Sarah Rottenberg: The Innovation Coach | Generation Change Philly
Oct. 28, 2021
If you take always wrapped a pregnancy test in half a roll of tissue before throwing it away (privacy, yo!), or if you have ever wished for a better, faster chest pump, or if you lot have struggled to dig in the garden with arthritic hands, and then y'all are someone who might exist able to empathise how a unmarried production—say, a flushable pregnancy test, a chest pump with a compression component, or assistive gardening gloves that make it easier to manipulate tools—can change your life for the better. Sometimes, for the way meliorate. And sometimes, lots of lives for the way better.
Changing lives, or at to the lowest degree moments in lives, is part of what drives Sarah Rottenberg, who is something of a one-woman innovation hub at Penn. She'due south an offshoot acquaintance professor in the Weitzman School of Design; she's the executive director of the Main'due south in Integrated Product Pattern (IPD), a School Of Engineering program that intertwines engineering with design and business concern; and she's the kinesthesia manager and one of the founders of the Executive Programme for Social Innovation Design (XSD), which debuted in 2022 equally a certificate program for professionals, a collaboration betwixt the Weitzman School of Design and the School of Policy & Practice. (More on that later.)
Changing lives, or at least moments in lives, is role of what drives Sarah Rottenberg, who is something of a one-woman innovation hub at Penn.
These creations—the pregnancy test, the pump, the gloves—are but a few examples of the bright inventions from students in the IPD program, which aims to teach a new generation of entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators and designers how to develop products and experiences that address the existent needs of real people.
Very few people understand the style to use pattern thinking—or sympathise the people they're designing for—too every bit Sarah Rottenberg, says Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer for Penn Medicine. The philosophy of "human being-centered pattern" relies on a deep empathy for the population for whom you're designing. And long earlier it was a buzzword and well-established pillar of the innovation earth, Rosin says, "Sarah already just lived it and breathed and got information technology." And not only that, he says, but "her students are incredible, and she teaches them then well. They actually get information technology, too."
So what does "getting it" look like, in terms of touch? For starters, it looks like the wearable device Rottenberg's students designed to aid surgeons communicate with one another for more than successful surgeries. And information technology looks similar an updated take on the menstrual cup, created (again past students) specifically for athletes who needed something more reliable than what was out there. It's an IPD/CHOP collaboration to develop better data-sharing between clinicians and patients, and it's an IPD project with the nonprofit CraftNOW that used pattern-centric inquiry to create an infrastructure for getting more Philly kids arts- and-crafts didactics.
It's besides, yes, the same flushable pregnancy test, which is a story that makes for a skillful window into IPD, into Sarah Rottenberg herself. Several years back, IPD students Bethany Edwards and Anna Couturier-Simpson were interested in making plastic pregnancy tests more than sustainable. One time they began really researching their pattern demographic, as Rottenberg tells it, they came to realize that many women had a need for more privacy in their tests, too—that for a range of reasons, they didn't need anyone finding a pregnancy exam in a trashcan.
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So they designed an effective, eco-friendly and flushable test, which they named Lia—a production Rottenberg believed in so much that she really joined up with the students in 2014 as an early co-founder of Lia Diagnostics, which officially debuted in March. (Headquartered on Chestnut Street, they've faced enough need that they're currently out of stock.)
The thing near that pregnancy test, Rottenberg says, is that information technology was a pattern for "a pocket-sized moment but a huge moment." And if they tin make moments like that better, and brand them improve over a lot of criteria in terms of what better looks like … well, yous tin see how in that location is a cumulative consequence of examining homo moments and human needs in search of a solution yous can design.
"I think we're making these pocket-sized differences," Rottenberg says—you know, moment past moment, need by need, person by person, product or experience or service at a time. "And they add together upwards."
