The Yale-NUS minor in Innovation and Design is a collaboration with the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Innovation and Design Programme (iDP), which is offered by the Engineering Design & Innovation Centre (EDIC) of the Faculty of Engineering. The minor provides Yale-NUS students the opportunity to learn and apply the principles of design thinking and engineering to solve practical problems.
The highlight of this minor is a year-long design project, where small interdisciplinary teams will use the principles of design thinking — a highly successful ideation and prototyping process— to address real problems in healthcare, urban mobility, sustainable cities, smarter living, intelligent systems, and immersive reality. Whether it be designing a virtual reality first aid training course or an autonomous haze-monitoring drone, this minor will teach students transferable skills regardless of their major, and we hope that such experiential learning in small groups will be profoundly meaningful for the students.
– Shaffique Adam, Associate Professor, Science (Physics)
Innovation and Design at Yale-NUS
Limited spaces are available for each Yale-NUS cohort as this minor is a special collaboration between Yale-NUS College and NUS Faculty of Engineering.
Yale-NUS students in the minor are able to:
- Identify and solve problems in complex, uncertain situations;
- Think critically and creatively through the society/design/technology nexus, and collaborate with others from different disciplinary backgrounds;
- Apply the knowledge and skills learned for the conceptualisation, implementation and realisation of an engineering design solution to solve practical problems; and
- Develop professional skills such as communication, project management, and teamwork.
The minor is strongly interdisciplinary. It focuses explicitly on experiential learning in small groups.
Outcomes in Innovation and Design
Students can work on projects from a wide range of themes such as healthcare, urban mobility, sustainable cities, smart living, and intelligent systems, which will enable them to apply their learning in Yale-NUS toward a design thinking project. For example, the project could focus on a solution to improve a museum experience, better identify people with major depressive disorders, or design robot companions for the elderly. This makes the Innovation and Design minor particularly relevant for aspiring technopreneurs and students who are keen on pursuing innovative hands-on project work.
