In preparation, students from the Center for Design Thinking have been working alongside Power + Place storytellers to mentor youth in Robert Alvis’ Civic Literacy course at Walter Williams High School.

In addition, students from Professor Deidre Yancey’s “Leadership Theories” class have been preparing to facilitate conversations around leadership and changemaking for community attendees.

The American Queen is a North Carolina Reads 2025 pick from the North Carolina Humanities NC Center. The book is based on the true story of Louella and William Montgomery, two freed slaves who became the self-proclaimed king and queen of the Kingdom of Happy Land nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western NC.

Alamance Reads is funded by the Friends of the Alamance County Public Libraries, a nonprofit that raises money through annual book sales to support all programming initiatives, including the Zoom Pass program, the Lucky Day collection, the Seed Library, book club kits, educational resource kits and downloadable electronic content.

To help make these connections possible, the Center for Design Thinking and the Power+Place Collaborative were awarded $20,000 from the North Carolina Humanities Awards Large Project Grant. The grant, entitled “Storying Home: Cultivating Cross-Cultural Connections through Storytelling,” supports civic storytelling efforts across the county. The goals are to connect people to different ideas in their local communities and encourage a deeper understanding of the importance of conversation between different generations and backgrounds.

Forging Fridays, a virtual workshop series starting Jan. 30, focuses on first-hand practice with emergent relational design strategies. The goal is to explore how we can each apply these emerging strategies to your own life. In partnership with the Systematic Design Association and the Future of Design in Higher Education, this opportunity allows educators and practitioners from across the globe to meet and learn directly from acclaimed relational designers.

Sessions are scheduled for the last Friday of the month at 2 p.m. January through May and feature a different design thinking creator that will share practical, actionable strategies we can implement across our professional, personal and civic lives.

There will be five total Forging Friday speakers: Michael Osterweil, Lesley-Ann Noel, Haley Fitzpatrick, Rafe Steinhauer, and Wayne Li. Sessions will be January 30, February 27, March 27, April 24, and May 29, leading up to the FDHE conference on June 24-26, 2026. Sessions will focus on social impact, how systems shape daily lives, generative AI, and what mindsets to use during the design thinking process.

The first session will be with Michal Osterweil, one of the closing keynote speakers at Design Forge last year, with a workshop called “Slippages to Portals: A Laboratory for practicing and implementing relationally” that explores relational politics and how “slippages” can become portals.

Forging Fridays will culminate in the Future of Design in Higher Education (FDHE)  hosted at Elon and Duke University this June. FDHE is an international organization of design educators committed to building community and exchanging ideas about �þ��� and running programs in human-centered design in higher education.

The Center for Design Thinking invites anyone interested to register and learn more on our website.

The workshop, entitled “”, brought together over fifty youth and community leaders from across countries to share research on effective social systems changemaking, highlighting powerful stories and promising strategies from visionary changemakers.

Both sessions were sponsored by The Jane Addams Center for Civic Engagement and the University of Warsaw.

“We must take seriously the belief that there are multiple pathways to redesign our lives and communities towards peace,” Lake said during her virtual session.

Both sessions highlighted design thinking strategies, stories from the center’s long-term partnership with the Power+Place Collaborative, and the book “Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human.” Participants were asked to think about their own communities and how conflict impacts them, visualizing how they can bring their own skills and passions towards cultivating connections across divides.

Multiple participants joined in from war-torn countries, like Ukraine.

“When I hear the word ‘peace,’ I immediately think about the absence of war,” said one particpant. “That people can live calmly, without fear. Peace is when you can plan your future, study, travel, and not be afraid.”

Jane Addam’s own social justice storytelling initiatives have inspired Lake and catalyzed many of the initiatives the Center for Design Thinking has undertaken. Lake has built the center to explore potential challenges of emergent, relational, place-based design for addressing wicked problems and transforming social systems in the Elon community, but also all over the world.

If you’re interested in consulting with with the center or reviewing it’s latest research, please visit their website or reach by email at elonbydesign@elon.edu.

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• Untold Stories
• Community members harvest their history at Power + Place Collaborative event

For over a year, �þ��� Master’s of Higher Education student Emily Moser has been leading the Alamance County History Harvest, an initiative affiliated with the Power + Place Collaborative that focuses on building a community archive through digitizing the historical materials of Alamance County citizens and storytellers.

