Designer: Design for America Location: Evanston, IL, USA Category: Design Education Initiative & Design for Social Impact Award: Notable
Design for America is a nation-wide initiative that supports a network of student-run design studios based in college campuses throughout the US. These initiatives provide a framework for students from all majors to gain the experience, skills and confidence necessary to lead and innovate local and social impact design projects.
The principles of DFA's learning approach are based upon a new student-directed approach to education called Extracurricular Design-Based Learning (EDBL) (Gerber, Olson, & Komarek, 2011). The EDBL model provides opportunities for students to develop the non-technical skills critical to examining and prototyping solutions to ambiguous and complex problems from a design perspective, and engages students early in their academic experience within a community of professional practice that extends beyond university boundaries to inspire careers in innovation.
Theoretically, EDBL blends perspectives from many learning models, including project-based learning, adaptive learning, and design-based learning. Like these models, EDBL leverages the student-centered elements of student interest and self-direction; however EDBL depends upon knowledge being co-created by the students, peer mentors, and facilitators who are applying learning in a specific service learning context and applying this learning to complex social problems in uncertain organizational systems.
Since the original conception of the organization in 2008, DFA student founders, faculty advisors, administration, and community partners have followed a participatory design approach to refine DFA. Through one-on-one conversations, weekly check-ins, evaluations, and reflective workshops, DFA continues to include its various stakeholders on the refinement of its services. Through rigorous evaluation of learning outcomes it is found that participation in DFA positively influences students' beliefs in their ability to use design to innovate (Gerber, Olson, Komarek, 2011). DFA's services continually adapt to meet the needs of their users and encourage input from each participating member to offer insight for improvements to exemplify the learning model that we advocate.
Core77: How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury? Design Education Initiative: We had checked the awards after the end of the work day and were thrilled to learn we were recognized as notable among such excellent entries. To use, the recognition is validation that we are meeting an unmet need and look forward to growing our initiative and the impact of our projects.
Design for Social Impact: We thought, if we were recognized once, surely that would be it, but that night, a friend of ours posted a congratulatory comment tagging us on Facebook so were pleasantly surprised to learn that we were in fact recognized twice!
Core77: What's the latest news or development with your project? Design for America Northwestern just kicked off their summer studio looking at childhood obesity prevention, foot care for the homeless, and learning through tinkering with local community partners including the Chicago Children's Museum, Howard Area Community Center and Inspiration Corporation. This week we'll have 20 students from throughout the country joining us for our Leadership Studio in preparation for their official launches in the fall. Should be exciting!
What is one quick anecdote about your project? In DFA, we try to ask the obvious as we are often surprised by the contrast between assumption and reality.
Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.
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