MBA7502 Future Lab: Human Center Design with AI
(Formerly Future Lab: Complex Problem Solving for Social Impact)
3 Elective Credits
Why this course matters. We live in a volatile, uncertain, and increasingly complex world—startups fail at staggering rates, the lifespan of leading organizations keeps shrinking, and the sustainability and social challenges before us defy tidy, predictable solutions. The most valuable thing you can learn is not a single prompt for answers but a way of complex problem solving: the knowledge, mindset, and skills to identify meaningful problems, question your assumptions, reframe what's really going on, and creatively advance solutions when the data are partial, the system is tangled, and stakeholders disagree.
Human-centered design (HCD) with AI course teaches you the innovator’s mindset, process, and approach to identify meaningful challenges and creatively solve complex problems. It guides innovators to understand and respond to the needs of specific people, question assumptions, reframe problems, and experiment to advance their solutions. You will pair design behaviors with a systems thinking view and strategic focus, so you act where you have the greatest leverage. These are precisely the durable, adaptive capabilities that are becoming most important as routine analytical work is automated. In this course you don't just use AI alongside HCD. AI augments the method itself by accelerating research and sense-making, expanding the range of ideas you can explore, and sharpening how you scope, prototype, and decide. The result is not a more efficient technician but a more creative, more capable innovator.
How we work. Future Lab is a practical, experiential innovation lab; we learn by doing. Working in teams, you'll move through the full arc of design-driven innovation, scoping a meaningful challenge, mapping the system and its forces to find points of leverage, examining history and your own assumptions to design more equitably, conducting lived-experience interviews and empathy probes to understand the people you're designing for, and building low-resolution, experiential prototypes you test in days rather than months. AI tools are woven throughout this hands-on work, used ethically and effectively to augment ethnographic research, accelerate analysis, fuel idea generation, and pressure-test interventions before they scale. Each cycle of understanding, making sense, prototyping, and gathering feedback builds your adaptive problem-solving and decision-making skills under real ambiguity.