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The Design School
In May of 2019, the faculty and staff overwhelming voted in support of the redesign vision and objectives. We will spend the 2019-2020 school year building out the methods and means to bring these objectives to life. Follow this page for updates as the school year progresses to learn more about specific changes to programs. To ReDesign School, we will...
1. Build a truly accessible design school
Empowering anyone to change the world through design.
- Embrace all qualified students who choose The Design School by removing and limiting barriers to entry, welcoming transfer and foreign students, and building on existing university policies to enable and support students’ autonomy.
- In the next 10 years, grow our enrollment to matriculate potentially 10,000 students with design-based degrees, including 500 graduate students.
- Ask to create a "Design" General Studies designation – one that acts in partnership with the Herberger Institute’s “Creativity” designation plan to ensure all ASU students have access to creative thinking and making within their core curriculum.
- Open the majority of undergraduate design courses to all ASU students.
- Create undergraduate online degrees by 2021 and make school-wide knowledge and course content available to the ASU Online global student audience in support of lifelong learning.
2. Teach designers to be human-centered
Giving every student the economic, political and life skills necessary to succeed.
- Advance ‘human’ skillsets training into the curriculum by 2021-22.
- Create opportunities and platforms to teach leadership, collaboration, community engagement/creative placemaking, ways of being/ethics/values, and environmental and economic awareness skillsets.
3. Reinvent the relationship between community and design school
Building a cooperative framework to ethically improve our place.
- Develop and implement ethical standards for community engagement by 2021-22, utilizing Design and Arts Corps, Creative Placemaking and Indigenous Placekeeping principles of community engagement
- Establish new co-operative to create cross-disciplinary projects, studios, initiatives and partnerships that support local communities and partner schools by 2021-22.
4. Decolonize design education
Challenging biases and forming a representative community of faculty, staff and students.
- Train faculty and staff in RaceForward Initiative in 2020-21.
- Continue to review curriculum of all programs in The Design School with the support of Design Equity Committee in 2020-21.
- Ensure faculty diversity reflects student/Arizona diversity by 2030.
5. Open up silos
Creating transdisciplinary and flexible degree pathways.
- Develop flexible curricula, class schedules and multiple pathways for students through new program options, certificates, minors, modules and more.
- In our current programs, embrace design experimentation and research-focused non-artifact-based design practices including: systems design, service design, transitional design, experience design, behavioral design, speculative design, design anthropology, social design, interface design, discursive design and more.
- Build a series of interdisciplinary experiences into our curriculum to advance design collaborations and integrate knowledge both inside and outside of our programs.
6. Make design central
Ensuring design is at the core of ASU’s global research and teaching.
- Develop research ecosystems to include industry and academic partners around: sustainability, global health, social justice, and technology and innovation.
- Make The Design School a key player in ASU’s Global Futures Initiative and other primary research initiatives. Track progress based on the following goals:
- $5 million in research dollars in 2021-22 with 10% increase per year.
- Faculty on at least five transdisciplinary/ cross-ASU research projects a year.
- Three corporate partnerships by 2021-22.
- Design learning assets/microcredentials available to be deployed to programs outside of The Design School and across ASU by 2021-22.
- International ‘leagues’ of design schools established by 2022-23.
- Our study away and student exchange experiences restructured by 2020-21.
- Funded state-of-the-art laboratories for design experimentation opened by corporate partners.