Chapter 3
Human-Centered Project Design
Seeing Stakeholders Deeply & Designing With Empathy — Total of 2.25 PDUs
Focus Areas and PDUs: Power Skills (0.5 PDU) | Ways of Working (1 PDU) | Business Acumen (1 PDU)
Here you’ll learn to manage projects through the lens of experience—not just deliverables. Through talks and workshops, we explore user experience mapping, empathy-based stakeholder understanding, and how to bring learning back to your organization with practical impact.
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Why is Human Centered Design important in PM?
2. Watch This Video
Experience Mapping
3. Watch This Video
Experience Mapping
4. Watch This Video
Workshop Instructions
5. Complete Workshop
6. Watch This Video
Guided Break: Implementing Learning Back to Your Company
7. Complete Workshop
8. Share Your Takeaways (Accountability & Community)
Post your insight, question, or worksheet reflection on the Project Management Empowered LinkedIn Group:
9. Submit for PDUs
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Speaker Spotlight
🎤 Speaker: Raja Schaar
Raja Schaar, IDSA is Associate Program Director and Assistant Professor of Product Design at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. She also co-chairs IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. She is an industrial designer with an extensive background in museum exhibit design who is passionate about ways design can make positive impact intersections with health, the environment, and education.
Raja’s interdisciplinary research focuses on addressing inequities in maternal health; methods for engaging black girls and underrepresented minorities in STEM/STEAM through design and technology; innovation and entrepreneurship education; and biologically-inspired design and sustainability.
Raja currently co-leads two collaborative research projects. She works with faculty from Drexel’s College of Nursing and Design and Merchandising Programs the development of low-cost wearables for maternal health. She is co-PI on an interdisciplinary research project funded by the US Department of Education Promise Neighborhood Grant entitled “Black Girls STEAMing through Dance,” where she works with students and faculty from Drexel's departments of Computing and Informatics, Dance, and the School of Education to uncover STEAM identities, literacies, and self-concept in African American girls through the development of wearable technology. Raja is also PI on a VentureWell Faculty Grant that connects Product Design, Biomedical Engineering, and Entrepreneurship to examine the role of clinical immersion on product innovation on campus.
As an educator, Raja works to infuse Drexel’s Product Design Curriculum with society-centered design principles that address impactful, real-world problems. She teaches a number of traditional and research-based studios across the curriculum, but her favorite courses to teach are Interdisciplinary Product Design, Bio-Inspired Design and Sustainability, Design and Waste, and Wearables for Health.
Before joining Drexel's Product Design faculty, Raja taught at Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at GA Tech and Emory University. Raja received her BSID from Georgia Tech in 2001 and completed her graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.
[Bio from Drexel University]