Amongst the virtues of the course is instilling creativity, collaboration, and flexibility within its dedicated student base. It also articulates the fundamentals of design thinking and compares them to different design approaches tackled by multiple disciplines. Furthermore, it strengthens one’s representative skills through its elaborate education on how to employ visuals and prototypes to cultivate an unconventional yet meaningful representation of what caters to the user’s needs. 

Indeed, Dr. Garcia succeeds in endowing her students with the aforementioned traits through her experiential and ambiguous approach. During the first lecture, each student shared a one-minute creative story about his/her name with an unfamiliar classmate.

As the tension in the classroom dissolved, students were left with an excitement for the learning process and an anticipation to embark on the journey to come. The main project this year entailed the development of a self-sufficient community in Hamra, and it consisted of five phases: empathy, define, ideate, prototype and test. To stress on the relevance of the humane aspect of engineering, the first step was to conduct field observations and interviews around Hamra, followed by a breakdown of the field notes into needs and insights rather than rushing to yield a technical solution. After that, the focus was on coming up with a solution that best fits the user’s needs which was a collaborative activity amongst the students.