The Power+Place Collaborative is a partnership between �þ���’s Center for Design Thinking, diverse faculty across campus and community organizations. Their goal is to collect, preserve and share oral histories and digital stories in partnership with residents from diverse communities across Alamance County.

“We’ve really been trying to highlight the storytellers of Power+Place and the communities that interface with Power+Place, particularly the African American communities in Alamance County,” Moser said. “It’s rooted in accessibility to create counter archives – archives outside of a traditional university or library archive.”

Moser holds many roles at Elon, along with her time doing History Harvest, including being the program coordinator for the Center for Engaged Learning and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Through her work, she’s interweaved all her interests into one, including her love for objects and public history.

“I hope that objects can be another way people can connect,” Moser said. “I think that the History Harvest can be that. You don’t have to be a permanent resident of Alamance County and the items don’t have to be about Alamance County. It can be about you as someone living in Alamance County, that’s just as valid.”

Power+Place stores its archived materials from its storytellers and its History Harvest materials on , an openly accessible platform for digital collections and exhibitions. So far, Power+Place has archived over 106 documents, photos, transcripts, and more to their database that is accessible to anyone. They will work this summer on adding all of the donated materials to the Omeka site, along with hosting additional Harvest events.

Coordinating and planning for the History Harvest started in the summer of 2024, then transitioned to one of Assistant Professor of History Amanda Kleintop’s fall Museum Studies and Public History classes, where students learned how to do some of the work themselves.

“We had an initial open History Harvest in September at Snow Camp Outdoor Theater,” Moser said. “We’ve done pop-up History Harvest events with Power+Place. We are really lucky that students from Dr. Kleintop’s class last fall stayed interested. A benefit of Elon being a close-knit community is that there’s a lot of interpersonal connection.”

According to Moser, History Harvest was designed at the University of Nebraska as a public history project designed to engage students. The student-led initiative encourages working directly with community members to collect and digitize donated materials. Moser will be at the Gibsonville Public Library’s Juneteenth Celebration on June 14, also referred to as Juneteenth, to collect and further expand the History Harvest database.

The setup is “way more simple than you think,” only using a book scanner that saves scans directly to a hard drive and metadata forms that describe the specifics of the object on the website. Moser says that those who bring the materials still keep ownership of the object brought to History Harvest, which will be recorded in the metadata.

Connect with Power+Place Collaborative

If you are looking to donate any objects or materials to the History Harvest archive, you can contact Moser at emoser3@elon.edu or Center for Design Thinking director Danielle Lake at dlake@elon.edu for further information.

This summer, you can also join the Center for Design Thinking and the Power + Place Collaborative at where the organization will be sharing digital stories from diverse community members.

In the fall, Power+Place will host Stories of Alamance County 2025, a public screening and community dialogue featuring new digital stories focusing on rootedness, migration, and belonging. These stories are co-created by Elon students and local partners, including the African American Cultural Arts & History Center and the CityGate Dream Center.

A History Harvest, community dialogue and lunch will be held along with the screening open to all members of the community to join! .

Learn more about the Power + Place Collaborative and make a donation .

The workshops were carefully created in collaboration with the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community, an organization that connects the Dayton community and university campus together. Their mission is to cultivate partnership, leadership, community-engaged learning and scholarship, and innovative solution-based strategies for civic needs through an asset-based approach.

“I’ve been hearing great things from participants,” Nancy McHugh, executive director of the Fitz Center, said. “I would love to do this again. Perhaps a virtual workshop could be in store for the future.”

Even as seasoned catalysts for the Center for Design Thinking, Gooding and Chan had a lot to learn while working on their first major consulting opportunity together. The duo waited for participants to arrive for their Design Thinking Failure workshop, but when they looked at their watches, they had a good laugh for what happened next.

There was a mix-up in scheduling between the presenters and the participants, which caused Gooding and Chan to think Designing for Failure actually “failed.” Using design thinking principles, the catalysts began discussing how they could apply concepts from their workshop in this situation to better their outcomes.

