the information we'd like, the time or techniques to fully analyze the information we have, the luxury of complete rationality. But we this does not give us an excuse to put our heads in the sand or just to "wing it." Back of the envelope (BOTE) or Fermi calculations are a solution to this problem. They are not a natural talent, they are a learned skill.

Ultimately, this topic is about making optimal use of the time and information available to produce the best possible guestimate.

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Autodesk's 123D Circuits application is a web-based breadboard editor with realtime circuit simulation.
You can design circuits, draw schematics, create circuit boards, and all of it collaboratively.
This workshop will introduce students to the circuit editor and simulator.

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People spend years studying electronics and circuits. Are we insane for thinking you can learn anything meaningful in a single concentrated session? Perhaps, but we'll try, one step at a time.. In this hands-on workshop we will introduce the basics of DC circuits. Topics will include voltage, current, and resistance, measuring with a multi-meter, batteries, simple light-bulb circuit, Ohm's law, Kirchoff's law, parallel vs. series circuits, five simple circuits.

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One omnipresent manifestation of disruption in the contemporary world is the end of mainstream journalism as the primary gatekeeper of public informedness. One piece of this is "citizen" and "community" journalism. The latter refers to coverage that focuses on the extremely local - neighborhoods instead of nations - and the former refers to non-journalists being the collectors and disseminators of news. Citizen journalism sometimes goes by names such as "participatory," "street," or "public." In this module we will learn the lay of the land - a quick history to provide context, pros and cons from the perspective of professional journalists and activists, types of tools currently being used, and hear from some insiders on where the phenomenon is likely to be headed.

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Has it been a while since you re-read Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre (1810) or Josef Alber's Interaction of Color (1963) ? Do paint chips make your brain swim?

This workshop will introduce participants to color and interactions among colors and how artists and designers think about color steering a path between theory-speak and ready-to-use palettes.

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In this workshop you will learn the deep "why" of rapid prototyping and several techniques for building prototypes of physical objects, services, and organizational rules with ordinary, close-to-hand materials.

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d3 (data driven documents) is an awesome javascript tool for creating amazing interactive graphics. For students who know javascript, acquiring facility with d3 is straightforward. But even if js is completely new to you, we can give you enough basics that you'll be able to appreciate the beauty and power of d3 and have an idea of how to learn more. That's what we'll do in this workshop.

From the d3 website:

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

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Design thinking is (hopefully) not just about creating consumer products and experiences and works of art. The social value of design thinking also includes the claim that it can contribute to the solution of real world problems. In recent years advocates of design thinking have argued (and demonstrated) its value in tackling such problems, but this idea has its critics too. In this module we will explore the two sides of the conversation with a look at several concrete examples and then run a mini design charrette focused on a problem like those in the examples.

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We will use mini LED circuits we build in a separate workshop and the cameras on our smart phones to create photos of light drawings.

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A Wikipedia Editathon is like a hackathon but the focus is on editing Wikipedia content rather than creating something in code. Some Editathons focus on a particular topic and some focus on getting more involvement by a particular group. Our popUp Editathon will have as its primary purpose our collective transformation from consumers/users of open online content like Wikipedia to being a part of their production.

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A crucial step in the innovation process is the assessment of the problem and a crucial step in the assessment of the problem is listening to people. But listening does not always mean just hearing what people say. We also want to observe what people actually do with the end goal of trying to understand how they think and how they feel. Some of the techniques we use to do this are borrowed from anthropology. In this workshop we will learn how three of these work: free listing, pile sorting, and triad tests.

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We don't mean design that's experimental, we mean the design of experiments!

Experiments are the heart of innovation, but experiments poorly designed are worse than no experiment at all. It turns out that a lot is known about how to design experiments and this module will introduce students to the basic logic of experimental design, a set of standard designs, and the most common tools for analyzing the results of each design.

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Autodesk is a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Their premiere workspace is located in San Francisco at Pier 9 along the Embarcadero. On this field trip students will see the workspace of their dreams, meet some of Autodesk's artists in residence, and hear about some of the latest in 3d design and fabrication.

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We will visit the Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco. The program is a unique art and education program that provides Bay Area artists with access to discarded materials, a stipend, and a large studio space at the Recology Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center. By supporting artists who work with recycled materials, Recology hopes to encourage people to conserve natural resources and promote new ways of thinking about art and the environment.

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If you are adult and you have never picked up a hammer, a violin, a scalpel, a sewing needle, or a chef's knife, you might never. Strange objects, especially those we associate with expert use, can be so intimidating that we shrink back and leave them to others. In this series, we will offer participants a genuine hands-on experience. Our approach will be one of gentle vigor. Designed for real absolute beginners.

