Transdisciplinary project unites students from multiple campuses

This is Design for Impact, and it's a human-centered design program. It started through an ACC Academic Leaders Network program, and was really looking for a way to unite some of the schools in the ACC. Historically, when the schools touch points, it's competing against each other in sports. And so we wanted to find a way where instead of competing against each other, we're partnering, collaborating. So this is a program where we bring students from four schools together and four different disciplines. We participate in the Stanford Design for Longevity Challenge. The general idea is people are living longer. As your lives are longer, you are dealing with more issues, so trying to find things that make your life easier. Our problem statement that we're focusing on is people in this day and age have poor mental health, and so that's due to a lack of third spaces so like you have like work, you have home, where's like the cafe or the park or something that you go to. Our top idea that we're thinking of is maybe some sort of app that pairs with a device like maybe a piece of jewelry or something that you can like hit if you're feeling really stressed to like nudge a friend to reach out to you. The big goal is to get the students to go about design but using tools and disciplinary knowledge that come from other fields and then to also get a different world view of engaging with the problem. So if we have a student from Boston coming to Blacksburg now we get to see a completely different like ecosystem and context for solution. We're learning a lot about all these other forms of thought and that'll be useful for actually getting out and working with people because these are like what our actual careers are going to be. We're different ideas and it's good to know now that like we're capable of maximizing or like optimizing or like potential