“We had been designing this for a while,” Gooding said. “How are we going to respond to this failure? We’re going to workshop this as our own failure. We went through the mental stages of failure and having to pivot from that.”

Their workshop invited students to learn about how they can bounce back from failure rather than letting it tear them down using the design thinking method. Thankfully, over 30 participants did arrive for the workshops when the time was right.

The Dayton Nonprofit Partner Workshop was designed specifically for the collaboration between the Center for Design Thinking and the Fitz Center. Participants learned how to use each step of the design thinking process in a real and practical way, diving into what the human-centered, problem-solving approach is at the root.

“I loved having the opportunity to support participants’ personal, educational and professional growth with this consulting opportunity,” Lake said.

Many of those who came to Lake’s workshop worked on providing funding for community-based projects, which Gooding said people left with a new perspective on what to do.

There was no doubt that the catalysts were bringing the “Design Thinking Mutually Beneficial and Joyful Partnerships” to Dayton, one of the Center’s most requested workshops at �þ���. This workshop aligned with the Fitz Center’s goals of creating connections with new community-based learning partners and generating mutually beneficial project-based learning opportunities.

Though the 2024-25 academic year is ending, the Center for Design Thinking works year-long, collaborating and consulting with communities worldwide. Request a consulting session, which may include assessment, customized workshops and a badge for Pathways to Design Thinking.

The Center for Design Thinking created the mentoring constellations toolkit and educational workshop in 2022 with support from ACE Mentoring for Learner Success effort, the , and outreach efforts.

During the “Cultivating Mentoring Constellations” workshop, students are guided through the process of design thinking as a means of building and nurturing their personal and professional support constellations. Mind maps encourage students to explore how they might deepen their current mentorship relationships and design opportunities for developing new connections.

The workshop’s structure enables students to visualize their “mentoring constellation” and recognize individuals surrounding them who contribute to their experiences, such as teachers, colleagues, supervisors and figures from the community. Student leaders with the Center facilitate the workshop, sharing their own stories of mentorship and encouraging participants to realize they can play a key role in the support networks of their communities.

“I could be that mentor to somebody else that is helpful and makes a difference in their life,” Chan said “I’ve done that for a few students. I think that’s the most relatable human thing. We all have problems. We want them to be solved and to get to be a part of that for somebody. That’s the most meaningful thing in the world.”

The term “constellations of mentors” was coined by U.S. Naval Academy and John Hopkins professor W. Brad Johnson. Johnson visited �þ��� in 2017 to present “The Art (and Science) of Mentoring Undergraduate �þ���.” Designed in partnership with leaders, students, and initiatives, the workshop pushes participants to think about the role of mentorship and the research on it.

Through shared activities and small-group conversations, students sort out “glows” (positive mentorship experiences) and “grows” (avenues for improvement). They come to create manageable, actionable tasks that can help expand and deepen their network of mentorship.

As part of its Boldly Elon strategic plan launched in 2020, Elon took the next steps to implement a mentoring model in which all students learn to build meaningful mentoring constellations that include peers, staff, faculty and communities beyond the university. As written in the strategic plan, “this lifelong constellation of mentors will emerge as a hallmark of an Elon education, guiding reflection to integrate learning across students’ educational and professional trajectories and engaging all students in developing essential skills and fluencies to shape the future.”

The Center has done over 40 workshops reaching more than a thousand students, reshaping how they connect with peers, faculty, staff, and their surrounding community. Facilitators help participants shape conversations that allow making that connection easier.

“It can be very daunting and scary to reach out to others,” Lake said. “We often assume that the person might not want to connect… thinking ‘who are we to ask something of others,’ when almost always that human wants to connect with us. We want to demystify the process of reaching out and make it easier for students to connect.”

Creating “constellations of mentorship” through mind mapping and tiny tasks allows participants to understand who in their lives are mentors and how they can continue to be open to invitations for conversations on mentorship in the future.

“Finding more mentors in your life is a complex problem,” Chan said. “It’s not one with a simple answer. It’s something that’s scary. It’s intimidating. It’s difficult to know where to start, but what I love about design thinking is that it breaks a complex problem into its smallest parts.”