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Everyone (thinks s/he) knows what a flowchart is, but most people don't know enough about them to exploit them. In a brief workshop we'll teach two useful skills: how to draw disciplined flow charts and how to structure the analysis of a problem by step-wise refinement. The latter, it will turn out, is a technique at the heart of the discipline of rapid prototyping and iterative design. We will see how these techniques are useful across the disciplines to insure productivity and error-free results.

Resources
Charts & diagrams at Critical Thinking Web

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Most users of Excel never get beyond the basics. This popUp will introduce participants to a wide range of extremely useful techniques that will quickly be filed under "I can't believe I've never known how to do this." Participants will take a giant leap toward becoming a power user of these programs in just two hours. We guarantee the skills you learn here will save you many, many hours over the course of your college career and beyond. Plus you will be a hit at parties.

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Most users of Word never get beyond the basics. This popUp will introduce participants to a wide range of extremely useful techniques that will quickly be filed under "I can't believe I've never known how to do this." Participants will take a giant leap toward becoming a power user of these programs in just two hours. We guarantee the skills you learn here will save you many, many hours over the course of your college career and beyond. Plus you will be a hit at parties.

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When the practiced eye looks at a page or a poster or a room and declares it good design or bad design, what are they talking about? It can take years of work to attain an "expert's eye," but practitioners in many fields can benefit from greater familiarity with some of the formal principles of design. In this workshop we will introduce, illustrate, and get a little hands-on practice with concepts such as balance, emphasis, movement, pattern, repetition, proportion, rhythm, variety, and unity.

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Many of us carry around a device that has the capacity to be digital audio recording device that's more sophisticated than anyone but serious professionals had access to just a few years ago. In this workshop we will get pointers on how to make the best recordings using popular iOs and Android phones and how to use some common apps to make the most of those recordings. The apps will include those that allow for text indexed recordings, simple audio editing, cloud storage, etc.

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You never know when won't have a key and you need to get into a box or door that has a lock on it.* Even as things move toward card swipes (big brother watching your every coming and going), good old locks and keys will be around for a while. Lock picking is a serious skill that takes a long time to get really good at, but you can develop beginner level competence pretty quickly. Plus, it's cool to understand how locks work. In this workshop we will learn how to use lock pick tools to open the most basic kind of pin tumbler lock.

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Erving Goffman once noted that whenever humans encounter one another there is an exchange of information, some of which is "given" and some of which is "given off." Some of the latter lies in our body size and shape and the style of our clothes, but a lot more of is found in the flood of subtle signals we broadcast, mostly unconsciously, by the way we tilt our head, move our hands, breath, laugh, make eye contact, and stand. In this workshop we'll learn about how to read the body language of others and how to temper our own behavior so we are sending signals that are consistent with the overt and explicit messages we want to communicate when we meet people, work on teams, and give presentations.

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Many of us harbor a certain reverence for those who call themselves engineers, even if we are not sure what they do. If we stop and look, the first thing we notice is that engineers come in many flavors. What do they have in common? What habits of mind and styles of working constitute "engineer thinking"? In this session we will look at how engineers solve practical problems by exploring the limits of things.

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Collaboration with "community" partners sounds like the kind of good and moral idea that nobody could ever think was a bad idea. And so it might be, but that doesn't mean it's easy or straightforward. In this workshop we will hear from some folks who have worked on the front lines, getting a sense of the wide variety of situations which fall under the umbrella "community partners," a little theory that helps us to understand generically why these situations can be so challenging, and then some practical training in how to use your beginner level experiences to develop the capacity to have more effective relationships in the long run.

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For two years now, IDEO.org has partnered with Acumen to offer a course for those interested in learning about and practicing human-centered design. We will join the over 67,000 individuals from 148 countries who have already embarked on their learning experience, and become part of our flourishing community of innovative problem solvers.

This workshop will continue over 7 weeks as we constitute one or more design teams here at Mills.

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"Ideation" is sort of like brainstorming, but not quite the same. In this workshop we'll learn what ideation is and how to do it by engaging in a series of ideation exercises.

Some of these exercises will involve drawing, others might involve acting things out. Mainly we want to free our minds to simultaneously concentrate intensely on a problem and to be free to discover and generate all manner of solutions that have never existed. We'll encourage analogical and lateral thinking, sketching, and building one new idea on top of another.

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Design thinking is (hopefully) not just about creating consumer products and experiences and works of art. The social value of design thinking also includes the claim that it can contribute to the solution of real world problems. In recent years advocates of design thinking have argued (and demonstrated) its value in tackling such problems, but this idea has its critics too. In this module we will explore the two sides of the conversation with a look at several concrete examples and then run a mini design charrette focused on a problem like those in the examples.

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A few times a month we will host an innovation related meetup at the Mills Innovation Lab.

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These sessions will feature visits by a successful innovators from a wide variety of fields. Participants will have the opportunity to hear the innovator's story and pose their own questions.

