Hasta La Ideas

Design for America (DfA) is a network of student-led studios creating local and social impact through interdisciplinary design. DfA equips our generation with the mind-set and skill-set to create social impact. We are a network of student-led design studios that Look Locally, Create Fervently, and Act Fearlessly. Recently, DfA stopped by the Dartmouth campus for an introduction to the program.

1. Define

Design for America’s (DfA) Sami Nerenberg has been on the road for weeks visiting leading universities like Stanford, Cornell and Dartmouth. Sponsored by Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, DfA has come full-circle with this last stop, as the program’s founder Liz Gerber first found inspiration for unconventional design education during Dartmouth’s outdoors freshmen orientation. “I realized the potential of peer-to-peer learning and transformation outside of the traditional classroom,” said Gerber. “I danced the Salty Dog rag with the first years…then sent them off on their trips with a sense of excitement of what they would learn from each [other] and about themselves…”

2. Discover

More than seventy participants from all College academic departments filled the room—anthropologists, geographers, English majors and the engineers, of course. The Innovation Workshop started off with very little introduction before diving right into the problem: helping out elderly people living in rural New Hampshire/Vermont. Four personas, composed of a mixture of both reality and fiction, were proposed to the group. These included a woman with dementia who needed help keeping track of her finances and a couple who had been taking care of their mentally retarded daughter. The next steps were to dig deeper into a chosen persona and to start “bodystorming”—one group member “became” the elderly individual while other members interviewed them.

3. Reframe

Engineering Design Professor Peter Robbie welcomes this new approach to design education. “Students want to make a real impact and Design for America provides a great venue for learning how to turn their ideas into action,” said Robbie. “We need a new breed of designers who can work across disciplines.” The workshop groups are interdisciplinary teams of interdisciplinary individuals, a result of Dartmouth’s mission to produce graduates who have been exposed to many areas of thought. The design element is not just another major—it’s universal. Perhaps best put by Robbie’s words, this design thinking “provides a common language and method to support the kind of radical collaboration we need to develop innovative solutions to the complex problems facing society.”

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