UMBC is known for innovation in education. Now, a couple of faculty members are taking that one step further and are teaching students to become entrepreneurs.

Baltimore Business Journal reporter, Sarah Gantz wrote about the class in the October 5, issue.

Gantz writes, “Two faculty members are developing a course for the school that would establish partnerships with businesses and nonprofit organizations to bring real-life problems to the classroom for students to solve by developing a product or service. William LaCourse, dean of UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences; and Gib Mason, co-founder of wraparound-earmuff company 180s Inc.”

She writes that, “The faculty members say the course is meant to offer students a hands-on experience with business implications beyond their grade point average, provide students who lack internship experience an opportunity to interact with businesses and establish a relationship with the business community that could lead to future jobs or internships.”

This course is still under development but she writes,

“The course would be modeled after a current class Mason teaches. In that class, students each come up with a product or service — some ideas from this semester include a knife with a safety sheaf, a mobile application that helps students navigate campus and a service to help find lost cellphones. They whittle down those ideas to one and spend the remainder of the semester working together to bring the product to market.”

Students love the course and Gantz reports that, Josh Massey, a 32 year old junior in the class says that, “Gib has a way of teaching you how to think, not what to think.”

So how does it end? “Mason said the course, which is not offered every semester, has developed a waiting list. Businesses may also be lining up to get in the future class.”

Proposition: The natural sciences will forever be at odds with the humanities and social sciences. Steven Gimbel ’90, philosophy and physics, argues in the negative. As chair of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College and the author of works such as Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion, Gimbel has made his career finding useful and provocative intersections between the sciences and the humanities and social sciences.

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There are days in college that leave an indelible trace on your mind. I will never forget sitting in professor (and now professor emeritus of physics) Robert L. Rasera’s solid state physics class about two weeks from the end of the semester, when Jon Lau ’90, physics (who busted every curve), asked for clarification about the topic being discussed.

I recall that Rasera paused, and then said three little words: “We don’t know.” Not “I don’t know,” but “We don’t know.” And as he sketched out competing views, everything changed for me.

As a double major in physics and philosophy, I was used to discussing disagreements between philosophers – that’s just what philosophers do. But science had always been beautifully clean. Every problem had an elegant solution. All equations had seamless derivations. Problems were solved exactly.

That moment in Rasera’s class showed me that science was also a process involving people arguing with each other. It was the real physics, the messy physics, the human physics. I had found the philosophy in the science – and I have stayed there ever since.

As a philosopher of science, students often tell me: “This philosophy stuff is interesting, but I believe in science.” Their mistaken view is something one could easily infer from the way we do things. We create departments of physics, chemistry, and biology, and then locate them in buildings away from history, sociology, and political science. Much of what we do at universities can entrench the idea that these divisions are absolute. Natural sciences go in one box, pack the humanities in a different one, and leave the arts and social sciences to their own.

But it just isn’t so. There’s no competition here, and no need to choose sides. Indeed, these seemingly disparate disciplines are complementary, working together to create multifaceted minds that appreciate the full breadth of the world and derive insight and wisdom from it.

Sociologists like Robert K. Merton, historians like I.B. Cohen, and philosophers like Thomas Kuhn looked at scientific communities and the reasoning of individual scientists in order to embed discoveries in historical and cultural contexts. If we want to understand not only how the science works, but where it came from and why it appeared when it did, then we need to blend our disciplines across borders.

This is what I do in my latest book Einstein’s Jewish Science. The title comes from a phrase used by the Nazis to denigrate the theory of relativity. Like so much that came from Hitler and his minions, we now dismiss it as absurd propaganda. But look closely at the history of our sciences, and you’ll realize how inextricably intertwined they are with the politics, ideas, and religious beliefs of their day.

But interdisciplinarity isn’t merely a retrospective exercise. It is essential to developing the minds of scientists who will move us forward. During the last week of my first semester of quantum mechanics at UMBC, I remember professor of physics Ivan Kramer discussing the interpretation of the equations we had been studying. The theory itself, Kramer argued, was “a bunch of squiggles.” But then he asked what those squiggles meant.