Some of these sessions may be more like a public lecture, others a panel discussion, and some more like a small master class. Examples for this year: Goldieblox, Even, Moxxly, Educents.

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Another Innovators Face to Face session. Educents is the first and only marketplace for educational products. We believe in affordable education. By providing teachers and parents with access to educational products all in one place, they can discover products that will inspire learning in their children, all while saving them time and lowering the cost. Now educators & parents are able to find the best resources at the lowest price on the internet – saving them a whopping $15 million in just 18 months. Mills grads???

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Even is a small venture-backed team of designers and engineers. We're building a new type of bank: one purposefully designed to help people build liquid assets and escape poverty.
We're starting with a huge and largely hidden problem: income volatility.
The US government funds a research program called the Financial Diaries. In their first study, they asked a large and varied group of the working poor to choose between "make more money" and "make more stable income." 77% of people chose the latter. They chose predictable money over *more money*!
Why? As our economy trends towards flexible labor, millions and millions of Americans are suffering from tremendously painful income volatility. With Even, these workers can get a steady paycheck, every week, with the job they already have. In good weeks, we automatically set money aside. And in bad weeks, we give our customers credit with no interest.
It's expensive to be poor. We're fixing that, and we need your help.

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Moxxly is a female-founded San Francisco based startup whose mission is to take the guesswork out of modern motherhood through beautiful, connected devices. Moxxly’s first product is a smart, stylish, and high performing breast pump system that enables today’s mobile mom to pump wherever she is, with her shirt on, while receiving real-time data about her supply. Moxxly is a proud alum of PCH International's Highway 1 hardware incubator as well as a current participant in Stanford's StartX accelerator.

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Organizational consultant Edward deBono developed a playful mechanism for group collaboration and meetings that involves the idea that there are six different hats one can wear when working with others. Sometimes we are in the mode of clarifying what we are doing - managing ourselves in the meeting; sometimes we need to surface some information, get the facts; sometimes we are expressing feelings; sometimes we need to be logical and analytical; sometimes we cheerlead; and sometimes we provoke and encourage investigation. The six hats method encourages self-consciousness about each of these functions. In this workshop we'll learn to recognize them and to employ the "hats" to structure meetings and interactions within meetings to achieve big productivity gains and reduce the amount of time wasted in meetings.

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Law is often a feature of the world that we experience the same way a goldfish experiences the water in its bowl; it's all around us but we take it for granted. Most of us don't think about law or legal systems or legal institutions as something that might be consciously designed. But that's wrong. In this workshop we will connect with the Legal Innovation Lab at USC's Gould School of Law to learn what legal innovation is all about and to explore partnerships between workshop participants and law students who are working in the LIL.

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Startups are legendary as an opportunity for "on the job" training, but there is no need to re-invent every wheel. In this popUp participants will be introduced to practices that have emerged in the area of "lean startups" and then will work, workshop-style, on putting these into practice in series of fun, but provocative, exercises.

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This small workshop will extend over three sessions. In it, we will build a 3D printer from a kit (or maybe more than one!). We will learn a bit of engineering along the way - how the 3d printer and its parts work - and develop our manual dexterity. In a follow up session we will learn how to design 3d objects in software and how to transfer them to the 3d printer for fabrication. This workshop has limited enrollment as there are only so many hands that can fit into the space around a work-in-progress.

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Instructables.com is an amazing collection of DIY how-tos for everything from a home-made airconditioner to an electromechanical insect. In this popUp we'll pick a few really interesting ones ahead of time, source the necessary materials, and then spend a day making some really cool things. We'll not so much have an instructor as a team of technique advisors who will participate by demonstrating any special skills or answering questions along the way.

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One motto of the maker movement is "It ain't broke, take it apart and fix it." Another, often seen on T-shirts, is "I void warranties" (by taking the back off of things). In this workshop we will learn to and learn by taking common everyday objects apart. We'll strip them down carefully, learning how they work along the way and preserving the parts for who knows what next project. We'll also have the task of creating some sort of art object that conveys how the machine works (e.g., a posed "exploded view," an animation of the parts coming out, a stylized schematic). Objects we'll work on may include ink jet printers, a computer keyboards, watches or alarm clocks, hair dryers, blenders, headphones, lamps, and cameras. We will keep a special eye out for usable components like motors, gears, switches, and the like.

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This is a middle-beginners workshop on how to fabricate objects out of wood. This session assumes the knowledge you gain in our "first touch" series on working with wood.

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A monthly series involving a presentation from or visit to a "maker space" or "fab lab" in Oakland for networking, inspiration, and collaboration. Candidates include:

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"Media Training" means different things to different people in different contexts. This workshop covers the basic and maps the lay of the land. We start with an overview of the variety of media one is likely to encounter in our work, how they are similar and how they are different. We then look at what we think of as a portfolio of media skills - being interviewed live and not, crafting a press release, responding to requests for interviews, the special case of student/campus media outlets, what you can expect your "media person" to accomplish for you. The hands-on portion of the workshop will include a simulation exercise where teams craft a message and are interviewed by actual reporters.

