Stop and Think: PI awareness campaign
Summary
The Fulton Schools of Engineering joined the Principled Innovation (PI) initiative, as part of the second cohort, in Spring 2024. Our efforts aim to integrate PI throughout the engineering culture at ASU by prototyping many methods connected to teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and operations. These efforts are situated within an institutional change theory to improve the chances of long-term success.
A critical first step in our change effort is building PI awareness so faculty, staff, students, and partners share similar language, frameworks, and practices. As an important first phase, a PI poster campaign was designed over Summer 2024 and deployed in Fall 2024. The posters were created by two students majoring in Graphic Information Technology (GIT), a senior and a master’s student. Following two months of design work, the posters were sent for production at ASU’s Print and Imaging Lab, where both students had past work experience, improving the workflow efficiency.
The poster campaign settled on introducing PI using a simple message, “Just because we can, should we?” and contextualizing this with imagery of products, services, or infrastructure produced by engineering and technology professionals. Twelve different versions of posters based on these images were created in this first run. A small notation of “Principled Innovation at Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering” connected the messaging to the PI initiative and engineering at ASU.
Over three sessions in September 2024, 96 posters were mounted to walls in 26 spaces within The Polytechnic School. Spaces included faculty meeting rooms, classrooms, design studios, maker spaces, and break rooms. The posters have also appeared at recruiting events, visitor presentations, and conferences. They have also inspired a series of simple stickers for distribution at recruiting events, and similar, as distinctive tokens of the PI culture at ASU.
Creating a cultural norm
This project represents a unified messaging campaign of culture across The Polytechnic School (TPS), perhaps the first of its kind. While there are some instances of ASU charter or design aspiration posters in conference rooms, this campaign communicates an emerging cultural norm– and a differentiator from what faculty, students and staff might expect– across the TPS enterprise. We hope this makes downstream PI efforts clearer and more likely to succeed.
Universities do not change easily. Oftentimes inspired thinking gets ahead, or misaligned, with institutional norms. This is why we are starting our PI engagement with a clear awareness of institutional culture and how to build upon it with relevant messaging of new concepts, terms, and practices. A cultural shift over the coming years will help support and sustain critical PI programming and approaches, and importantly, serve as authentic context for broadly differentiating engineering at ASU.
– Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering College Catalysts
Sparking people’s imaginations
With this awareness campaign, we aim to establish language, concepts, and awareness of Principled Innovation within The Polytechnic School’s (TPS) faculty, staff, students, and partners. This is a first step toward introduction across the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. TPS is the experimental site of our strategies to test and refine before deployment across the Fulton Schools of Engineering.
Each poster superimposes the provocative question, “Just because we can, should we?” on images of things we often take for granted, such as plastic bottles, clothing, robotic assembly, meat production. The juxtaposition of inquiry and familiarity is a powerful method to encourage divergent thinking.
Check out all of the phase 1 posters!
TTLs exemplify PI practices
Design creative solutions
Our team spent weeks examining the needs and constraints of communicating a new institutional initiative and settled upon a simple poster campaign to hook viewers within two seconds of attention. This curiosity campaign was then translated to a set of physical posters, rather than digital, to highlight the importance of messaging to place. The posters were designed and fabricated by student workers creating a group of PI champions within the student body.
Identify and acknowledge fundamental values
A separate initiative at The Polytechnic School is the definition of the New American Polytechnic, by starting with key values that honor the current and future culture of TPS. This multi-month process, which has included most faculty and staff, is identifying a short-list of important qualities. While not quite finished, highly rated terms include terms connected to innovation and character. Principled Innovation is an apt summary term for a mix of these values, and will certainly be used to describe our definition of a modern polytechnic at ASU. PI is a timely framework to shape our future, partly by giving us a well-formed framework to describe and differentiate our School.
Designed with and for students
Having student designers central to this strategy improves the receptivity of one of the key stakeholder groups– students– for the awareness campaign. Kurt Paterson, Director of the Polytechnic School, met weekly with the team to provide project context, as well as and administrative and faculty perspectives to the work.
