Q&A with Geoffrey H. Radbill Center Executive Director Adrienne Ausdenmoore

What Life Design brings to BGSU as a public university for the public good

Adrienne Ausdenmoore is a nationally known thought leader in Life Design principles and is now spearheading Life Design at BGSU as executive director of the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design.

Life Design provides students with extra support in addition to traditional advising and academic resources and is an integral part of the University’s Forward. strategic plan to redefine student success. The program is modeled after the Life Design Lab at Stanford University and is designed to help students graduate in four years or less, minimize student debt and create a well-established career network.

Life Design at BGSU began as a small pilot program in 2019 with about 500 students. In early 2020, 60 BGSU faculty and staff members representing various departments and programs participated in an intensive, three-day life design training that introduced them to the key principles of Life Design and how to incorporate them into their work with students. This led to broad support for an initiative University leaders believed had the potential to reshape student experiences, and the program officially launched in the fall of 2020.

We asked Ausdenmoore to share her thoughts on what Life Design and the principles of design thinking bring to BGSU as a public university for the public good.

What does Life Design bring to the undergraduate student experience at BGSU?

Life Design at BGSU combines two strong resources for student success: 1) design thinking tools and content providing creative problem-solving skills that students can apply to their college and life experience, and 2) a Life Design Coach who is positioned to help students apply Life Design content and empower them to design a life they love. Broadly speaking, higher ed is reexamining what it means to get a college education. Prospective students and their parents are understandably asking, ‘What's the value of a college education?’ BGSU is attempting to better prepare our students for an unknown future, including careers that might not yet exist in a world that's constantly evolving and changing.

Can you tell us more about the principles of Life Design and how we are applying it to our students at BGSU?

Life Design is based on the principles of design thinking as a creative problem-solving framework, which began as a discipline stemming out of mechanical engineering and has emerged across several disciplines and often used as a tool for innovation. Design thinking has been used in many different industries to address a wide range of challenging problems in an increasingly complex world. As we think about BGSU as a public university for the public good, we are looking for effective approaches to tackling a multitude of challenges as a society. As an institution, we are focusing on how to best position our students to take on current and unforeseen challenges in the future.

Life Design is all about applying the process and principles of design thinking to one’s own life. It leads to thinking about how you can prototype your career opportunities. From a Life Design standpoint, we focus on six mindsets:

1. Be curious.
2. Have a bias to take action.
3. Reframe your problems to broaden your perspective.
4. Embrace the process.
5. Collaborate and ask for help when you need it.
6. Share your story.

How are students brought into Life Design?

Over the next two years, our goal is to find a way for all incoming students to get exposed to Life Design in some way. It doesn't mean they're all taking the University’s first-year seminar, BGSU 1910, or meeting with a Life Design Coach. That’s because many of our students are already part of a strong cohort integrating Life Design with campus partners like Athletics, the Thompson Scholarship program, TRIO and others.

We want to make sure that students have that network of faculty and staff who are there to support them, and that they are getting exposed to the basic mindsets. So, with BGSU 1910, we're thinking about auto enrolling students who might not otherwise be part of a cohort during their first year.

Where first-year students are already grouped together within a program, we're working with those deans and schools and faculty to think about how we can integrate the basic principles of Life Design into the curricula. From a franchise model standpoint, the question is, ‘How do the basic concepts of Life Design become part of the fabric of our campus culture?’

How does Life Design support the University’s mission and strategic plan?

President Rogers and the Board of Trustees, faculty members and administrators have spent years thinking about how the Life Design framework ties to our strategic plan and our goals as a public university for the public good. As we think about what it means to redefine student success, we want to work out how Life Design principles can become an integral part of how we, as an institution, equip our students to become curious, empathetic, adaptable and creative problem solvers.

We also want our students to be able to build meaningful connections on and off campus. We want to provide a rich, multifaceted experience that helps to jump-start fulfilling careers. We want our students to test out and prototype things they might be interested in, and we want them to do all of that with a sense of purpose. When I think about how Life Design can contribute to redefining student success, I see the need to work together in an intentional ecosystem that seeks to ensure every BGSU student thrives here on campus and feels like they belong and have the confidence and empowerment to navigate the future.

How can faculty and staff get involved with Life Design to help students get the most out of their time at BGSU?

I’d like to extend an open invitation to faculty and staff to ‘get curious’ and learn more about Life Design. Our team is available to meet with departments and other groups of faculty and staff to share an overview of our work with students. In addition, we’re offering faculty and staff workshops that are a great opportunity to get introduced to the mindsets and even do a design thinking exercise that takes you through the process of what we do with our students. We currently have workshops in March and April that have open registration.

We’re also building a Life Design affiliate program for faculty and staff who are interested in integrating Life Design in a more intentional way. They can work with us to have a more intensive experience with our team and then use the toolkit in their own work. Our first affiliate training is coming in May. We welcome the opportunity to connect with partners across campus as a team to learn more about what they do, whether that's in an academic program or in another type of office, so that we can help direct students to these valuable resources.