Penn Forward: Sarah Rottenberg applies design thinking for strategic University initiative

Sarah Rottenberg is executive director of the Integrated Product Design Program (IPD), an interdisciplinary graduate program that crosses schools and prepares students to lead cross-functional teams, and is an adjunct associate professor in the Weitzman School of Design. Prior to her time at Penn, she led innovation strategy consulting with Fortune 500 companies, empowered by a master’s degree in anthropology and a deep knowledge of design research.

Over the summer, Rottenberg was asked to contribute to Penn Forward by assisting three working groups—Global Opportunity and New Markets, Research Strategy and Finance, and Access, Affordability, and Value—in their planning phases. The goal: Generate big ideas that will carry Penn forward for the next decade and beyond. Rottenberg collaborated with the groups to apply design thinking, a human-centered approach to idea development popularized in the 1990s by designer and Stanford professor David Kelley.

Rottenberg can often be found working with IPD students or developing innovative product ideas at the Engineering Studios at Tangen Hall.

Rottenberg’s design-thinking approach, which she explained in a 2018 TEDxPenn talk, puts the experience of users front and center, focusing first on empathy for how decisions might impact stakeholders, then on framing problems and generating ideas. It is a creative-problem-solving toolset inspired by the disciplines of design, business, engineering, psychology, and social sciences. It’s popularly applied in product development but also used with healthcare service design and other service-based organizations.

The approach, she says, challenges those in a large organization like Penn to “do new things and act in new ways.

“What I love about design thinking is that it’s a collaborative process that can bring people together from different perspectives, help them generate a shared point of view, and then develop lots of ideas coming out of that point of view,” Rottenberg says. “It really treats an idea as a hypothesis about what might work, and then there’s a process of iterating and prototyping that is collaborative.”

With challenges as robust and consequential as ones the Penn Forward working groups tackle, Rottenberg’s role was, she explains, to help them “come up with better ideas, bigger ideas, maybe even more creative ideas.” Some working group members, for example, had smaller ideas that could be combined into a larger one, she says, while others had ideas that could be set aside as ones that could be enacted regardless, separate from the Penn Forward strategic initiative.

The process is a two-parter: understanding the problem and ensuring it’s the right problem; then, developing a varied set of ideas that can be tested, prototyped, and iterated.

Ultimately, says Rottenberg, the design-thinking approach was ideal for this type of planning process that necessarily deals with uncertainty.

“I think on issues where the future is ambiguous, there’s a lot of different stakeholders whose needs you have to take into account, and you need to get a lot of people moving in the same direction, creatively, in order to solve a problem,” she says. “That’s where I think this toolset can apply.”

The three Penn Forward working groups submitted recommendations to the Penn Forward Steering Committee in December and are being reviewed. New initiatives from these recommendations will roll out gradually and updates will be shared with the Penn community as key progress is made.

“I walked away feeling excited about Penn’s future,” Rottenberg says. “The combination of smart people with good energy and intent led to great ideas. There is still work to be done to go from ideas to implementation, but the incredible effort that the working groups have put in—showing up to every meeting, doing homework on weekends—has us set up for success.”