Students will practice design thinking and systems thinking—while exploring purpose and happiness—through a series of interdisciplinary team-based projects in new, three-week program in January
Creative Inquiry at Lehigh is launching a new program open to all students called the Sustainable Happiness Institute (SHI). The SHI is a three-week “hands-on, hearts-on” adventure that challenges students to imagine, conceptualize, and pursue practical actions toward alternative happy futures.
Self-driving cars, predictive medicine, cognitive enhancements, extended reality...the steady march of technological breakthroughs is fundamentally reshaping the human experience. At the same time, hunger and extreme poverty, systemic inequities, the ravages of climate change, all pose existential questions to our long-term survival. The COVID pandemic has brought to the fore the stark realities of the increasingly vulnerable, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous world we live in. In these slow and fast, strange and exciting, promising and perilous times, here we are, mere humans, trying to find meaning in our lives and keep up with the societal pressure to be happy and positive at all times.
The program will integrate global megatrends, sustainable development, social innovation, life coaching, and the science of happiness through a series of collaborative projects, virtual escape rooms, and personal conversations with people from all walks of life. It is a three-credit effort for the Spring 2021 semester (although it will largely take place in January) through the CINQ 387 course.
More information and the link to apply can be found at the program website: go.lehigh.edu/happiness.
The priority deadline for full consideration is December 1.
