A new minor being offered through the School of Engineering is designed to equip students across campus with the tools to turn ideas into impact.
The Innovation and Design Strategy (IDS) minor provides a structured, interdisciplinary pathway for students to identify real-world problems, design meaningful solutions, and bring them to life. Open to all Vanderbilt undergraduates, the 15-credit-hour program blends human-centered design, hands-on making, and collaborative problem-solving.
At its core, the IDS minor introduces students to human-centered design—often called design thinking—a process that begins with understanding user needs and leads to ideation, prototyping, and iterative testing.
“Human-centered design is foundational to breakthrough innovation,” said Krish Roy, the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Dean of Engineering and University Distinguished Professor. “The world’s most pressing challenges are not neatly packaged within one discipline. They demand creativity, empathy, technical rigor, and the ability to work across boundaries. With the Innovation and Design Strategy minor, we are giving Vanderbilt students powerful tools for translating insights into action, and a venue to innovate, bringing their ideas to fruition.”
The minor builds on Vanderbilt’s commitment to immersive, project-based, experiential learning. Over the past several years, student demand for design-oriented education has surged. More than 1,800 students participated in Design as an Immersive Vanderbilt Experience (DIVE) boot camps and more than 1,600 enrolled in deep-learning DIVE courses. Those students came from majors spanning Engineering, Arts and Science, Peabody College and beyond.
“It’s clear that students are hungry for opportunities to tackle open-ended design and invention challenges that make a real-world impact,” said Kevin Galloway, research associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the minor. “Students want to build things. They want to test ideas with real users. They want to collaborate with people who think differently than they do. The IDS minor brings those experiences together in a cohesive, academically rigorous way.”
Galloway was also recently named the Evans Family Executive Director of the Wond’ry, Vanderbilt’s Innovation Center.
From discovery to prototype
Students in the minor will build skills in design thinking, prototyping and applied problem-solving through a sequence of hands-on courses, including:
Innovation Foundation Course
• IDS 2300: Design Discovery
Design Realization Course (choose one)
• IDS/ME 2273: How to Make (Almost) Anything
• DF 2100: Rapid Prototyping
Experiential Course Options
• IDS/ME 2373: Make It Matter and Make It Real
• IDS 3300: Enterprise Design Thinking
• IDS 4500 / ENGM 4500: New Product Design and Development
• HODC 3262: Social Entrepreneurship
• HODC 3352: Philanthropy and Social Problem Solving
• NANO 2500: Nanoscale Innovation and Making
Design Discovery is an Innovation Foundation course that introduces the core methods of human-centered design through team-based projects focused on user research, insight generation and opportunity framing.
Students then deepen their technical skills through a Design Realization course by taking either How to Make (Almost) Anything or Rapid Prototyping. How to Make (Almost) Anything is an immersive course in CAD, digital fabrication and prototyping in the Wond’ry. Rapid Prototyping emphasizes mechanical design, additive manufacturing and embedded systems integration through a functional device project.
The experiential courses offer students an opportunity to apply the innovation process across a range of design and societal challenges. For example, in Make It Matter and Make It Real, teams complete a semester-long design-build-test project, working with clients to refine requirements and iterate prototypes.
Two additional electives allow students to tailor the minor to their interests. Approved courses span the School of Engineering, the College of Connected Computing, the College of Arts and Science, Peabody College and the Owen Graduate School of Management. Any courses included in the minor that a student has already completed will count retroactively toward completion.
The program also benefits from Vanderbilt’s expanding infrastructure for design and making. With the Wond’ry now in the School of Engineering, students have increased access to fabrication tools, collaborative spaces and expert staff who support prototyping and product development. Those resources will complement coursework that emphasizes rapid iteration, user feedback, and hands-on realization of ideas.
“Design thinking is not just for engineers,” Galloway said. “It is a way of approaching uncertainty with curiosity and discipline. Whether a student is studying neuroscience, economics, computer science or education, the ability to define a problem well, generate bold ideas, and iterate toward a viable solution is transformative.”
Graduates with a minor in IDS will be prepared for roles in product management, user experience (UX) design, consulting, research and development, healthcare innovation, sustainability, startups, corporate strategy, and emerging areas like AI-enabled products. More broadly, they leave with the ability to frame problems thoughtfully, work across differences, and move ideas forward in real-world settings.
Learn more about the Innovation and Design Strategy minor: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/the-wondry/innovation-and-design-strategy-minor