In Review

Julia Maddox, director of the new Barbara J. Burger iZone at the River Campus Libraries, talks problem solving, innovation, and the hub’s efforts to foster creative thinking and actions. Opening last fall, the 12,000-square-foot space in Rush Rhees Library is named for Barbara Burger ’83, a trustee whose lifelong passion for libraries and innovation inspired her support.

What’s the iZone’s raison d’être?

All humans have the inborn potential to be creative problem solvers. But the reality is that we, and especially young people, are told, “get good grades, get into a good school, get a high salary.” That means we often deprioritize creative pursuits that might otherwise help us unlock true innovations. We’re out to prove that every single one of us is born to be a creative problem solver.

What happens at the iZone?

We have a peer-led model led by undergraduates and graduate students who provide tools to help other students explore their ideas. We also offer workshops and programs such as project management, design thinking, pitching and brainstorming—things that students can walk away with and feel they immediately have something in their tool kit.

What’s behind “design thinking?”

Design thinking is a method for solving problems that starts by empathizing with real people. Before coming up with concrete ideas, we first spend time really understanding the people who experience a problem—talking to them, shadowing them, learning from them. Only then, when we have a human-centered understanding of the challenge that we’re trying to tackle, do we start to come up with possible solutions. Design thinking encourages us to brainstorm previously untapped ideas and then to quickly experiment with that idea by building it, by acting it out, tweaking it—and maybe burning it all down if we realize it wasn’t a good idea after all.

What gets in the way of innovation?

Truly innovative ideas lie somewhere between the expected and the impossible. At iZone, we help students hunt for those ideas. Ten years ago, would we ever have imagined going to a city and staying in a stranger’s house? Or summoning a stranger on our phone to have them come and pick us up in the car? You cannot come up with groundbreaking ideas if you do not allow yourself to wander around in the zone of the unknown. So much of what we do at iZone is helping students develop the mental muscles they need to come up with those ideas.