Design Thinking and AI with Garret Westlake

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “assignment makeovers” in this new age of AI, and a key part of rethinking assignments is exploring what we and our students can do with AI technologies in our fields.

To help in those explorations, I reached to Garret Westlake. He is the associate vice provost for innovation and executive director of the da Vinci Center for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. I know Garret because I helped the da Vinci Center build and launch an online short course on design thinking and human-centered design. I learned that Garret has been actively exploring the use of AI technologies in design thinking, and I was really interested in hearing from Garret how AI might serve as a catalyst for creative thinking and a supportive tool for entrepreneurship.
If you’re interested in teaching creativity or critical thinking or having students tackle open-ended problems, I think you’ll get some great ideas for integrating AI into your courses from my conversation with Garret.
Episode Resources:

· Garret Westlake on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/garretwestlake/

· Garret’s TEDx talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXuhHB093I

· da Vinci Center for Innovation at VCU, https://davincicenter.vcu.edu/

· Introduction to Design Thinking, a free short course from the VCU da Vinci Center, https://davincicenter.catalog.vcu.edu/courses/introduction-to-design-thinking

· Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age: Essay Edition, https://derekbruff.org/?p=4105

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