🤝 Work with a dedicated student team.

✅ Make headway on a complex problem.
💪 Grow your office’s innovation potential.

By participating in Design Corps, campus partners have the opportunity to collaborate with a team of design students and learn new skills. Over multiple terms, the student team will research a thorny problem posed by the campus organization, and then offer solutions and implementation strategies. The campus partner will also learn design methodologies through working with the students and the Design Corps instructional team that can be applied to any problem they might face in the future.

The Design Initiative At Dartmouth (DIAD) will split the cost of the student employment with the campus partner organization.

We partner with organizations that are eager to engage with student innovators. Organizations from all areas of campus are eligible, but we especially seek partners who are excited to learn more about design thinking and are committed and open-minded to the process.

What makes for a good project?

The ideal Design Corps project is:

<aside> 👉 A real, pressing problem that your department or office is motivated to solve.

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<aside> 👉 An issue that students are uniquely positioned to shed light on.

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<aside> 👉 An open-ended challenge (i.e. one that doesn’t already have a pre-determined solution).

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If you think you might have an idea for a project but aren’t sure if it’s a good fit, please get in touch! ([email protected]) We will work with you to refine the scope of the challenge to make sure that it can reasonably be tackled in one to three terms by a 4-person team working between 6 to 8 hours per week.

<aside> <img src="/icons/document_green.svg" alt="/icons/document_green.svg" width="40px" />

Project scoping template 🔗

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<aside> <img src="/icons/cash_green.svg" alt="/icons/cash_green.svg" width="40px" /> **Budget napkin sketch 🔗**

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How does it work?

DIAD Provides:

• 50% of wages for student members of the Design Corps assigned to work on your project.
• Assistance to project partner in scoping the project.
• Coaching and mentoring of the student team throughout the project.
• Administrative back-end support (student payroll, etc.).
• Project management support, including scheduling of milestones, presentations, and check-in points.
• Assistance and troubleshooting to project partner as needed throughout the project.

You Provide:

• 50% of wages for student members of the Design Corps assigned to work on your project.
• A dedicated liaison to have weekly check-in meetings with the team, and respond promptly to student questions via email.
• Connections to stakeholders for students to interview, as well as access other relevant data to assist in research.
• A commitment to taking the students’ ideas seriously.
• Reasonable resources for the implementation of prototypes and pilots of students’ solution concepts.

<aside> 💫 Have a project idea? Get in touch! [email protected].

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FAQ

What is the cost of doing a project with Design Corps?

What is the time commitment on our end?