The idea for the Fall 2025 JMU X-Labs class Reimagining Virginia’s Fight Against Organized Retail Crime developed from a real-world problem that has challenged the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia in Richmond.

All X-Labs courses require a challenge statement that reflects a wicked problem that Dukes aim to tackle. For the Fight Against ORC, the statement read: “Students will develop solutions that help the Virginia Office of the Attorney General tackle organized retail crime across Virginia.”

While X-Labs has a long history of helping students gain real-world experience by confronting big issues, this one was something new. As part of the interdisciplinary teaching team, Adrienne Hooker, an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Design and assistant director of engaged learning for X-Labs, wanted the class to develop an understanding of organized retail crime.

“I will say, most in the class were like, ‘What? What is organized retail crime?,’” she recalled. “And I am not just saying students. I will admit, as a professor, I was like, ‘What are we talking about?’”

Retail crime goes beyond just shoplifting, she says. Gift-card fraud, for example, might involve a person stealing the card number and pin of a gift card, draining the money once a buyer has loaded money onto it.

According to the attorney general’s office, organized retail crime schemes are often tied to larger criminal networks or cartels, and linked to more serious issues, such as human trafficking.

Last year, after the Office of the Attorney General approached JMU with its idea to collaborate, the initiative found a home in the X-Labs program. Over the summer, the course took shape as the teaching team, along with Judi Lynch, director of outreach for the attorney general, identified the issues to work on with students. The class kicked off the Fall 2025 semester with a visit from fellow Duke and former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (’98) which set the stage for a learning opportunity that would take them beyond the classroom.

Students broke into teams and brainstormed solutions to the issue, planning at the end of the semester to present directly to the attorney general’s office. The process demanded intensive research and interviewing of stakeholders to better understand the problem from multiple perspectives.

Nico Peeples, a senior studying Industrial Design, found that X-Labs courses fit well into the curriculum requirements of his major and that his educational background could bring a unique perspective to the course.

Peeples and his groupmates were asked to prevent a certain aspect of organized retail crime. “My group focused on trying to prevent the activity of it all. We were trying to stop it from happening,” he shared. “The idea weaved its way into a browser extension we made that would plug into online shopping websites and flag suspiciously listed items.”

His team trained their software to compare a product found online with similar ones and display the real price, alerting the consumer if they were being scammed or perhaps contributing to resale crime. “In X-Labs classes, the solutions are either an innovation, or a product, or looking at systems and discovering where the gaps are,” Hooker said. “We had five teams very much looking at the systems that the attorney general’s office needed to address.”

Another group undertook the creation of a public safety announcement campaign to alert consumers about the prevalence of online retail crime on commonly used sites like Amazon and Facebook Marketplace, sharing that if a sale online seems too good to be true, it probably is. By showcasing the prevalence of online retail crime on sites where students regularly purchased items, the groups’ campaign brought the problem into the personal domain. 

“The other ones were dealing more with networks and communication of who’s doing what where,” Hooker explained. “Because with this issue, you have retailers, you have state patrol and law enforcement, you have lawyers, prosecutors. And so, there’s a lot of different people within this network figuring out who is reporting to whom, and when and how that is being done ... That was the major point that the students picked out of the system that needed to be better.”

All X-Labs courses are developed with two key factors in mind: interdisciplinary collaboration and experiential learning. These factors are reflected in the makeup of students’ majors and in the teaching team, which included Hooker in the College of Arts and Letters; Dr. John Robinson (’09), assistant professor of intelligence analysis in the College of Integrated Science and Engineering; and Fadi Majdoub, lecturer of marketing and international business with the College of Business.

The design of an X-Labs course is unique in several aspects, including requiring Dukes to take a more active role in their learning. For Peeples, the opportunity to participate in a team-based, student-led class was an exciting prospect, but he also noticed obstacles to learning when the class's motivation would wane, which would stall progress.

Additionally, the interdisciplinary aspect of the class facilitated teamwork across expertise, which students and professors found rewarding. “It was really nice to be surrounded by people with different skills,” Peeples said. “And when we were doing group projects, everyone’s backgrounds really did show, and we ended up making some cool stuff because everybody had a different talent.”

The ability of students to operate under that kind of learning model was Hooker’s goal for the course. “We all have different languages within our majors; we all have different understandings,” she said. “And so, to be able to work in a team, to come up with something to understand a problem and to come up with a solution is really hard, but I think, at least in my mind, the X-Labs classes are so good at bringing in different people and bringing them together to tackle an issue.”

Joshua Montanez (’11), director of the Valley Scholars program, recently began collaborating with X-Labs through its Faculty Associate Program. As another key player in the Fight Against ORC teaching team, his role as a faculty associate was to facilitate the use of what the Stanford d.school (design school at Stanford University) calls Design Thinking Methodology.

Design Thinking Methodology sets out to challenge the notion that problem-solving is a strictly linear process. “If you think back to high school, middle school, we talked about the scientific method and those sorts of things,” Montanez said. “And even in the majority of courses, we have syllabi that have specific assignments throughout, and how well you do on those determines the outcomes.”

But there is another way. “The intent behind the design is to [offer] a human-centered approach to problem-solving,” he said. It’s an iterative process, one reliant on repeated cycles of trial-and-error without a determined starting point. The process is categorized into three primary groups: noticing, sense-making and experimenting.

“Noticing is focused a lot on observations, the human-centered piece,” he shared. “Building empathy is a critical component of this process.” This means understanding clients’ challenges and intentions.

“Sense-making is essentially what it sounds like,” Montanez said. “Making sense of the information you have and how to take this large amount of information — interviewing is a big part of this — and make it into a meaningful collection.”

The experiment piece manifests in what Montanez calls prototyping: “What is the bare-bones, prototype physical object that I can develop that helps people understand the concept I am working toward?

“At its most basic, it’s, ‘How do we infuse creativity into this process in a collaborative way?’ Because we know the research says if you work with different perspectives, and on a team you’re going to get a better result,” Montanez said. “The idea is never to say, ‘Let’s get this perfect thing,’ but, ‘How do we get this prototype or system that we can demonstrate to other people, and then go through this cyclical, iterative process?’”

Reflection played a large role in the course, with emphasis on the process and experience instead of the outcome. Students regularly interacted with the following questions: 

• “What did I notice about myself in that learning process?”
  
• “How did I feel when encountering barriers?”
  
• “What was my response? How do I feel while working with this group of people?”
  

“At about a third to halfway through [the semester], I could see students were frustrated,” Hooker shared. “Because we weren’t giving them answers … [Instead] we were trying to help them find resources and to facilitate how to tackle this … And I would say, the moment that the teams had those ‘aha!’ moments of ‘Oh, we see now, we’re seeing where things can be adjusted.’ … Those moments where they pushed past that frustration and dove in harder, those are the moments I always appreciate as a professor.”

In the context of this course, students were presented with a problem that was unfamiliar to many, but by using design thinking, they were able to approach the problem in a new way.

“There are a lot of unknowns and a lot of ambiguity,” Hooker said. “This isn’t a known thing. There isn’t a Step 1, 2, 3 … we don’t have that. We very much lean on ambiguity, because a lot of times, that is where innovation can come from. If everyone comes with an open mindset and questioning stance, that leads you to interesting solutions.”

The Virginia gubernatorial election in November brought a change in administration and a pause in the implementation of proposed solutions to organized retail crime in the commonwealth. But Hooker and Lynch are optimistic for the partnership between X-Labs and the Office of the Attorney General going forward.