Community-Based Design

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Community-Based Design is an advanced Visual Communication Design course that focuses on the design of socially-driven interventions that impact communities at large and small-scale. Students will learn how design might work for, with, and through communities in a way that is empowering and sustainable for existing community advocates and organizations. Students will consider the impacts of extractive, top-down, externally driven interventions that fail to identify or activate local expertise. This course is structured as a hands-on, interdisciplinary studio that might be taken as the capstone for the Collaborative Innovation minor. Complimentary majors such as anthropology, sociology, peace studies or others are invited to join the class. Students will divide their time between lecture, critique, stakeholder research, presentations, and in-class work.