Again, I found philosophy in my physics class. Because looking for meaning, after all, is what a philosopher does. Some of the squiggles represented mass or length – things that can be measured. Others were mathematical symbols, like an equal sign, that form the grammar of mathematical language. And there were more squiggles standing for potential field values, curvature tensors, and other weird things that we can’t see. If the theory is true, how do we make sense of these? What does the theory mean? What does the universe really look like if this theory describes how it works? The equation doesn’t answer these questions. Philosophy does.

This meditation leads us to two important elements of interdisciplinarity. First, what theory tells us about the world may compel us to completely change how we understand ourselves and our universe. Moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system did not change an inconsequential technical parameter. The earth was removed from the center of Creation. There were other planets just like ours, and other suns just like ours. This required a full reworking of our relation to the universe.

Scientific advancement and new technologies lead to yet another place where the sciences and humanities collide and collaborate. New discoveries force increasingly complex ethical issues onto the cultural stage. Technology gives us new tools and science gives us the know-how to use them in unforeseen ways. But the questions of meaning are urgent: Should we use them in those ways, or indeed at all?

Again, consider Einstein, who saw the horrors of the two world wars in which science and technology helped create mass death. Knowing that the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg had been enlisted by the Nazis to create an atomic weapon, Einstein and fellow physicist Leo Szillard wrote to warn President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That letter helped create the Manhattan Project, which also led to the nuclear arsenals that shaped the Cold War and now stoke our greatest fears concerning terrorist organizations. Einstein later said: “I could burn my fingers that I wrote that letter.” Science yields knowledge, but that knowledge also forces weighty and complex moral decisions upon us.

We are faced with new and daunting ethical challenges each day because of the progress of science and the technology derived from it. That will not – and should not – change. But it does require us to shed the old way of thinking of knowledge in boxes. We must cross boundaries, weaving together the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. This is what education for a new age needs. It is what I received – and what students still receive – at UMBC.

Students in the Erickson School’s Project 2061 class have high expectations for technology and its power to meet human needs. Working across disciplines, they’ve created new possibilities for the future of senior care.

By Dinah Winnick
Photos: Marlayna Demond ’11. CAD images: Michael Mower ’12

Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS (left), helped her team imagine the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss. Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering (right), inspired his classmates to design for “Abdulla,” an imagined 90-year-old man determined to live independently despite impairments from a stroke.

It’s hard to imagine ourselves five years into the future, let alone 50. But one group of UMBC students has confronted this challenge head-on in search of inspiration for new designs to improve the lives of older adults.

Their course, “Project 2061” was spearheaded by the Erickson School, UMBC’s newest college. Founded in 2004, the school offers undergraduate and graduate curricula that combine the studies of aging, public policy and management.

The Erickson School created Project 2061 after being invited to showcase UMBC student research at a conference on the future of aging. The project quickly attracted faculty and students from engineering, information systems, design, management of aging services (MAgS) and interdisciplinary studies (INDS) to collaboratively develop new technologies for older adults living in the year 2061.

As it turns out, the endeavor’s success hinged on something simple and personal: students’ reflections on their own imagined future needs and desires. The class created three avatars based on students’ life experiences – “Abdulla,” “Ashley,” and “Spencer” – to help them explore both the problems aging can bring and how design can meet those challenges.

“Abdulla,” for instance, was based on Project 2061 participant Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering. His avatar is 90 years old and recovering from a stroke that has left him struggling with memory, speech and motor impairments. Yet he is determined to live independently and enjoy activities such as cooking, daily prayer and going to the theater.

For Judah Ronch, dean of the Erickson School, creating personas like “Abdulla” proved the key to making Project 2061 click.

“This is always the challenge in teaching about aging,” says Ronch, “Until you make it about us it’s very removed. If it’s always about them, it’s highly abstract, it’s not very real, and there is not a sense of urgency about it because [typical students] are 25 or 20 and we’re talking about 60 years down the road.”

Everything changes, Ronch observes, “once you start talking about yourself and [asking], ‘How will this affect me?’”

BUILDING A TEAM

Assistant professors Amy Hurst and Catherine Neylan explore data visualization with Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones ’12, computer science and interdisciplinary studies (left to right).

In May 2011, LeadingAge — a research and advocacy group focused on the lives of older adults — asked the Erickson School to create an exhibit on the future of aging.

LeadingAge planned a celebration of its 50th anniversary in October 2011 with a conference that would bring 8,000 participants to Washington, D.C. The group wanted to highlight dramatic changes in senior living from 1961 to the present, and also articulate a bold vision for the next 50 years.

