Your Impact Factor Matters
DSI programs provide faculty with the opportunity to increase their capacity and impact through engaging multidisciplinary student teams that:
- Advance existing faculty research projects,
- Provide a low-stakes environment for testing moonshots,
- Provide essential access to skills from other disciplines to overcome barriers,
- Can help fulfill broader impacts and outreach components required by many agencies,
- Help produce new tools and technologies that advance DSI-themed curriculum,
- Facilitate "test-beds" to pilot new multidisciplinary research or project initiatives, and,
Students work on projects for credit and are not formally hired or paid as part of the DSI program. While not expected, faculty often elect to hire students after participation in DSI projects to continue work in future terms.
The DSI initiative provides faculty and instructors with an opportunity to collaborate in a community of like-minded colleagues across the university in design-centered education, research and outreach that is highly experiential and focused on social good. Relationships with external clients can be fostered through collaborations bound together through DSI sponsored student projects.
DSI affiliated faculty get connected with a diverse network of students across majors and disciplines working hand-in-hand to achieve innovative visions through:
- Creating multidisciplinary teams conducting hands-on project work within design and social impact themes that can span multiple terms and years,
- Transforming curriculum in the faculty member's unit (or the new DSI course code) to increased enrollments in cross-cutting themes such as design, social betterment, sustainability, arts and technology, and entrepreneurship,
- Activities that count as Research Mentorship, Community Engagement, DEI, and Broader Impacts.
DSI students will bring their personas, education, interests and voices to interactions with faculty with a shared vision of design for social impact.