DTX 180   Exercising Empathy   credit: 3 Hours.

Emphasizes the role that empathy can play in everything we do. Understanding empathy throughout our lives enables us to live a full and intentional life. How do we become compassionate people? When we approach trying to solve problems in our world, how do we ensure that we consider others, their perspectives and their needs? This course will provide students with a foundational understanding of empathy and engage them in empathic practices such as observation, interaction, and perspective taking.
This course satisfies the General Education Criteria for:
Social & Beh Sci - Beh Sci

DTX 210   Introduction to Social Design   credit: 3 Hours.

Social design supports and empowers culture by looking at design through the lens of the community as a whole. The overarching goal of social design is to create outcomes that inspire cultural engagement and improve creativity, equity, social justice, and public health. This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of social design, where students will collaborate on projects across the semester to learn how to bring the course materials together to real-life applications.

DTX 221   Human-Centered Design Across Disciplines   credit: 3 Hours.

Lecture, discussion, and case studies provide a foundation for examining the Human-Centered Design (HCD) process. Key stages—assessing needs, synthesizing insights, ideating, prototyping, and implementation—are explored alongside applications in technology, healthcare, education, and social services. Theoretical exploration highlights ethical considerations, common challenges, and emerging trends. By analyzing real-world examples, students develop a deep understanding of how HCD shapes innovation and drives meaningful impact across fields.

DTX 252   Introduction to Prototyping   credit: 3 Hours.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach that identifies the unmet needs of a population in order to iteratively develop solutions. Part of this process includes evaluating ideas with audiences in order to elicit feedback. The aim of this course is to introduce you to the purposes of prototyping along with methods of creating, communicating, and evaluating prototypes. During the course, you will be engaged in hands-on activities that facilitate your development of experimental and creative mindsets. Prerequisite: DTX 251, DTX 455, or permission by instructor.

DTX 451   Introduction to Design Thinking   credit: 3 or 4 Hours.

Provides a hands-on introduction to the fundamentals of Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design. Students will analyze and reflect on design challenges as well as participate in human-centered design while working collaboratively on group projects. Through project work, students will learn methods to perform initial research and project scoping, conduct interviews, create journey maps and wireframes, brainstorm and propose ideas, plan and develop prototypes to communicate and test ideas. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Credit is not given for both DTX 251 and DTX 451.

DTX 455   Design for Social Impact   credit: 3 or 4 Hours.

An immersive exploration of design thinking as a method for tackling social needs and issues. Social innovation seeks to impact transformational change in underserved, underrepresented, and disadvantaged local and international communities by addressing problems too complex to be solved by traditional methods. Students in this course will work in collaborative teams to employ the human-centered design process to discover and develop innovative solutions for social problems such as poverty, homelessness, hunger, and violence. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: DTX 210, DTX 251, or permission by instructor.

DTX 495   Special Topics in Design Thinking   credit: 1 to 4 Hours.

Subject offerings of new and developing areas of knowledge in design thinking and human-centered design intended to augment the existing curriculum. 1 to 4 undergraduate hours. 1 to 4 graduate hours. May be repeated, if topics vary, in the same term to a maximum of 6 hours or in separate terms to a maximum of 12 hours.

DTX 499   Multidisciplinary Innovation Studio   credit: 3 or 4 Hours.

Design thinking requires design practice, especially on real-world challenges that truly need cross-disciplinary creative and critical thinking. This course brings together multidisciplinary student teams who will use the human-centered design approach to complete authentic projects. Thematic sections will require the teams to implement design thinking methodologies to conduct research, propose and prototype designs, and plan for the implementation and launch of final designs. Teams will be matched with appropriate advisors for guidance and inspiration. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated in separate terms to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours and 8 graduate hours.