Courses Offered
Recent, current and forthcoming courses in Health Sciences Design (HSD) and are listed below, along with courses offered from partner programs in collaboration with HSD.
A star (★) indicates a course that is expected to be available in the Fall 2023 semester. Please visit the UAccess Student Center Class Search page or the UArizona Course Catalog and Schedule of Classes to view the most current information on HSD classes.
Core Courses
Health Sciences Design Core Courses are open to any student on campus who is interested in exploring human-centered approaches to meeting health care needs. With foundational curriculum centered in design thinking experiences, Core Courses employ next-generation education to prepare students to build and lead the future.
HSD 401 and 501
Design for Health Workshop: Addressing Human Health Challenges with Design Thinking
In this course, you will gain creative confidence and hands-on problem-solving experience as a member of an interdisciplinary, interprofessional team. Your team will work on addressing health seekers’ experiences within the health care system that require you to apply the design thinking process — Notice, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test and Reflect — to understand and clearly define the real need, explore design options/concepts, analyze options, prototype your design, and pitch your design recommendation and implementation plan.
Through enhanced group collaboration, you will build intellectual and practical skills in inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, teamwork and problem solving.
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HSD 410/510
Device Design in the Health Sciences: Developing Tools for Health Care Solutions using Design Thinking
In this course, you will work in an interdisciplinary team of your peers to gain hands-on experience developing devices for application in the health sciences. Your team will broadly aim to develop devices to address and improve health seekers’ experiences within the health care system. The course will be organized so that you learn to apply the design thinking process — Notice, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test and Reflect — to understand and clearly define the real need, explore design options/concepts, analyze options, prototype your design, and pitch your design recommendation and implementation plan.
Using project-based learning techniques, this experiential learning course will enable you to learn about a subject through the experience of exploring an open-ended, student-driven topic in health care delivery and patient-centered service experiences. Appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, through enhanced group collaboration and in a makerspace learning environment, you will build intellectual and practical skills in inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, design and prototyping, written and oral communication, teamwork and problem solving.
HSD 420/520
Inventioneering: Design, Health, Emerging Technologies and Societal Grand Challenges
In this course, you will work in a transdisciplinary team of your peers to gain hands-on experience developing innovative design-based solutions to address societal grand challenges, with particular focus at the intersection of health and emerging technologies (extended-reality, internet of things, robotics/drones, etc.). The course will be organized so that you learn to apply the design thinking process — Notice, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Reflect — to understand and clearly define the real need, explore design options/concepts, analyze options, prototype your design and pitch your design recommendation and implementation plan. Using project-based learning techniques, this experiential learning course will enable you to learn about a subject through the experience of exploring open-ended, student-driven innovation to address societal grand challenges. Appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, through enhanced group collaboration and in a makerspace learning environment, you will build intellectual and practical skills in inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, design and prototyping, written and oral communication, teamwork and problem solving.
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Participatory Research and Design Courses
HSD's Participatory Research and Design Courses employ immersive learning and systems thinking to understand and address complex problems and their root causes. Using an interprofessional approach, these courses engage students in advanced simulation or direct collaboration with communities to provide opportunities to develop core competencies in clinical care, community action, service leadership, crisis management, threat assessment, public policy and other key areas — as well as opportunities to deepen their understanding of communities that are directly affected by disasters, inhospitable conditions and/or systemic and structural barriers to community resilience and health justice.
HPS 595 002
Alamos Global Telehealth Course and Rotation
This global health course and rotation will provide students the opportunity to work in interprofessional teams in partnership with Clinica Integral Almas in Alamos, Mexico, using a telehealth framework. This course will increase knowledge and application of global health concepts, indigenous health practices, the utilization of community health workers (CHWs) in health care delivery, telehealth competencies and rural health promotion. Utilizing telehealth as a means of health care delivery and clinical training, students will interact with and learn from health care providers in Mexico and the United States, while partnering with CHWs in Alamos, Sonora, Mexico to address individual and population health needs in their communities.
International practice provides a framework for a more comprehensive examination of how health and wellness are impacted by global issues such as climate change, violence and migration, and how partnerships between communities in differing countries can increase understanding of common health challenges and lead to innovative solutions. Students, faculty, and staff from the University of Arizona, Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC), Clinica Integral Almas and members of the indigenous communities will work together using a shared decision-making model for health promotion and health care delivery.
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HSD 496/596
MILAGRO Collaborative: Addressing Migration in the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands
The MILAGRO (Migration Interprofessional Leading to Action and Growth) Collaborative course will provide students with the opportunity to participate in a collaborative response to address migration in the borderlands of Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico. The course is taught by an interprofessional group of faculty and staff, who represent all four Tucson-based University of Arizona Health Sciences (UAHS) colleges, in partnership with the Casa Alitas Migrant Welcome Center and other community partners. Through community engagement and experiential learning, the course focuses on analyzing the evolving root causes of migration and the relative impact of effective public policy, exploring social determinants of health and the role of volunteers in supporting migrant communities, and developing interprofessional perspectives across health-related disciplines/practices. As part of the learning experience, students volunteer with a local migrant shelter to provide basic services to migrant families.
