Faculty & Staff Design Projects · Spring 2026
AwardedMay 2026
Design Initiative
at Dartmouth
at Dartmouth
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 →
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.
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.
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. To apply for open items, email: design@dartmouth.edu.
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.
In 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.
