MADI Alumni Take Flight at Southwest Airlines

Seven MADI (Master of Arts in Design and Innovation) alumni have landed careers at Southwest Airlines on the company’s innovation team, where they are tasked with creating and designing innovative solutions to existing problems, a focus of their MADI education.

MADI is a two-year graduate program, created as a collaborative degree between the Meadows School of the Arts and the Lyle School of Engineering, that teaches the value of human-centered design process in any field. The program is, at its core, learning how to design solutions to problems. For the alumni working on the innovation team at Southwest, they are able to leverage specific skills learned in the MADI program, like how to conduct user research, engage in ideation activities, facilitate workshops, and outline metrics for success, in their process, which has proven invaluable to the impact and outcomes for the company.

Ryan Lozano (M.A. '21), an Innovation Designer at Southwest Airlines and MADI alum, studied civil engineering as an undergraduate at SMU before earning his MADI graduate degree and, in his role at Southwest, found a way to blend those two professional fields.

“The more I learned about MADI, the more I saw that there were careers focused around human-centered design and user research or engagement practices,” Lozano explains. “I wanted to be a part of the civil engineering and modern-day infrastructure design solutions that impact the lives of everyday people, and MADI’s core framework for designing in the world teaches exactly that.”

One of the many ways MADI students are prepared for a career in design and innovation is by pairing them with real-world clients, in both the private and public sectors, seeking actual solutions for existing problems. Through these projects, not only are students able to acquire first-hand experience, they also are exposed to a variety of industries that have a need for a human-centered design approach.

In order to truly gain an understanding of the problem to solution pipeline, students are encouraged to “learn by doing,” one of the main philosophies of the MADI program. To learn by doing essentially means that while you can read about what others have done, you don’t really learn it until you do it yourself. For this reason, when students are learning about a new method or tactic in design research, they’re encouraged and expected to go out and experience the method or tactic directly.

“Our whole curriculum is based around this concept, and it ultimately helps train students to be operating in their own evidence, and not their assumptions of something,” says Director of Design and Innovation Programs, Jessica Burnham. “This approach is important to design and innovation because so often it’s easy to just plug and play concepts or best practices, but if we really want to address a need than we need to know exactly what we’re solving for, and that comes from getting in the field and doing and experiencing the work ourselves.”

Ultimately, the MADI program teaches its students about how every design decision can have a larger context and impact than anticipated. And while this active, research-based approach to solving problems can be utilized in any field, it lends itself particularly well to industries dedicated to pushing the envelope in their field and striving to create a better tomorrow.

Want to learn more about MADI? The 2nd Annual MADI Showcase, "Interplay," will be on display in the Hamon Arts Library in SMU Meadows' Owen Arts Center from June 8 through July 28 and will feature graduate student work from the 2022-2023 academic year. You can also read about the MADI program here.