Dartmouth's home for design as a liberal art, where students from every major learn to turn curiosity into things that matter.
Design at Dartmouth began in 1987, becoming the only Ivy framing design as a liberal art and holding that design thinking is most powerful when paired with domain expertise. Here, a human-centered design minor can amplify any major and Dartmouth's modifier system—majoring in one field modified by another—means students don't leave their discipline to learn design; it becomes part of how they practice and amplify thinking within it.
Students learn design fundamentals and how to combine engineering, ethnography, health, AI, ecology, and craft without losing the judgment that makes the work worth doing. Government majors run design sprints. Biology students prototype diagnostic tools. Environmental Studies researchers translate data into something a community can act on.
The Design Initiative at Dartmouth grows these combinations deliberately in partnership with the Human Centered Design Minor Program Committee, our new Collaborative Intelligence Lab (CoLab), cross-departmental grants, and cultivating new ways to strengthen the connective tissue between them.
Start with the Human-Centered Design minor, Dartmouth's most popular minor. Six courses, any major, taught by faculty from across the university.
Students from every department amplify their major with rigorous, studio-based grounding in human-centered design.
Making Fast and Thinking Slow. Expert coaching embedded in partner courses that helps students iterate more, learn further along the trajectory of their ideas, and work with AI and emerging tools with real design judgment.
Dartmouth's HCD faculty are leaders in developing innovative design curriculum. We develop, test, iterate, and teach others ways to improve design education.
Grants and projects that support design work across the university from student projects, faculty research, course development with DCAL (Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning), and co-curricular programs like Design Corps.
Partner your course with CoLab for AI-native design coaching. Apply for a faculty design project grant. Or just reach out. We'd love to hear what you're working on.
Human Centered Design affiliated faculty and courses live in departments across the university.
An applied creative problem-solving discipline for addressing human needs, combinable with every field Dartmouth students study. Six courses taken alongside any major, taught by faculty from across the university.
Six courses in three stages — a foundation, a set of methods from the social sciences, and a concentration of design electives chosen from across the university. At least one Section 2 course must be from outside your major department.
Start here. ENGS 12 Design Thinking introduces the core practice (observation, reframing, prototyping, iteration) that everything else builds on.
Two courses grounding your design work in how people actually think, behave, and live, drawn from anthropology, psychology, geography, sociology, or engineering research methods.
Three design-intensive courses that let you specialize (UX, making, XR, sustainability, ethics, entrepreneurship, or architecture). The "modified by HCD" part of your degree.
Courses eligible for the HCD minor, drawn from departments across Dartmouth. Which courses run in a given term, and who teaches them, rotates. For the current term's offerings and instructors, see the official Dartmouth HCD Minor page →
The HCD minor is administered by the Thayer School of Engineering. There's no application — declare any term once you've completed ENGS 12 and at least one Section 2 course.
A few things to know: minimum 2.0 GPA in minor courses, no course may count toward both a major and minor, only one transfer course allowed, and engineering majors may only count ENGS courses numbered below 20.
Prof. Peter Robbie, Co-founder and Director of the HCD Minor · Thayer School of Engineering · undergraduate.engineering.advising@dartmouth.edu
Making Fast and Thinking Slow. CoLab expands what's possible within the student projects already planned in your course, enabling students to iterate more within the same timeframe and learn further along the trajectory of their ideas, with expert coaching on AI and emerging tools.
CoLab specialists embed in partner courses at the instructor's invitation, adding tools, coaching, and studio access to your existing course. It serves any course involving design, making, or applied projects, not just Thayer. Three things we add:
Multi-modal tools change monthly. Faculty and TAs can't evaluate what they can't see. Students can generate impressive output without the understanding it implies. We co-design projects and support students on which tools help at which phase, how to maintain creative agency, and when to trust AI output vs. override it.
CoLab continuously evaluates the evolving tool landscape, builds step-by-step workflow recipes mapped to course goals, and manages access. Every partner course gets a curated stack rather than a generic AI playground.
