Aging & Design Course Series

Winner of the 2023 Provost Award of Pedagogical Innovation

The Aging & Design course series is an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and cross-cultural initiative at Drexel University focused on aging, design and immigrant communities in Philadelphia. It is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students across the University spanning multiple colleges from design, healthcare, biomedical engineering, entrepreneurship, Honors’ College and more.

This is a 10-week course that encourages students from across campus to imagine and create products, strategies, and/or services for older persons of the Asian community in Philadelphia, culminating in a design competition and exhibition at the end of the course.

The course is structured around three main components:

Community-Based Participatory Design—An approach to design where empathizing with end users to co-create solutions that are both inclusive and sensitive to their needs, experiences, and perspectives. By taking a build-to-learn approach, students gain real-time feedback while continually evolving their design.

Understandings of Culture and Agism—Evaluating and addressing cultural awareness, implicit bias, and ageism in the context of an increasingly diverse older population, fostering inclusivity and sensitivity in design approaches.

Entrepreneurship— Students develop a comprehensive roadmap for commercialization, which includes problem-solving, solution development, testing, lean business model creation, team building, advisor and partner acquisition, funding strategy development, and investment pitching.

The current Fall 2023 course Aging, Design & Entrepreneurship is sponsored by 2022 Fall VentureWell Course & Program Grant. It is taught by June He, Founding Director of Empathic CoDesign Lab, Assistant Professor of Product Design at the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design; and by Catherine Quay, Assistant Clinical Professor of Nursing in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, with support from Arun Ramakrishnan, Director of the Research Labs in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, and Chuck Sacco, Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Director of the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship.

History

In the Fall of 2021, Professor June He launched the Aging & Design initiative by establishing collaborations with local non-profit organizations. Through her efforts in fostering intergenerational and cross-cultural connections between diverse college students and older Asian immigrants in the community, June successfully developed the inaugural Aging & Design course in the spring of 2022, thanks to the support of Westphal’s 2022 Mini-grant.

Since then, June, in collaboration with Professor Catherine Quay, teamed up with non-profit organizations such as the Philadelphia Senior Center and SEAMAAC (Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition) through the generous support of the 2022 Age-Friendly Drexel Pilot Grant.

Together, they introduced yet another groundbreaking course titled Creating Age-Friendly Innovations in the autumn of 2022. This initiative included workshops conducted in senior community centers, joint exhibitions, language programs that were mutually beneficial, as well as research endeavors involving a broader spectrum of interdisciplinary partners.

In the Fall of 2023, the team developed the latest iteration of the course Aging, Design & Entrepreneurship to include more interdisciplinary perspectives. The current course is funded by the 2022 Fall VentureWell Course & Program Grant.