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In the wake of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden it is easy to think that the topic of information and governments is a new one but it's not.

This module will deliver a historical and conceptual framework for thinking about the informational relationship between people and the state. The framing will be historical and philosophical but the focus will be on efforts over the last decade or so and the current state of the art in government information APIs and the like.

After a brief overview of the "open government" movement we will explore recent developments and undertake an exercise in applying design thinking to some data available in the greater LA area in a sort of mini-hackathon (with, perhaps, more emphasis on what we would do if we had more time than on coding up anything on the spot).

Resources

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What does "open source" really mean? How does Wikipedia work? What is a creative commons license? What kind of attribution do you need to give for various kinds of borrowings? How can you make it clear to people that you want them to use your stuff? How do libraries/communities like Autodesk and Thingiverse work? Why would you want to open source YOUR stuff? What do you need to do to do that?

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Origami is at once an ancient art, a brain and hand skill, and a set of ideas that are turning out to have relevance in fields as far away as robotics and protein chemistry. In this workshop we will hear about some of this breadth of relevance and we will learn how to make very cool things from sheets of paper.

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There's lots of evidence that even tech savvy web users don't know enough about maintaining online reputations. Some of us know some things, others other things. In this workshop we will try to provide a rising tide that raises all our boats to a higher level of sophistication on this score.

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This workshop introduces a few principles of graphic design and some do's and don't's for creating poster presentations of research work. We will create mockups of a conference poster using materials from our own research and prepare to convert these into digital form.

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For Reunion/Family Weekend, the Eduvation Design Center will put on a series of workshops to introduce itself to the community. We'll have a fun group exercise called the "marshmallow challenge," we'll have a workshop on rapid prototyping for people who work in NGOs, a panel discussion with Oakland innovators, a hands-on workshop for kids (lock picking, perhaps), and a reception to describe the out of the box plans we have for the space.

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Handshakes, wine, forks, introductions, small talk. How to hold your own in unfamiliar social environments. How to order in a fine restaurant. Answering the phone, composing an email, sending a thank you note. This workshop has as its primary goal "cultivation" : raising your awareness and teaching you the kinds of skills you need for making good etiquette second nature.

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Awash in technology it's easy to overlook sewing as a art/craft/technique. In this popUp we will learn by doing - a quick tour that will run from threading a needle to cutting fabric to sewing a seam to how one visualizes a garment or object to be sewn from scratch. We won't be able to do much more than scratch the surface but by the end of the workshop you'll be well on your way to knowing your way around a sewing machine and learning more.

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Sometimes the ability to relate your good idea to others is more important than the innate quality of the idea itself. From its origin (perhaps) in the media industry (most notably film and journalism), the idea of "the pitch" - a concise description of a project presented by an author, artist, or journalist to an editor, supervisor or funder with the goal of landing an assignment - has spread in recent years to all areas of business and entrepreneurship. This module is a voice-/body-/hands-on workshop in the art of the pitch. We'll learn about the different contexts of pitching and how they affect what works and we'll learn how to develop, practice, and deliver a pitch as well as engage in the give and take that goes with them. If time and interest permit we'll also explore the creation of a video pitch in the style of Kickstarter videos.

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What are the risks when really smart people build really successful economic organizations and become significant public actors? Is Uber a good thing? Are we silly to worry about privacy and Facebook? Should Amazon have drones? Should Google honor the right to be forgotten. This module introduces a critical look at the pro- and contra- social attitudes that can emerge in this context. After grappling with some introductory and core texts we will have a student forum and interaction with outside speakers with a range of takes on the issue.

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It is easy to get discouraged when time management is talked about as an individual skill or even an moral virtue. In this we focus on time management as a practice rather than a trait and we emphasize both its individual and group/team aspects. We will try to impart a small handful of good practices but the the main take-away will be a sense of the the underlying issues and a feel for the wide variety of available tools and a healthy dose of skepticism about the idea that a tool will solve your time issues.
Prioritization, critical path, to do lists, check lists, Gantt Charts, PERT, Divide and Conquer, the Clockwork Muse, Automate, stepwise refinement

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The concept of design as a "style of thought" is not new, but it's all the rage these days and so seems to be new new new. But what is it? If you start looking around for an answer to that question, you will find many of them. In this workshop we'll introduce one approach to design thinking built around the idea of problem identification, ideation, research, and prototyping. We will look at ways each of these components can be structured in a manner that maximizes creativity and exploration of options. Subsequent workshops will make deeper dives into each of these.