Ronch says the exhibit “was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.” So he recruited faculty and students from across UMBC to create the school’s presentation as part of a new, boundary-breaking course in the Erickson School.

To teach the class, Ronch enlisted Tim Topoleski, a professor of mechanical engineering who studies mobility and the mechanics of joint replacements. Catherine Neylan, assistant professor of design, and Amy Hurst, assistant professor of information systems, followed, attracted to the course by their shared interest in design for people with disabilities.

These faculty recruited students from a range of majors. Neylan observes that technology and social problems are now so complex that “we need collective intelligence to build the things that we build.”

Eventually, 19 UMBC students joined the effort. Early in the process, MAgS major Joe Yoon proposed that the class should create specific design personas based on students in the course and then craft flexible technologies to meet those avatars’ specific needs. His idea was a game-changer.

“In all of our scenarios of how this would be used,” recalls Hurst, “we never said, ‘How would grandma use this?’ We said, ‘How would I use it in 50 years.’ I think that fundamentally changed a lot of the designs [and] helped the students be more creative and engaged.”

Yoon’s proposal also forced students to ponder uncomfortable possibilities. As Steven Hall, a junior majoring in graphic design, observes: “I don’t think anybody’s going to want to think, ‘What’s my life going to be like in 50 years? I’m going to have cataracts and be overweight. I’m going to have my foot amputated from diabetes.’”

The students had to deal with uncertainties about their lives and the world in 50 years. “You can’t take the current older adult population and simply throw them 50 years into the future,” argues Colleen Bennett, a gerontology Ph.D. student and Project 2061 teaching assistant. The project depended on young people confronting their own fears and desires for later life.

“Every generation is different, and then they age,” says Hurst. “Traditionally, people are very bad at abstracting and predicting what they would want in the future, but they can tell you what they want now and how they feel about things.”

REALIZING A VISION

The three personas gave Project 2061 students a concrete foundation to build on.

“Once we had a starting point,” says Aljneibi, “the ideas started flowing.”

The class worked quickly to conceptualize, research, and render designs for technologies to meet functional needs: eating, sleeping, hygiene, and entertainment/social engagement. Living environments in the future might be quite different, they reasoned, but basic human needs will remain the same.

Occasionally, there were hiccups. The blurred lines of interdisciplinary work and the indefinite nature of the problems that the project aimed to address frustrated some of the students, especially early in the process.

“You would think design and engineering would be closer, but they both want to have a product and their process is so different,” observes Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones ’12, computer science and INDS. At times, she adds, students misinterpreted their failure to communicate across a disciplinary “language barrier” as actual disagreement over ideas.

“They are beginning to learn that the real world is not as clear-cut as their well-designed classes,” says Hurst.

In four weeks, however, a dozen designs took shape, all of them informed by contemporary technologies and targeted to meet users’ specific needs.

One group devised a “Smart Closet” that reminds users with memory and other cognitive impairments when and how garments need to be cleaned. It also lets users know when they last wore a favorite dress or tie, and even what clothing is appropriate for particular activities or occasions.

Another design team emerged with a “Lavish Lavatory”—which auto-adjusts toilet and rail height to account for changes in strength and balance over time. The design’s flexibility means it can help communal facilities better meet the needs of diverse individuals. It also discreetly and unobtrusively monitors waste and automatically sends relevant health data to each user’s physician.

Eating properly is important at any age, so another group designed a “FoodPro,” that monitors the refrigerator and pantry, keeping track of grocery inventory, expiration dates and nutritional content. It also helps users prepare meals that meet their particular dietary needs, taking into account health conditions, lifestyle choices and food preferences.

These projects formed the core of the Erickson School’s LeadingAge exhibit— “My Surroundings, My Well-Being”— which centered on personal experiences with technology.

The student designers took the exhibit opportunity as a chance to demonstrate how individuals would use their products in home environments. They acted as docents to the conference exhibit, explaining to visitors how each invention would serve “Ashley,” “Abdulla” and “Spencer” in their future lives.

Helping people connect with the exhibit in a personal way was a priority for Aljneibi—and not simply because he lent his identity to the design process. He also belongs to a close-knit multigenerational family with a grandmother facing mobility problems.