Cross-project exchange, lateral learning, and shared norms around AI use and attribution, built through practice rather than policy. A place where students from different courses cross-pollinate around a shared making practice.
We're looking for students who are already active and eager to learn AI-native design methods to help serve our faculty partners. If that's you, reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
Current CoLab partner courses: TBD for the upcoming term. Check back or email us to be notified when the next cohort opens.
Write to design@dartmouth.eduAn instructor with a design, making, or applied-project course reaches out. We meet, understand the syllabus, and identify where AI-augmented work could extend student learning.
CoLab builds a bespoke toolkit for that course: curated tools, step-by-step recipes mapped to your assignments, guest lectures, and TA training. You run the course; we add a layer.
Drop-in studio, 1-on-1 coaching, office hours, Zoom support. Students optionally adopt AI methods; the ones who do produce exhibit-ready work in weeks.
Does the embedding model work without disrupting syllabi? Do AI-augmented workflows improve student prototype quality and enable more iterative learning? Our Winter '26 v1 pilot's short answer: yes to both, visibly, across two very different course formats.
Winter '26 v2 pilot: CoLab is expanding to work with faculty partners who teach entrepreneurship, language learning, geography, design ethics, design research, creativity, and emerging technology. If you're faculty and want to explore a partnership for Summer '26 or Fall '26, write to design@dartmouth.edu.
What we heard from people inside the pilot, unprompted and unedited, across both courses.
Teaching students Adobe After Effects was always a headache; being able to scrap that module for what feels like a much more career-relevant, future-relevant, and enjoyable set of AI tools was great.
The fact that students surprised themselves is the biggest insight of this whole pilot. Students were surprised by the quality of the ideas and exhibits they all created — and frankly, I was surprised too.
Even though I might normally take a staunch anti-AI stance, this project helped me realize that it really is a tool that can improve quality of life for many people. It can also be a good sounding board for human-created ideas.
Having the creative freedom to present our product in multiple ways — through a hype video, physical pots and pans, snacks, a 3D printed prototype, and a Figma mockup — allowed us to tell a rich, multidimensional story.
Three from ENGS 15.10's future-of-home brief. Each was exhibit-ready in five weeks, combining AI tools with physical making, Figma prototyping, and narrative video.
A preventative neurological system addressing cognitive decline in an AI-saturated future: at-home MRI monitoring during sleep, targeted neural stimulation, ambient health data.
A kitchen cobot that guides rather than replaces the cook: stabilizing hands, prompting memory, translating recipes into tactile learning.
A closet using engineered silkworms to break down textiles and regenerate bio-fibers, 3D-printed into custom garments on demand.
Built for rapid iterative learning. Each phase is scoped to produce learning that feeds the next. Spring 2026 is underway.
Does the embedding model work across course types: Creative Problem Solving, Design for Entrepreneurship, Designing with Emerging Technology, Design Research, faculty research in climate and arts? Also repeats the model across terms of the same class with new faculty.
An application-based workshop series that extends the CoLab approach beyond the partner-course model, open to Dartmouth students and, selectively, to external participants. First exploration of whether this works as its own offering rather than embedded support.
Announcements from DIAD, updates from the CoLab pilots, public lectures and exhibitions, open calls for proposals, and design-related events across Dartmouth.
Following a successful Winter 2026 pilot, DIAD's Collaborative Intelligence Lab is opening applications for its second cohort across five or more partner courses.
Partner with CoLabA public lecture on AI-native design practice at Dartmouth, drawing on CoLab's Winter 2026 pilot findings and what's coming in Spring.
RSVP →Three weeks of student projects from across the HCD minor and the CoLab pilot — prototypes, installations, videos, and bio-fabrication experiments.
Learn more →First public showing of projects from DIAD's new lab. Students present work in progress and take open feedback from the Dartmouth community.
RSVP →A day-long symposium with faculty from across the university on DIAD's Design Curriculum Lab — how the SEMINAL framework is being piloted in multiple courses, and what we've learned so far.
