IA50005 Design your Purposeful Life

Academic Year 2023/2024

Please note this module is designed for Graduate Taught and Graduate Research students. This module cannot be taken by UCD undergraduate students.

The aim of this module is to enable students to plan and reflect upon their learning, career and life goals using Design Thinking and other approaches.

Design Thinking, is a human-centric creative problem-solving process. It offers a proven methodology and repeatable approach that can be used to identify new opportunities, solve problems, and develop innovative solutions. While it has usually been applied to the development of products and services, in this module, participants will apply the approach to design their own career and life goals.

Over the course of the module, participants will reflect on their life so far, their values and sense of purpose. Using a combination of creative and analytical tools they will work to develop insights into themselves and to map out their way ahead, acquiring a toolkit that can be used at any point in life to identify, evaluate and make informed career and life choices. Along with this, participants will meet guest speakers from a wide range of sectors who will share their own journeys and lessons learnt. Participants will also develop a community of peers in which to share ideas and hear how others are thinking about their own life and career questions.

Our team of Entrepreneurial Specialists will introduce the students to the processes and tools that will enable the students to make creative and informed life and career choices for themselves.

UCD Innovation Academy

**Enrolment on an Innovation Academy module means a commitment to active participation and engagement, which necessitates full attendance at all scheduled classes**

At the UCD Innovation Academy, we are a group of Educator Practitioners with extensive real-world experience as academics, business and social entrepreneurs, tech thinkers, creative professionals and design thinking practitioners.

We take an action-oriented approach to learning, with a combination of individual, group and class tasks and activities, including discussions, presentations and reflection. All of our teaching is grounded in academic rigour. Our focus is on ‘learning by doing’ in a real-world context. Classes include a combination of individual and team tasks and activities, along with discussions, presentations and reflection.

Note on Class Size: Due to the interactive nature of our programmes - we aim for a class size of no more than 36 students to ensure a quality experience for all. We also require a minimum of 16 participants to ensure enough people for teamwork and a dynamic classroom environment. On very rare occasions, if we have less than 16 registered students we will aim to offer students the opportunity to join another class.

Note on COVID-19: All our courses will be run in accordance with good practice, University and Government guidelines around COVID-19. This module is intended to be taught in-person but we may switch to an online format in light of updated guidelines or circumstances, in which case we will update registered students as early as possible. If this should happen, please don't be concerned - our online experiences are equally engaging.

www.innovationacademy.ie