Design Thinking: Addressing Academic Burnout

Overview: as a part of Notre Dame's 'Intro to Design Thinking' course, I completed a final project utilizing human-centered design principles to address academic burnout in the Notre Dame community, using an Ideation, Inspiration, Implementation workflow.

Initial research into the broad topic of 'Academic Burnout at Notre Dame' was carried out in a multi-disciplinary team. Over the course of three weeks, I then individually conducted a number of interviews to gain insight into academic burnout and how students experience it at Notre Dame.

Taking those interviews, I looked for common threads and deeper insights, and synthesized my findings using a number of different methods and frameworks, including "on the wall" (done virtually via Miro) and the Past, Present and Future framework.

Based on my findings, I chose to focus on the physical health component of burnout. I brainstormed potential solution paths, sought out feedback from real students, iterated, and arrived at a few possible ways to address this component of the larger problem. I presented these final solutions in a video explaining my research process, takeaways, and final solutions.

💡Human-centered research can uncover previously unarticulated factors to problems

🛠Iteration and feedback from your target population are crucial to developing solutions that actually meet needs

⭐️Sometimes, the best solution isn't the most complicated