RSVP →Five or more partner courses expected, including Creative Problem Solving, Design for Entrepreneurship, Design Research, and faculty research projects in climate and the arts.
Findings from the first five Dartmouth courses piloting the pedagogical thesis behind design as a liberal art — what worked, what's changing, and what's next.
Winter 2026 round of the Faculty & Staff grant funded six projects across Engineering, Geography, Studio Art, Sociology, and the Hood Museum. Showcase coming.
Maya Chen '26 (ENVS modified by HCD) presents her CoLab prototype, a low-power bioacoustic monitoring tool for the Dartmouth Second College Grant.
A new cross-department partnership around AI and human-centered design, extending CoLab's work to additional research labs across campus.
A team of undergraduates partners with the Dean of the College to redesign signage and orientation materials for first-generation students arriving on campus this fall.
Two new design faculty asked to be included in the CoLab Spring 2026 pilot through independent word of mouth. The first signal that the embedding model is spreading on its own.
Exhibit-ready prototypes in five weeks. Faculty surprised by student output. Tool credits ran out early. A thread on what worked and what didn't.
DIAD's studio space opens in ECSC Room 007, a dedicated home for cross-disciplinary design work at Dartmouth. Drop by any time.
The ways DIAD works with the Dartmouth community — supporting students, faculty, and staff to take on design projects in their own classrooms, labs, and corners of campus.
Multiple tracks, each designed to lower the barrier to starting a design project at Dartmouth.
A partnership between DIAD and the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) that supports faculty redesigning or launching courses that integrate design thinking, human-centered methods, or emerging tools.
Small grants supporting faculty and staff doing interesting work in human-centered design — research projects, prototypes, pilots, and studio experiments across any department at Dartmouth.
Embedded AI-native coaching and tools inside partner courses. Designed with your syllabus, run by you, supported by us.
A student team working on campus improvement projects, from wayfinding to signage to interior redesigns, in partnership with Dartmouth departments, facilities, and student groups.
What's open right now, what's coming next, and what we're actively looking for. Proposal areas evolve term by term.
A hyper-flexible multipurpose room in the Class of 1982 Engineering and Computer Science Center where everything is on wheels, even the couches. Any member of the Dartmouth community can reserve it for design-related events: workshops, design sprints, working sessions, club meetings, presentations, exhibitions, special class meetings, and more.
Furniture: Bar-height and standard-height tables, dozens of chairs and stools, four moveable couches, stationary and mobile whiteboards.
A/V: Projector, room speakers, lecture capture, and built-in Zoom Room.
Drop by, book the space, or write to us at design@dartmouth.edu.
Projects from the HCD minor, CoLab studios, and faculty grant recipients showing the range of the liberal art of making.
Selected work from across the Human-Centered Design community. Every project travels an impact trajectory — the ◆ on each card marks where the work lives along it: human-centered design research builds knowledge, concepts open possibilities, prototypes make ideas tangible, field tests gather evidence, and some work takes on a life beyond the course or grant.
No projects match this combination — try clearing one of the filters.
Most student work stops at prototype — not for lack of talent, but of runway. DIAD’s job is moving these diamonds: technical depth, field-test partnerships, and continuation support that carry projects from concept to use.
Help us move moreIn 1987, studio art met engineering in a single course, Introduction to Product Design. That course became ENGS 12: Design Thinking, the cornerstone of the Human-Centered Design Minor. The Minor became the heart of a faculty community that now serves students and partners with faculty and staff from across the university. This community founded the Design Initiative at Dartmouth with the generous support of early funders who appreciated the quiet, long-term development of a strong foundation and made a bet that this is just the beginning of what is possible in the future.
DIAD draws on a community of faculty and staff across Dartmouth who contribute time, expertise, and energy to the work.
A note on rotation: Who teaches an HCD-minor course varies by term. This page reflects a snapshot. For the current-term schedule and instructor assignments, see the Thayer School of Engineering official minor page, which gets updated each registration cycle.
