Design Innovation | Kent State University

students, faculty, community and leading experts from diverse disciplines who are thoughtfully addressing technology and society through design to become creative, intersectional problem-solvers and fearless collaborators in the face of complex, messy problems.

We do this by building and connecting a network of existing makerspaces and resource laboratories across the entire university, making them more visible, accessible and effective in supporting cross-disciplinary collaboration. We call these the “Design Innovation Nodes.”

We link this network to the “Design Innovation Hub,” which sits at the center of the Kent Campus, and serves as an open-access, collaborative, co-working, co-making, idea-generating and innovation accelerating environment to be a place that inspires the kinetic collisions for collaborative doers, makers, fixers and experimenters.

To support this, we offer coursework and curate co-curricular projects, competitions, hackathons and grand challenges as part of a ‘challenge-based-innovation’ strategy.

This leads to students and graduates who become Design Innovation Fellows, people whose embedded instinct is to seek out temporary unities and create teams of individuals that come from the widest array of backgrounds, disciplines and perspectives to address, re-frame and tackle the truly big problems facing our world.