At many schools, students spend their days following carefully designed assignments. At NuVu, there are moments when students design the experience themselves.

Three times each year, NuVu students step into Open Innovation (OI): a three-and-a-half-week intensive where students propose their own ideas, form teams around shared interests, and develop projects from the ground up. Research, ideation, fabrication, presentation, documentation — the process mirrors NuVu’s design studios, but with one major difference: this time, students lead the way.

For the final OI of the year, seniors take on an additional role as mentors and guides for younger students, coached themselves by NuVu faculty along the way. The result is a layered ecosystem of leadership, collaboration, and experimentation that feels distinctly NuVu.

“I really like having a senior coach,” said Max. “It feels more personal. Because they’ve been in the same exact position that you’ve been in for years leading up to this point.”

Unlike traditional design studios, where projects are typically framed by coaches, OI begins with possibility. Students brainstorm their own ideas, combine interests, and shape them into something meaningful together.

“I think we kind of scrapped together all of our ideas about what we thought we were going to do and created what we’re doing now,” said Elise.

This year, Max, Elise, Paxton, and their senior mentor Orion are exploring environmental collapse through speculative evolution—designing a fictional creature adapted to survive in a polluted, post-human future. The project combines sculpture, biology, storytelling, ecosystem design, and fabrication into a provocative commentary on humanity’s environmental impact.

“We’re basically creating a sculpture that’s meant to provoke conversations about humans’ impact on the environment and about pollution,” explained Max. “It’s meant to try and make people think about it in a way that they’re not used to thinking about it in.”

For Orion, mentoring younger students through the process has felt natural — and rewarding.

“I really like it,” they said. “I like teaching people about different things, especially things that I’m interested in. I like being able to help — especially when they get stuck.”

OI also gives students something many educational settings struggle to provide: genuine ownership. That freedom can be exciting, but also overwhelming.

“There’s so much we want to do,” said Max. “The freedom is a little bit overwhelming at times, but it also makes for a project that has more of us in it.”

That balance — between autonomy and accountability, exploration and execution — is part of what makes Open Innovation unique.

“It kind of helps you shape your ideas in a way that takes something you genuinely enjoy and puts it into a context where it can have an impact,” Max reflected.

At NuVu, Open Innovation is more than a special project cycle. It’s a glimpse into what education can look like when students are trusted not only to learn, but to lead.

‍