heuristics program overview

Nutshell

Our innovative new major—“Heuristics, Design, and Technology”— aims to develop abilities in the 21st-century workforce: in particular, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication across various media. Although it’s “new,” it’s not really unprecedented: we are drawing on a variety of approaches that have been successfully pioneered elsewhere: project-based learning (New Tech Network, Western Governors University), campus-community integrated assessment (Imagining America), interdisciplinary instructional teams (Stanford School of Design), mobile technology applications (Abilene Christian University) and combining them with some signature HU strengths: a strong core curriculum in the liberal arts and an ethic of service learning.

Distinctives

All HDT majors must maintain a “B” average in the core curriculum.

All HDT majors, in dialogue with their advisor, should choose a minor or identify a concentration in one discipline.

In planning and developing courses, faculty should follow the “Degree Profile” adapted from the Lumina Foundation; further, as an assessment measure, students will be required to keep digital portfolios that document their progress through the program.

Click here to see sample courses.

Team

David Alexander, Philosophy
Bryan Ballinger, Digital Media
Del Doughty, English
Carrie Lloyd, Psychology
Dave McEowen, Business

Inspiration

For nearly a century, Western society in general, and American society in particular, has been dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical. Ours has been an age of the “knowledge worker,” the well-educated manipulator of information and deployer of expertise. But that is changing. Thanks to an array of forces—material abundance that is deepening our nonmaterial yearnings, globalization that is shipping white-collar work overseas, and powerful technologies that are eliminating certain kinds of work altogether—we are entering a new age. It is an age animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life—one that prizes aptitudes I call “high concept” and “high touch.” High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

--Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future