DeSE Course Description

Design for Social Entrepreneurship (DeSE)
RISD Fall '08

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.

This course aims to cultivate social entrepreneurial designers by investigating the power of product, system and service design to create positive social and environmental change. Looking at both international and domestic issues, this course asks, how can design and design thinking be used to solve the world’s leading problems to achieve triple bottom line sustainability—environmentally, socially, and economically? Structured around holistic thinking, collaborative and individual design work, with mentorship from experts in the field, this course uncovers how to design products and/or services, wrap a business around it, and create tangible positive impact in our world today.

The first half of the semester, the studio will investigate the UN Millennium Development Goals as a framework of understanding global issues. This investigation will include intensive research, peer-to-peer learning, system’s mapping, and a design project. As a group the studio will translate the UN goals to the “US Sustainability Goals” (USSG) - identifying the eight key factors
the US must focus on to become socially and environmentally sustainable. We will develop a series of educational videos defining the USSG to share with the larger design community including IDEO and others. As a final project each of you as an individual or small group, will choose a USSG and delve into the communities around us, to discover how design can improve the quality of life for our social and environmental landscapes.

Throughout the semester you will acquire and utilize the following skills: problem finding, problem solving, critical thinking, information architecture, new media, human factors, marketing, product design, system/service design, working in a group dynamic, presentations, and business strategy.

The projects and deliverables created during this course will be shared with the larger design community including IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Core77 and other design companies.