Sloan’s Integrated Design & Management Program Provides Management Tools In Design-Thinking

The Integrated Design and Management program, a master’s curriculum designed to produce new business models, great products and the creativity to solve complex, hard-to-define problems is offered jointly by MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the MIT School of Engineering.

Matt Kressy, Director, Integrated Design and Management Master’s degree track at Sloan says while designers are good at inventing or creating, most of them would not be well versed in the languages of engineering and business. Thus, they may not be able to explain how their creations could be feasible or profitable.

The program is aimed at providing designers with management tools to effectively communicate their vision and demonstrate that great design could be a competitive advantage.

The first batch of the 2-year IDM program got underway in August 2015 with 18 students, 9 men and an equal number of women drawn from 11 countries including the US. They comprised an equal number of designers, engineers and business professionals, who within the first two weeks, bonded quickly during “boot camp”, combining classwork and team projects.

The students are from India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Lebanon, the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica and Colombia.

The selection process was different from the MIT’s usual criteria. The candidates were to be drawn from those who “wanted to do something for the people around them and the society at large.”

Thus the batch included Honey Bajaj, who drawing upon her childhood experience of seeing soldiers, posted in freezing snow conditions at Nathu La on India-China border in Sikkim, struggling to use kerosene stoves to melt snow for drinking water, designed a filter to melt the snow into purified water.

Bajaj, from Siliguri, West Bengal, had also designed a low-cost infant warmer for premature babies that could be charged like a mobile phone for about 30 to 40 minutes. It stays warm for up to six hours.

Tammy Shen from Taipei is an engineer, who had designed a robot companion for autistic children.

The first boot camp for the students was at Cambridge, Massachusetts as street musicians, who first designed their own instruments using found materials. Innovation and design crossed new frontiers when Mechanical engineer Maria Tafur, from Bogota, made a clarinet from a carrot. Tammy made a musical instrument out of bottles filled with water at various levels.

The tuition fee for the program works out to be $27,810 per term (high, more than 37 credits), $18,540 per term (low, less than 36 credits) and Thesis only $16,480.