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HPS 495/595 002
Simulation and Survival: An Immersive Educational Introduction to Threat Assessment, Emergency Planning, and Survival in the Uncertainty of the 21st Century
The goal of any institutions of higher learning is to prepare its students for life. However, most authorities agree that humanity will likely reach an “existential bottleneck” in the next 50 years or less. Preparation for life increasingly means that the individual must develop a solid fund of knowledge as well as survival and creative problem-solving skillsets to adequately prepare themselves, their families and their communities to face the challenges of a human-made or natural disaster and ensure their survival in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world. Students will be presented with seminar-style didactic, along with hands-on training using the ASTEC lab for learning wilderness medicine and survival tactics, techniques and equipment. Two optional weekend overnight field trips are tentatively planned that focus on desert bushcraft and primitive survival skills. By the end of the course, students will be asked to show proficiency in any three of the following areas: (1) emergency planning and evacuation; (2) emergency shelter; (3) emergency water preparation, filtration and storage; (4) emergency wilderness medicine; (5) telecoms and signaling in grid collapse; (6) logistics and tactics in survival scenarios; and (7) medical aspects of wilderness emergency medicine.
VIP Directed Research Courses
Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) is a multidisciplinary program that engages students in research, creative inquiry and service learning in faculty-led project teams. VIP focuses on experiential education that prepares students for the interprofessional collaboration that will drive the 4th Industrial Revolution and produce equitable solutions to global grand challenges.
HSD 292, 392, 492, 592, 692 and 792 002
AI for Medical Interviewing
In this hands-on research and design course, students will collaborate to discover methods of improving patient-provider interactions with artificial intelligence (AI). Students will learn and apply how AI can mediate conversations in health care settings to personalize services, improve the timeliness and effectiveness of provider feedback and improve providers’ metacognitive skills. Coursework will take a design thinking approach and engage theory and concepts from adaptive teaching, machine learning, cognitive architecture, human-computer interactions and mHealth to explore ways to innovate health care in the digital age.
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HSD 292, 392, 492, 592, 692 and 792 003
Optical Imaging to Advance Health Care and Biomedicine
This course is focused on applying different types of optical imaging to advance screening, diagnosis and treatment of different diseases, primarily cancer. Students will go about this by conducting rigorous imaging studies of different tissue types and then will conduct advanced image analysis to identify biomarkers. Students may also be involved with designing and assembling imaging devices for clinical application.
HSD 292, 392, 492, 592, 692 and 792 001
UA Holodeck
In this directed research course, students will collaborate on the forthcoming UArizona Holodeck, an immersive, interactive learning environment on the third floor of the Health Sciences Library, where students can use virtual reality and other novel technologies to explore a wide range of research questions and engage in worldwide collaboration using virtual environments, telepresence and remote interaction.
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Design Intersections Courses
Design Intersections Courses are offered by other programs but include curriculum that complements or connects with Health Sciences Design. These include courses taught by HSD faculty and their faculty colleagues from across campus. Although the curriculum is not necessarily health-focused, the courses listed here are featured because of meaningful inter-program collaborations or content synergies that could make them of particular interest to HSD students, especially students who are interested in courses they could take before, concurrently with or after their HSD courses to broaden their design competencies.
ARC 195B
Why Design Matters
This colloquium introduces students to design in differing scales, media and applications, and to how design thinking and making produce different effects.
HNRS 195I 008
Strategies for Creative Problem Solving
The purpose of this course is to help problem solvers improve their “street smarts.” Every individual possesses creative skills of one type or another, and these skills can be sharpened if they are exercised regularly. This course will help you hone your creative skills and apply those skills to solve nearly any problem. Drawing on advanced research on problem-solving techniques in all areas of modern industry, this course presents a comprehensive, systematic problem-solving framework. Through hands-on techniques and exercises drawing on realistic examples, you will learn how to approach an ill-defined problem, identify the real problem, generate and implement the best solution, evaluate what you’ve learned, and build on that knowledge.
SBE 301
Introduction to Design Thinking
This course introduces students to the essential methods of visual communication and ordering systems through a series of interrelated exercises. Techniques such as investigative sketching, freehand drawing and digital design communication are considered in relation to their potential to reveal the world around us with a heightened sense of awareness. Issues such as place, material, structure and enclosure will be explored empirically and conceptually at a variety of scales and applications. Importantly, this is an interdisciplinary-based studio; students enrolled in this course will have the ability to engage in a variety of different design strategies.
CHS 497A / SOC 497A
Healthy Community Design & Innovation
In this course, we will learn how to use social science to create change in our society, right here in the heart of Tucson. Using human-centric design thinking, we will learn about the fields of applied sociology and community development and apply our in-class learning to develop real-world solutions to some of Tucson's most persistent social problems. We will review both the academic and practitioner literature on the processes involved in designing social innovations and use experiential learning to bring about positive social change in our own community.