Design Your Life, Solve Wicked World Problems: HNRS 2000

Although it’s been a long day of classes, the energy of ambitious Honors College freshmen crackles through the animated conversation sparking across the Gateway Sounds assembly hall. The students are sharing the progress and impact they’ve experienced during HNRS 2000, the freshman-year Honors colloquium. In this course, students partner with local organizations to solve a “wicked” world problem that aligns with their career interests.

Although the course has always focused on leadership and service, Honors College faculty recently revamped the Honors curriculum based on the tenants of design thinking. “This represents one of the first large-scale efforts in Honors education in the world to incorporate design thinking into a curriculum,” explained Dr. Tim Christensen, one of the faculty members teaching the course. “Design thinking is quickly becoming the standard paradigm for cutting-edge commercial and non-profit ventures to conceptualize problems and identify viable solutions.”

The principles outlined in the #1 best-seller Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life were the guiding spirit for the curriculum: providing the means for students to productively address the challenging moments in their college careers and lives. According to Dr. Katie Ford, a professor and shaper of the course, the values of “Human Centered Design” give students the tools to solve problems in their career and personal lives.“The coursework and Designing Your Life book offer insight into assessing problems—personal or external—such as reframing failure, establishing creative confidence, and understanding leadership positions within group context,” says Dr. Ford.

If we fast forward beyond graduation, we can see design thinking’s impact on student success, embodied by Honors College alumna Mona Amin—Co-Founder of Freshspire and Program Manager of Innovation Initiatives at the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) in Washington, D.C. “I approach the work that I do with an innovative mindset and lead my efforts with confidence,” said Mona. “An aspect of boldness is having the courage to take risks; I’ve incorporated that into my life by allowing myself to be comfortable with the unknown.”

Social entrepreneurship and the Human Centered Design skills that the Honors College freshman class are currently applying in the Greenville community are core tenets in Mona’s approach to both Freshspire and the WBENC. “I currently support the Freshspire team through Business Development, and my Co-Founder, Shraddha Rathod, and I are spearheading efforts to empower farmers. Freshspire is an online wholesale marketplace that helps farmers connect to buyers (distributors, nonprofits, and restaurants), and we truly believe that farmers will save both time and money, and reduce food waste through using our platform,” she said. Ultimately, Freshspire aims to optimize growing and selling products for farmers in local food communities by providing restaurants and businesses with a one-stop-shop for local food.

Mona’s role in the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) also benefits from her experience with Human Centered Design. “Although WBENC is a non-profit, it is also a social business at its core,” she said. “We tackle the issue of unequal access to business opportunities for females through providing programs and certification opportunities that give female founders a foot in the door at several Fortune 500 companies.”

Her experience with social entrepreneurship all began with her Signature Honors Project. “Consumers today are becoming more conscience of the businesses they support, and so there has been a rise of social enterprises, businesses that strive to improve human and environmental well-being,” Mona said. “My Signature Honors Project—’Social Enterprises: The Intersection of Business and Humanity’— explored design thinking and the creative process behind building social enterprises among student entrepreneurs at ECU.”

“I found that so many college students have the drive and passion to do something big,” she added. “They want to solve the world’s most complex social problems. All they need is a platform and the right resources to help them ultimately reach their goals.”

As a key player in the shaping of HNRS 2000, Mona was chosen as the keynote speaker at this fall’s Honors College Convocation welcoming the Class of 2023. Her keynote mantra—“Get curious, meet people, try stuff—important points of Designing Your Life, are the words she left this year’s Honors freshmen to ponder and incorporate into their collegiate journey.

“Society often pressures us into following straight life paths, but this book helps you understand that there are so many alternatives to that straight path,” said Mona. “The Honors College is dedicated to building dynamic experiences for students…to think outside of their current major and coursework. College is no longer just a set path to a specific job—it is a gateway to the real world.”