2018
Introducing Healthyish Superpowered: A Kind of Dinner Party, Healthyish, February 26, 2018
Healthyish is celebrating people who believe that wellness is for everyone and highlighted Aileen Suzara, cook and educator with the mission-based catering business, Sariwa. This successful business originated from Eat. Think. Design and has continued to showcase vibrant, healing food cultures. Aileen Suzara works with communities to promote these food cultures and these dinners bring healthy-minded people together.
2016
Edible East Bay: Eat. Think. Design. At UC Berkeley , Edible East Bay, August 12, 2016
In Fall Harvest 2016, Edible East Bay showcased the impactful way that the selected 25 graduate students of Eat. Think. Design innovate and devise solutions that stick for the most prominent problems in nutrition, food, and farming. Highlighting Farmacation and Terrific Tacos, two of the seven projects that the graduate students were involved in, the article exemplified how students are challenged to create designs that truly helps their clients in a lasting, meaningful way.
Startup connects local farmers with city dwellers, University of California , Anne Brice, May 26, 2016
The article, produced by the University of California , highlights one of Eat. Think. Design.’s original projects, Farmcation. Most small farms face demanding challenges, which sparked the inspiration for Farmcation, which brings together the process of growing and providing food to guests. Solving a pressing food problem, the projects of Eat. Think. Design. are making real-world impacts in the Bay Area and beyond.
This New Startup Wants To Be The Airbnb For Local Farm Tourism , Fast Company, Adele Peters, May 11, 2016.
Farmcation, a startup that began in Eat. Think. Design., was featured in this article for its impactful way of offering a new source of income by bridging farmers with community members who want to visit. By allowing Bay Area visitors to have a comprehensive tour of an organic family farm in the Central Valley, small-scale farmers and food producers can be supported by a food-conscious population to make small-scale farming more economically feasible.
2015
AJPH special issue: Berkeley brings innovation to education through collaboration and leadership training, Linda Anderberg, March 17, 2015
The American Journal of Public Health released a special supplement issue in March 2015, devoted to innovations in public health education, featuring articles about two groundbreaking programs at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. These commentaries share two ways in which the School is shifting the paradigm for public health education—through small interdisciplinary teams designed to develop problem-solving skills and by giving leadership training for graduate students equal priority to the technical competencies on which programs currently focus.
AJPH Talks Blog Post: What Does a Filipino Food Pop-Up Have to Do With Public health Innovation?, J. Sandhu, R. Hosang, K. Madsen, March 2, 2015
In this post, the authors of “Solutions That Stick: Activating Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in a Graduate-Level Public Health Innovations Course at the University of California, Berkeley” from the “Innovations in Public Health Education” Special Issue of the American Journal of Public Health write about an exciting and inspiring project designed by graduate students at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Blum Center for Developing Economies Editorial Director Tamara Straus writes about Eat.Think.Design. in a February 2015 article titled: Eat.Think.Design.: A Public Health Course for the Startup Generation. This article was also highlighted in The Berkeleyan newsletter, and has been picked up by the UCOP/UC Global Food Initiativeand the UC Health site.
For the creators of the UC Berkeley course Eat.Think.Design, two things are certain. First, the United States is facing a food and nutrition crisis, with rocketing rates of diabetes, hunger, and health disparity. Second, graduate students today—from fields as different as public health, business, information technology, and engineering—want their education to be more hands-on, more interdisciplinary, and more “impactful” to society at large. In the case of the Eat.Think.Design course, they want to spend class time not just learning about food and nutrition problems, they want to devise actual food and nutrition solutions.
2014
American Journal of Public Health Article Solutions That Stick: Activating Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in a Graduate-Level Public Health Innovations Course at the University of California, Berkeley, J. Sandhu, R. Hosang, K. Madsen, October 14, 2014
Since 2011 we have taught a public health innovations course at the University of California, Berkeley. Students gain skills in systematic innovation, or human-centered design, while working in small interdisciplinary teams on domestic and global health projects with client organizations.
To support acquisition of meaningful problem-solving skills, we structured the course so that the majority of learning happens in scenarios that do not involve faculty. Taken by students representing 26 graduate programs (as diverse as epidemiology, city planning, and mechanical engineering), it is one of the 10 highest-rated courses offered by the School of Public Health.
We present the blueprints for our course with the hope that other institutions whose students could benefit will borrow from our model.
UC Students to Develop Solutions to Global Food Challenges, Sybil Lewis, BigIdeas@Berkeley, UC Berkeley, September 28, 2014.
The School of Public Health at UC Berkeley…offers an interdisciplinary graduate course called “Eat.Think.Design,” which encourages students to connect with nonprofits and government agencies to implement projects that address challenges in food systems. Jaspal Sandhu, a lecturer in design and innovation at the School of Public Health and a former Big Ideas team mentor, said he designed “Eat.Think.Design” to “create links between the classroom and the real-world to motivate students and ensure a worthwhile learning experience.” Past students from the course include a computer scientist who traveled to Uganda to test a post-diarrheal zinc therapy and health writer now working on special programs for the Culinary Institute of America.
Eat.Think.Design: Public health Course Brings Innovation to the Table, Niema Jordan, Berkeley Health Online, May 8, 2014
It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Wednesday in March, and students enrolled in Eat.Think.Design. are exploring Oakland’s wholesale produce market in Jack London Square. As the forklifts carry crates of fruits and vegetables and workers do their usual loading and unloading, the students take note of how the morning ritual flows and how it can be done better….
2013
Implementing Benghazi’s First Emergency Response System, Laura Montini, Health 2.0, May 20, 2013
A Libyan man named Mafi drives through the streets of Benghazi. Mafi’s vehicle suddenly collides with another car, and the accident leaves him seriously injured. A witness to the accident moves quickly and takes him to the closest hospital. The problem is that the hospital is closed. A militia group came in, and the staff felt unsafe and left the facility. But Mafi still needs help and he needs it soon. This is the story that Kim Garcia, a public health graduate student at UC Berkeley, told during a recent presentation….
2012
The Course That Innovates for the Public Good, Luis Flores, Blum Center for Developing Economies Newsletter, April 2012
On a rainy Wednesday evening, 23 UC Berkeley students from a broad range of disciplines gathered for class in a seminar room in the imposing University Hall—each taking a seat around a mysterious “Hello Kitty” stuffed doll. After a few minutes, the table was filled with seemingly unrelated products: cartoon toothpaste and toothbrush sets, a doggy-bag dispenser and a manicure set….
2011
Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions, Blurb, 40pp
Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions (DIPHS) is an interdisciplinary, project-based course, taught for the first time in Spring 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley. DIPHS teaches students about systematic methods to drive innovation in public health programs and interventions. The course integrates design thinking, ethnography, systems thinking, creativity, and critical thinking – all in the context of public health. As part of the core curriculum, the course brought in guest lecturers from a diverse set of institutions, including the California HealthCare Foundation, Toyota do Brasil, US Health and Human Services, the New York Times, and Pixar. This semester, eight project teams worked with domestic and international organizational partners to work on real problems that were expected to have meaningful impact. It is the only such public health course that we know of in the nation. Dean Stephen Shortell highlighted the course in his 2011 commencement address, describing all eight projects and indicating that the course is “the way we will move ahead.” This book illustrates the course and its outcomes.