Design is everything
When you lot're thinking virtually the people whose perspectives and work can make outcome positive change—which is exactly what nosotros hither at The Citizen are doing with Generation Modify Philly, our ongoing series in collaboration with Keepers of the Eatables—it'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to overlook the world of design and engineering. For that matter, it's easy to overlook the role designers play in our lives, only more often than not speaking. Rottenberg herself even gently jokes: "I hateful, I'm non making national policy, peace in the Center Eastward. I'm non making that kind of production."
Truth is, though, design is a role of our every waking moment, so ubiquitous that nosotros don't notice it. Merely call back most information technology. "You wake up every morning and yous get on a coach," Rottenberg says. "How did you find that bus? How is the bus designed? Then you pass a store: How was that shop designed for what's in it? For you?" From the fork in your paw to the shoes on your feet, she says, design is in everything we interact with. And that's one of the things she gets excited about—the chance "to continually improve things for people who apply them."
Very few people understand the manner to use design thinking—or empathize the people they're designing for—as well every bit Rottenberg, says Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer for Penn Medicine.
This wasn't always so apparent to her. Through a dissimilar sliding door, she might actually be solving for peace in the Middle East, or something in that vein. She had one time imagined a very different career, attention Georgetown University for Middle Eastern Studies. After graduation, the Atlanta native took a job with the Israeli Embassy, simply in one case fully enveloped in the globe of global politics and government, she found that the work felt besides "detached" from the daily lives of people. She pivoted and went to the University of Chicago for a master's degree in social scientific discipline, focusing mainly on anthropology. After that, she followed a path that took her into design inquiry and strategy, and innovation consulting.
"I just loved the work of delving into people'south lives, and also the idea that you lot could leverage what you lot learned well-nigh people to help brand better products and services for them," she says.
After moving around the country a bit, Rottenberg and her husband eventually decided to settle back in his hometown—Philly. Fast forward a few years, and a teaching gig in pattern at Penn grew into the opportunity to run the IPD program, which she's done at present for just over a decade, in addition to her teaching. She loves it, and yous tin meet exactly how her background in anthropology and inquiry (and maybe some of the diplomacy, she semi-jokes) come into play: Agreement people at their core is central to her piece of work. Empathy, remember?
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"Some of the biggest problems people need solutions for are things people tin't articulate," Rosin says. "Sarah understands how to get these things out of people, these things they can't clear."
This is true, says Adriana C. Vázquez Ortiz, IPD alumna and co-founding CEO of Lilu, a company that debuted in 2022 with the "massaging" chest pump that Vázquez Ortiz dreamed upward and designed with her co-founder, Sujay Suresh Kumar, as her master's capstone project. Vázquez Ortiz, who calls her time in IPD "transformative," says that not only has Rottenberg's accent on user enquiry been a helpful foundation in her own business organization every bit they introduce and design new products, but besides that her case as a woman in this space was important.
"You hear nigh non plenty women in Stalk or STEAM, and not enough women founders, or money for women founders," Vázquez Ortiz says. "This hasn't felt like the case for me." There was Rottenberg, "a potent woman," the head of IPD. In that location was Lia. There were her female cohorts, and there was, in a class of something like 16 people, two or 3 product ideas in women'due south wellness, she says.
"I think Sarah made it actually normal to innovate for women'southward wellness," Vázquez Ortiz says. "I've never had any doubt as a product designer or engineer that women's health was of import, simply not everyone sees information technology that mode. Information technology was practiced to have another person who sees that in my globe, in this earth."
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All of this reminds me a bit of Rottenberg's TedX talk from 2018, wherein she mentions an IPD partnership with Penn's Pregnancy Early Access Centre (PEACE) and Penn Center for Health Care Innovation. Students researched a large but often silent, underserved demographic—women suffering miscarriages—and designed a set of cards aiming to assist this audience process feelings, speak to doctors and communicate with loved ones afterward a miscarriage, things that had proven to present real challenges and fraught moments to significant numbers of patients and their families. Design, Rottenberg told her audience, has the opportunity to transform difficult or even shameful moments "into dignified ones."
