Design Fusion Certificate Program

The Office of Human Resources, in partnership with the Joseph Ballay Center for Design Fusion within the School of Design, is thrilled to offer a groundbreaking professional development opportunity to faculty and staff across the university.

The Design Fusion Certificate Program parallels the center’s Professional Education Program provided to external organizations and aims to cultivate a more creative and imaginative culture across CMU by unlocking the latent creative potential of our faculty, staff and administration. The program has been instrumental in fostering integrative thinking, sparking innovation, enhancing collaboration and achieving new levels of creative agency to frame big ideas. Now, you can harness these powerful tools to elevate your work and drive innovation within our campus community.

On this page:

• Nomination Process
• Program Format
• 2024 Pilot Program Schedule

Nomination Process

Participants are selected through nomination by college and division leadership. Nominations typically occur a few months before a scheduled session. For the 2024 pilot, nominations will occur in September and October for the December program.

Leaders should identify motivated team members in various roles to foster a culture of creativity and innovation that promotes both personal and organizational growth.

Nominees should meet the following criteria:

• Ability and willingness to attend training and presentations in person as outlined in the program schedule
• Employees at all levels, both supervisors and individual contributors, are welcome to participate
• Responsibilities of current role could benefit from an increased ability to apply agile and creative thinking to existing processes and systems
• Current performance reflects an ability to work effectively with others
• Consistently meets or exceeds expectations for performance at CMU
• Supervisory approval for release time to participate in the program and payment of tuition ($2,250/participant)

Program Format

Participants should expect to attend in person and devote a total of 23–25 hours to the weeklong program with 19–21 hours of class time and four additional hours of independent work. Graduates will earn a non-degree certificate from the School of Design upon successful completion.

The program ends with participant presentations the Friday following the completion of the course work. View the program brochure [pdf] for more details.

2024 Pilot Program and Spring 2025 Schedules

All sessions will be delivered in person at the Ballay Center in the School of Design (Margaret Morrison).