Extreme by Design

We had the pleasure of interviewing Ralph King, the inspiring and talented filmmaker of Extreme by Design, a documentary film. Design for America has had the exclusive opportunity to pre-screen the film at its studios around the country. The film itself focuses on a team of college students from the Stanford design school and their experiences as they engage in the process of designing products that address huge issues for the world’s poor. Watch the trailer here!

4 Daily Habits of Game-Changing Social Innovators

Design for America was recently recognized as 2013 Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Awards winner. Forbes is featuring a series highlighting some of the most high-impact and replicable innovations in social entrepreneurship education. DFA is honored to be included in this so we are reposting the article below! 

Jerry the Bear: The Full Story

Bringing Jerry the Bear to life has been a long and winding journey. Check out Aaron Horowitz and Hannah Chung’s recent presentation at Northwestern University where they share the FULL story of how they got Jerry the Bear started. Full of great stories from hip surgery to factory visits in China, bear suites, and bowling in North Carolina- learn what it takes to bring your idea into the world and make a difference in people’s lives

Featured Mentor: Brian Maggi

Design for America does its best to use good design to find solutions to real world issues. Our student teams and community members work together to create this kind of local and social impact, and this includes getting help from professionals in the field. Here, we’ve interviewed Brian Maggi, a DFA Anchor for Northwestern University, who has been doing an awesome job of creating connections between our students and professionals to help teams make an impact.

Featured DFA-er: Sara Mesing

Here in Design for America, we think DFAers are pretty amazing- not only for their work in DFA, but who they are as people and leaders. As such, we’re taking some time to feature a couple of them on our blog here. Get to know DFA Case Western-CIA founder and leader, Sara Mesing!

I put a lot of time into determining whether grad school, and what grad program, would be the best fit for me. I had worked in print media with enough designers to notice that they approached problems differently. That intrigued me.  I had worked in enough dysfunctional organizations to know there had to be a better way, and that to lead organizational change you needed to understand Accounting. My interests in Organizational Behavior and Design pointed me towards Business School and I only applied to programs that offered opportunities in both and decided on Case Western.

Announcing New DFA Fellows!!

Today, DFA is very proud to announce our new DFA Fellows! This year, we will be joined by two stellar recent graduates Thea Klein-Mayer  (Env. Sc. ’12, Northwestern) and Kayla Matheus (Eng./Art ’11, Yale) who will be joining the DFA team full-time. Their work will be focused on growing DFA, implementing the Right Angle,  and providing director mentorship to each one of our studios. Get to know them here!

New DFA Studios Announced!

Starting in September 2011, students already started rolling in wanting to start their own DFA studio. With students from over 60 schools signing up to use design to create local and social impact, we’ve put them through a long and grueling process to choose our new studios for this year. They’ve had to secure interests from students across campus, get faculty involved, interview strangers off-campus, organize a starter workshop, conduct a one-month long design project, put together a video, and top-it off with an interview with our DFA Fellows. This was not your typical application essay and it has NOT been easy. Which is why we are prouder than ever to announce our new studios for this year. They are the 6 college campuses that have proven their commitment and leadership to running a Design for America studio on campus and we are excited to announce them today!! Check them out!

A Small Step Towards Improving Lives for Veterans on Campus

The Dartmouth DFA team started off looking at the local veteran’s hospital, hoping to use the design process to help solve challenges there.  Soon, they began talking to student veterans at Dartmouth to gain a better perspective on veterans’ issues, and discovered a problem that had nothing to do with the hospital.