The center is extremely excited to offer a mentoring constellation workshop adapted to the goals of participants. To find out more about how to request this workshop and what it entails, visit the Elon By Design website.

Leaders in design and higher education met at �þ���’s Center for Design Thinking on March 27-28 for the annual Design Forge focusing on relational learning and living. This year the conference welcomed 35 guests in-person and over 50 virtual participants from across the globe to share stories and research-backed strategies for relational and joyful learning and living.

Inspired by last year’s conference, the Forge opened with a keynote talk from Eugene Korsunskiy, associate professor of engineering and co-director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth College. Korsunskiy guided participants through “Together by Design: Joy, Community, & Forging Better Worlds” with activities from the “Little Book of Joy.”

The Forge also featured a number of �þ��� faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Professor Evan Small worked with his students to design opportunities for conference guests to explore relational design opportunities in nature. Professor Tim Peeples took participants through mapping mentoring constellations, Professor Elena Kennedy helped participants think through  how they might redesign their relationship to time, and Elon counselor Bonny Buckley led a session on how to bring joy through “Music, Making, & More.” In addition, Alumni Tyson Glover and Mackenzie Hahn returned to Elon as virtual cohosts of the Forge.

DiMitri Higginbotham, assistant professor and Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Integrated Design, had participants explore practices to create relational and transformational learning environments. As a music educator, he has brought design thinking into the classroom to enhance his students’ learning and think about the world in different ways.

“You give kids the power to imagine — learn from people, empathize, and create — instead of just making boring school projects, or making caterpillars out of egg cartons,” Higginbotham said. “How can you design a plate for a caterpillar to help them so they love that? It’s a new way of approaching learning that I think should be in every school.”

The Center’s community-engaged workshop brought Diya Abdo back to campus. Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College, author of “American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience,” and Every �þ��� A Refuge (ECAR) founder. Abdo returned to �þ��� to facilitate a powerful discussion on actionable change through cross-cultural dialogue among students, organizers and community members. Participants were asked to reflect on their lives and the communities they live in now.

Elon’s Center for Design Thinking Research Lead Joshua Franklin ’25 attended his fourth and final Design Forge as an Elon student. In comparison to other years, this year he presented with student director Adam Kanowitz on the work of the Center over the past five years. Using data collected from over 900 Center workshops and over 20,000 responses, the session highlighted the tools and strategies the Center has designed and facilitated to support student learning.

“Now it’s such a different conference. The first time we were sitting in there in the middle of the room with all the faculty and people that came to present,” Franklin said. “This year, I haven’t had a chance to sit. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. I love it. Now I get to present. This is the goal now, especially as a research lead. This is what we’ve been working towards for the past three years.”

Closing keynote speakers and authors of “Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human” Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma shared compelling stories and transformative strategies drawn from their lifework, followed by an engaging Q&A session open to both virtual and in-person attendees.

“One cannot be on this planet right now and not feel grief,” Osterweil said. “I was born in a land where there is war right now. In order to feel joy, you need to feel grief. Do not try to change the world. Make new worlds. Design new worlds.”

More information about the conference, including recordings from each session, can be found on the Elon by Design website under Design Forge 2025.

The workshop is based on The Little Book of Joy, a crowdsourced collection of resources that started during Design Forge at �þ��� in March 2024. Korsunskiy says that joy is an important catalyst of — not a distraction from — the rigorous work of �þ��� and learning.

“Collected [in this little book] are lots of little ideas for how we can all infuse a little more joy into our work,” Korsunskiy said. “Each idea describes an activity that comes from an educator who has tried it in their classroom. These are things we can do to make ourselves feel joyful [and] things we can do to make others feel joyful.”

Pulling ideas from literature that focuses on humor and positive psychology thirty-six activity cards explain benefits and provide tips to get the most out of the activities. Check out the book here: 

“A growing body of research [shows] that joy helps with focus, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, perseverance in the face of challenges, and so much more,” Korunskiy said. “By inducing the release of ‘happy hormones,’ activities and environments that spark joy have significant cognitive benefits for learners.”

Inspired by this year’s Pre-Forge Design Read, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, participants will consider how joy is a foundational element of design in community, and explore how people can prepare themselves, students, and communities for the important work of collaboratively designing brighter futures.

