Industry-Engaged Pedagogy and Institutional Innovation
Industry partnership as a method for design pedagogy, not a veneer applied over coursework. Building the institutional infrastructure that makes the encounter productive — contracts, sequencing, expectations, scaffolding.
This strand grows directly from the institutional work I have done at Illinois Institute of Technology since 2018: building the College of Engineering Management’s experiential-media curriculum, leading IPRO Labs studios that have served more than 1,300 students, and co-teaching the Art of Data Visualization course across SAIC and Northwestern. Across all of it, the operative question has been whether industry partnership can function as a serious method for design pedagogy — not merely as a real-world veneer applied over coursework that would otherwise be the same.
The argument is that it can, and that getting there requires institutional infrastructure most universities do not have. A real industry-partnered studio is not a course with a guest critic; it is a sustained collaboration in which the partner brings a problem they actually need solved, the students bring methods they are still acquiring, and the faculty member underwrites the pedagogical scaffolding that makes the encounter productive for everyone. That scaffolding includes contractual structures around IP, communication norms with non-academic partners, expectations around the deliverable, and — most importantly — the curricular sequencing that prepares students to do this work in the first place. None of these scale automatically.
My work at the Kaplan Institute and within the College of Engineering Management has been to build that scaffolding. The IPRO Labs framework, the curricular sequencing of the experiential-media degree, the shared-design-studio model with ChiLab Design Studio, and the public Coursera course on data visualization and storytelling are all parts of the same project: making industry-engaged pedagogy reliable enough to teach with. The strand is also, by design, the place where my industry collaborations and my teaching connect — which is why it sits at the center, not the periphery, of my research.