It's true, Rottenberg admits, she does tend to push students to look at moments "we typically expect away from." And if she has a "slight bias" toward examining the private, the under-examined, the unexplored? Well, surely some of that is the anthropologist in her. Or maybe it's what Rosin calls her talent for "demand-finding." Then once more, she's too an entrepreneurial type, and isn't it often the hardest things to talk nigh that create our most pressing issues? Or, in startup speak, the "pain-points."
"I recollect Sarah made it actually normal to innovate for women's health," Vázquez Ortiz says. "I've never had any dubiety as a product designer or engineer that women'due south health was important, but not everyone sees it that way. It was good to take another person who sees that in my world, in this globe."
Still, not every educatee or project in the IPD earth delves into such securely personal territory: Rottenberg points to a list of award-winning new products she's seen come out of the program that don't live in the "unmentionable" spaces she's drawn to, from Hideaway, a kitchen tabular array that opens to transform into a full-fledged work space (plainly an answer to work-from-dwelling needs, especially if you live in a tiny Philly rowhouse!), to Rhea, a chair absorber designed for pregnant people who feel pain from sitting in an office chair all twenty-four hour period.
In any realm, information technology's a truly engaging gig, Rottenberg says. She likes the diversity of the ideas, the diverseness of the students, exposing them to new perspectives, examining the role of humility in pattern, and the excitement of seeing the start-ups and students "just putting new things into the globe."
Creating an ecosystem of human-centered innovators
She doesn't have an exact count of startup founders with roots in the program simply Vázquez Ortiz describes a Philly starting time-upward ecosystem merely blooming with IPD grads: interns and founders and early-phase startup players. When she and Suresh Kumar were at the hard-tech accelerator HAX, for example, there were at least three other startups there with IPD grads, she says, including Wazer (waterjet cutters) and Vue (smart spectacles). Not to mention the number of alumni who've collaborated with other Penn folks in, say, health or engineering, or joined other new startups, or went to work with design teams at big firms.
The numbers don't seem to exist terribly important to Rottenberg, who instead brings up a team of IPD alumni who are currently working on ways to make OTC healthcare more sustainable. "They got together with a bunch of other alumni equally well as current students, and they were all simply talking to each other, and building on each other's ideas," she says. "And that, to me, is actually exciting: It's virtually people we demand to have living and working in the metropolis, creating this customs here and throughout the globe."
That community is growing. The XSD program, which teaches professionals from architects to nonprofit managers to urban planners (and beyond) how to use design-thinking every bit a way to brand social alter, has been such a success that Rottenberg and her colleagues are brainstorming other potential certificate programs that could reach even more people. Meantime, IPD'south movement to a more expansive home inside Wharton'southward brand-new, cutting-edge Tangen Hall has meant that instead of the original capacity for twoscore students total in the program, they've been able to aggrandize to lxxx.
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This is a peachy thing for Rottenberg, not just from her perspective as a manager of a flourishing academic program, simply as a researcher and problem-solver assail nurturing more problem-solvers to do their matter, as a thought leader who sees limitless potential in combining all this disciplines with empathy with humility with people and their ideas.
"I also just experience actually lucky," she says. "I get to learn about all these unlike things." And so many different things: Over the course of but this past yr, she'due south seen a team of students looking at fertility and egg freezing, some other team looking at eating disorders, and another looking at helping wildland firefighters heave their effectiveness on the job.
And so you can understand where she'southward coming from. Who wouldn't want to encounter so many vivid minds engage with these worlds? Or with any globe, really, where at that place are bug to be solved, and solutions to be designed.
The Philadelphia Citizen is partnering with the nonprofit Keepers of the Commons on the "Generation Modify Philly" series to provide educational and networking opportunities to the metropolis's well-nigh dynamic change-makers.
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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/sarah-rottenberg/
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