“When she goes into the shower,” he says, “it’s always in our heads: ‘What if she slips? What if she falls?’” For his family, respecting her boundaries means resisting the impulse to help her in the shower. In what ways could his team’s designs enable her, and people like her, to more safely bathe by themselves?

Though he approached the course from a neuroscience background, Talmo Pereira, an INDS major and Meyerhoff Scholar, took the tenets of user-centered design to heart.

“Considering that the environment should adapt to the user,” he suggests, “the mutability of the environment is one of the things that will most compensate for differences in culture and preferences, and certainly limitations.”

The exhibit received an enthusiastic response from vendors, senior care professionals, and LeadingAge organizers, who immediately invited the students back for 2012.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Creating an exhibit with an October deadline left everyone involved in Project 2061 with the question of how to best make use of the rest of the semester. Focus on prototyping the exhibit designs or generate new concepts? Continue team projects or pursue independent research? The answer was different for each participant.

Aljneibi chose to continue his team project on bath designs. “When I came to the States I wasn’t fine with communal bathing, especially in the gym,” he reflects. “I used the handicapped one because I needed my privacy.” For him, this experience— uncomfortable though it felt—was an inspiration. After all, if the United States continues to grow increasingly diverse, certainly consumers would appreciate flexible bathing technologies.

Steven Hall ’11 and Pavlo Yankovetz ’11, both in graphic design, explored how visualizing health data in particular ways may offer older adults a sense of self-awareness and empowerment. They argue that information can motivate or stifle health-seeking behaviors, depending on how it is conveyed. “If you’re just giving someone numbers, that’s not helpful or useful. We want those numbers to mean something,” says Hall.

Meyerhoff Scholar Deanna Easley ’12, mechanical engineering, worked to develop safer flooring for older adults, who are often injured in falls. Having broken her own wrist in a fall, Easley understood the mental and physical traumas of injury and lengthy recovery.

“People told me, ‘At least you didn’t break the hand you write with,’” recalls Easley. “But I’m a pianist. I need both hands.” With a deep understanding of how injury can wreak havoc on one’s sense of self, plus input from MAgS students, Easley designed flooring that would not only enhance safety, but also offer aesthetic appeal and emotional comfort to potential consumers.

INNOVATION STARTS AT HOME

Academic leaders at UMBC applaud the new class, arguing that it breaks new ground at a university already known for its commitment to promoting undergraduate success through active learning.

“Project 2061 represents a striking example of UMBC’s ability to create innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning that address significant future challenges,” says Provost Philip Rous.

“In the process of researching real problems, our students not only gain knowledge, they also co-create knowledge and contribute to the field,” says Diane Lee, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education.

Connecting research to reality and realizing its potential for lasting impact isn’t simply a hypothetical draw to students. For Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones, Project 2061 is about “actually making a difference right now” rather than just “writing up a piece of code and turning it in.”

Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS, who helped her classmates understand the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden and meditate in the year 2061 but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss, agrees: “I’m never asking, ‘Will I use this in the future?’ I know I will.”

Students aren’t the only beneficiaries of this work. As Don Engel, Assistant Vice President for Research, articulates: “Universities support research both to expand human knowledge and to engage students in the forefront of their disciplines. Project 2061 demonstrates how interdisciplinarity and a focus on real-world challenges produce compelling results and provide a valuable education to students and faculty alike.”

Part of Project 2061’s success, it turns out, was also rooted in participants’ refusal to play it safe. Not only did they take risks with ideas, but students and the faculty broke out of their intellectual comfort zones when they crossed disciplinary boundaries.

When you predict the future, says Ronch, “you have to be prepared to be wrong.” This kind of risk-taking requires what he calls “a special kind of iconoclasm: looking at a blank space and seeing what could fill it.”

“For major league baseball fans in Washington, it’s been 79 years of waiting for another postseason appearance. The last time they made it to the playoffs, Herbert Hoover was just leaving the first air-conditioned Oval Office. This Sunday, the wait ends,” writes Ryan Bloom, English lecturer, in The American Prospect.

Bloom gives an account of the complicated history of baseball in the nation’s capital, concluding that “Whatever may come, the excitement in Washington is palpable… it seems D.C. fans of all stripes know what the rest of baseball is just figuring out: This time, the Washington Nationals are here to stay.”

The piece, “Nationals Pride,” appeared online on October 5.