By Grace Bardwick, 2022-23 Design Thinking Graduate Assistant
During her 23 years at Tulane University, Dr. Laura Murphy served as the Associate Director for Research and Scholarship at the Taylor Center and a Clinical Associate Professor with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She is a transdisciplinary scholar whose international work explores the enmeshed relationships between environment, technology, population, and development. Dr. Murphy’s efforts to bring social entrepreneurship to campus predate the Taylor Center, as she was a crucial part of developing the curriculum for the Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (SISE) Minor alongside Stephanie Barksdale and Rebecca Otten. Dr. Murphy additionally held the Carnegie Corporation of New York Professorship in Social Entrepreneurship from 2011 to 2016 and was a member of the Taylor Center’s first cohort of endowed social entrepreneurship professors, where she was recognized for leadership in social innovation.
Professional Background
Dr. Murphy was introduced to design thinking as an undergraduate engineering student at Stanford University, where she studied mechanical engineering with a minor in Values, Technology and Society. She later earned a PhD in city and regional planning—focusing on sustainable development— from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in addition to a certificate in Latin American Studies. On top of her academic qualifications, Dr. Murphy is a global scholar with work experience in Indonesia, Ecuador and Kenya. She’s found that international experiences mutually reinforce design thinking principles – each society designs their worlds differently, and there are naturally many ways to approach a problem.
The Fast 48
To further her goal of empowering everyone’s inherent right and capability to design, Dr. Murphy developed and led the Fast 48 series. These extracurricular workshops were held over weekends so that working professionals and community members had an opportunity to learn and practice human-centered design for social impact. In teams, participants engaged in a rapid design sprint and shared their prototypes with community partners like PlayBuild, Grow Dat and Broad Community Connections. Dr. Murphy’s favorite part of the Fast 48 series was seeing lightbulbs go off as people responded to design thinking and the joy created through personal capacity-building. Learn more about the impact of Fast 48 here!
Next Chapters
As Dr. Murphy prototypes her next steps after Tulane, she’s looking forward to studying biomimicry and environmentally-inspired design as well as consulting for public good. She’ll be immersing herself in the arid Southwest to learn about water conservation and landscape-based water harvesting with the goal of moving away from industrial and harmful systems of living. She envisions the future of design thinking as less human-centered and more ecologically-centered, as well as less corporate and more accessible to everyone. She reminds us that “Design thinking is a technology that can be used for negative aims. It must align with ethics, values and an understanding of complex systems to create social good”.
On a personal note, I am grateful to have been a student of Dr. Murphy’s and to have benefitted from all that she has contributed to the Taylor Center and Tulane. She will be sorely missed, but we are all excited to see what’s next and to sustain the impact she’s had on the Tulane and New Orleans communities. Wishing you the best in your new chapter, Dr. Murphy!
