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Northwestern University

Wall Street Journal Features Segal Design Institute

Bruce Ankenman, co-director of Segal and director of Segal's freshman course, Design Thinking and Communication (DTC) spoke with The Wall Street Journal recently about DTC and how the class teaches first-year undergraduate engineers to embrace and learn from failure. 

DTC is a required two-quarter course for all freshmen at McCormick, and is part of the Engineering First® curriculum. The course presents students with real design problems submitted by individuals, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and industry members. In the fall, projects tend to focus on clients or users with disabilties. Students are often faced with very tough, and at times, seemingly unsolvable, problems. Ankenman explains in the WSJ interview that by attempting to tackle these challenges, students gain resilience and humility. 

Read the full WSJ artcle, "The Power of Unsolvable Problems," here

In addition to the written article, Ankenman was also interviewed live on WSJ Video. View the segment below.

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