Alumni Spotlight

As the inaugural Tanenbaum Director of Partnerships and Social Impact, Kwan will leverage his extensive experience working around the world with dozens of diverse clients and top business schools. In his role, he’ll be paving the way for engagement and relationships across the broader community and beyond in service of UCC’s aim to more deeply embed design thinking, systems thinking, and technology skills across the curriculum — all through a real-world lens. 

Kwan is very eager to get started. 

“At the highest level, I'm here to elevate what the College’s great educators are already doing in their classrooms and trying to bring in some external partners to bring it to life,” he says. 

“The short-term goal is to help with the launch of our IB Diploma Programme Systems Transformation Graduation Pathway, to figure out how to take this curriculum and inject the real world in there. Sometimes the classroom can be theoretical and a bit abstract. Is there a certain experience, a person, or an organization that could make it more real?”

The broader goal is to enhance not just how students approach complex local, national and global issues, but how they think. For Kwan, that begins with approaching problem-solving in all its complexity. “You have to consider the whole system around you,” he says.

Kwan also stressed that there might be misconceptions about what the concept of design thinking encompasses: it isn’t just engineering. It’s an empathy-driven approach, one that requires you to talk to people instead of just making assumptions. 

“As a design thinker, you’re going human-first to really understand a user’s perspective. ‘What are your challenges? Why are you afraid?’ Then we come back and look at the problem again.”

Without first asking meaningful questions, Kwan says that any solution is bound to be dead on arrival.

“In my experience, people who understand the problem deepest are the ones who will eventually come up with the truly transformational ideas.”