See the official HCD Minor pageCo-curricular student design teams partnering with campus offices to tackle complex challenges over 2–3 academic terms. 80+ students since 2021. Design Corps alumni include people now teaching in the HCD minor: Maura Cass '10 and Nina Montgomery '14. Learn more about the Design Corps Program.
DIAD is Dartmouth’s home for design as a liberal art — where students from every major learn to turn curiosity into things that matter.
Design practice that used to take months now moves in weeks. A year ago, human-centered designers integrated feasibility, desirability, and viability over months. Today the timelines have compressed — and the materials have multiplied. Designers need to mix engineering, ethnography, AI, ecology, and craft without losing the judgment that makes the work worth doing.
Dartmouth has the structure for this moment. The Human-Centered Design minor is the most popular on campus. Faculty with deep HCD expertise already work across engineering, computer science, studio art, environmental studies, geography, psychology, and entrepreneurship. Small classes enable rapid cross-disciplinary iteration. The liberal arts core provides the critical thinking and ethical reasoning the work requires.
Dartmouth coined "artificial intelligence" in 1956. It should develop the pedagogy for the age AI created.
SEMINAL is the working vocabulary at the center of DIAD's curriculum lab — seven designable systems every project touches. We teach students to notice all seven, design for several, and never pretend the others aren't there. Faculty pilot it across courses, studios, and the grants program; it evolves with what we learn.
Experience journeys, touchpoints, delivery — how organizations relate to people.
Environmental flows, carbon, power, climate — the metabolism of every design.
Physical matter, form, manufacturing, supply chains — and where it all ends up.
Color, sound, touch, taste, motion — how designs are perceived and used.
Living systems, ecology, organisms — growth, decay, and care cycles.
Computation and AI as research partners and design accelerators.
Durability, repair, emotional attachment — craft that earns care over time.
In September 2025, DIAD's new leadership began studying historical inflection points in design education over the last century and the frameworks that emerged from them that stood the test of time. DIAD developed a series of working hypotheses for the current inflection point — one that involves an expansion of materials, systems, and methods that future design leaders will need to learn.
In Winter 2026, DIAD began piloting the framework in one course, with HCD faculty discussing and refining the working framework in weekly committee meetings. In Spring 2026, the pilot expanded to a second course.
We consider it a living framework that we will continue to iterate on over time in collaboration with faculty and students — for as long as it remains useful. Input is welcome at design@dartmouth.edu.
Across every course and every project, three principles run through DIAD's teaching — the things we want every student to leave the program believing.
Design decisions rooted in craft and beauty earn attention and sustained care. If it doesn't last — physically, emotionally, culturally — you haven't finished the design.
Designers must see and shape interconnected systems — supply chains, carbon costs, repair pathways, service models — rather than perfecting a single domain in isolation.
Computation extends designer perception and processing without replacing aesthetic judgment or intuitive integration. CoLab is where we practice this most directly.
Based on over a decade of teaching design students, we identified distinct impact trajectories they pursue and are building pathways to natively support these trajectories where systems meet real problems. Every DIAD project lands in one or more of these directions and we help creators aim for the right impact path for their team and project goals.
Market-viable, user-centered design that reaches people sustainably and earns a place in their lives.
Cultural contribution that shifts perception, opens new ways of seeing, and enters public life.
Research-driven invention that advances what's possible — often by designing the tools researchers use.
Physical and mental health, community, belonging, and resilience design that helps people live fuller lives.
Planetary health, sustainability, ecological restoration — designing for the systems that keep us alive.
Pedagogical innovation and capacity building — teaching the next generation of designers to do all of the above.
DIAD works closely with partners across the university — design research, making spaces, museums, medicine, energy, entrepreneurship, and the schools themselves. The breadth of collaboration is part of how design at Dartmouth stays connected to the liberal arts.
Design thinking woke me up. It's as simple as that.