You can register to attend the opening keynote online. Registration for all Forge sessions can be seen on the website.

Through hands-on design thinking exercises, students gain transferable experience in using AI as a partner for better problem-solving. The workshop includes practical steps for effective prompt-building and demonstrates how AI can be applied within design thinking to address real-world challenges.

Director of Artificial Intelligence Integration Mustafa Akben reached out to the Center with the idea of creating a workshop that introduced students to using AI ethically and effectively. Student Director Anya Bratić spearheaded the development of this workshop, shaping its content and ensuring it framed AI as a tool to enhance human thinking.

“This workshop enhances students’ knowledge of what AI is and why it is a vital asset for their academic and career success,” Bratić said. “The workshop highlights AI as a tool to enhance, rather than replace, human thinking, emphasizing the importance of using it ethically and efficiently in every aspect of its use.”

Bratić worked alongside Student Director Adam Kanowitz who structured the initial framework, and Publicity Lead Juan Daniel Chiriboga, who designed the activity modules.

Earlier this year, �þ��� released a student guide on navigating college in the artificial intelligence era, offering insights on how humans and AI can collaborate effectively. �þ��� President Connie Ledoux Book endorsed the guide as a resource for the Elon community, outside institutions and community members to use.

“AI won’t take your job. It’s someone using AI who will take your job,” said Richard Baldwin, a professor oat the International Institute for Management Development. This is why the Center is working with the greater campus community to change the narrative.

The workshop has been incredibly well received by faculty and students.

“The catalysts — Anya Bratić and Adam Kanowitz — did a wonderful job addressing key issues — such as the importance of using AI as a brainstorming partner rather than as a replacement for doing the work, the need for detailed prompting, and the process of challenging the output of AI tools. These are topics I’ll be talking about all semester as I teach my students how to use AI tools to create and implement brands,” said Michele Lashley, associate professor of strategic communications.

Center Director Danielle Lake is a scholar within design thinking, and her expertise was essential in providing insight and support for the project. Since the Center’s opening in 2016, Lake has trained hundreds of students to facilitate workshops that prompt a relational approach to problem-solving that helps uncover the underlying causes of challenges and provides creative, structured methods to address them.

“Danielle Lake is an amazing coach, mentor, and leader who trains, develops, and supports the Design Thinking catalysts,” Akben said. “As a thought partner, I love collaborating with her and the Design Thinking team. I fully support our partnership. Our AI Team will work with and support Design Thinking, and we’re looking forward to organizing more great workshops in the future.”

The AI workshop can be  for individuals at and outside of �þ���, including for community members or organizations.

The session demonstrated the ways design thinking supports the conditions that foster engaged learning and civic-minded leaders. Attendees learned how to apply the skills taught by �þ���’s Center for Design Thinking beyond the classroom and approach setbacks from a design thinking perspective.

“When participants attend this presentation, what we’re hoping they will gain is some useful, actionable practices, ideas and tools that they can implement into whatever learning setting that they are assigning so that their participants have engaged learning experiences,” Franklin said.

Information collected from over two decades of literature on design thinking and four years of research emerging from �þ���’s Center for Design Thinking was shared with attendees. The Center examined 950 of its own sessions from 2020 to 2024, consisting of over 20,000 participants and close to 9,000 responses.

Presenters highlighted some of the most effective strategies, including experience and mind mapping, story and strategy sharing and tiny tasks prototyping.

“The cool thing about our results is that, while most of our data was collected in a higher education classroom setting, a lot of the tools and strategies that have been useful for engaged learning can be taken outside the classroom setting,” Franklin said. “At a conference like PACE, where you have faculty, �þ��� students, graduate students, and community partners as participants, you can share your work beyond regular academic classrooms.”

NCCE’s annual PACE Conference seeks to grow and share the practice and scholarship of higher education community and civic engagement. Launched in 1999, PACE is the longest running conference in the nation focused on this topic. The 26th PACE Conference was at Guilford Technical Community College Conference Center in Greensboro, NC.

The Center for Design Thinking is excited to further present later this spring its at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophers Annual Conference in Washington D.C. on March 14, 2025, and at the University of Dayton in April.

Learn more about the Center’s research.