Students have a unique opportunity while in school to work on large-scale ‘wicked’ problems. Wicked problems, a phrase coined by Horst Rittel at Berkeley in 1973, are problems that are ever-changing, inherently multidisciplinary, and have an array of potential solutions. My former advisor, Dave Dornfeld partnered with Sara Beckman to start a class focused on the wicked problem of global slums and I served as the graduate student instructor. To memorialize Dave’s life and commitment to addressing large scale problems, Sara and I turned the course into a series called Reimagining X at Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. The series gives instructors and faculty the space and structure to engage students in messy, wicked problems. To date, Jacobs has offered courses and workshops on Reimagining Public Health (focused on birth control access), courses on Reimagining Mobility (focused on the future transportation sector), and Reimagining the Human Body (focused on prosthetic design).

Partners: Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, Berkeley Center for Global Public Health