Detroit Connections: Change by Design

In this project-based class, students respond to pressing social needs through design thinking processes, including visioning, concept generation, sketching ideas, everyday ethnography, creative experimentation, and extensive prototyping and validation. Students form interdisciplinary teams to work on actual entrepreneurial design projects focused on various issues that face our 9^th grade partners at Detroit Community High School. As part of the course, students acquire the theoretical frameworks and skills necessary for undertaking a social enterprise. They then use those tools to design and develop their own ideas for a social venture that creates possibilities, products and systems in response to real world problems.