The Educational Design for Transformative Social Futures specialization is designed for undergraduates who are interested in becoming creative, innovative designers who collaborate with communities, families, youth and educators to transform education across a range of settings. In this specialization, students cultivate orientations to living, learning, and thriving as designed and open to being redesigned and transformed (the world as it could be). We approach design as a creative interdisciplinary endeavor that draws from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines.

Design is often associated with products, how they look and function. Think of the iPhone, furniture, sneakers or clothing as examples. But in education design attends to process as well as product, where the process involves collaboratively designing experiences, environments, and systems that foster mutual flourishing. With this orientation to design in mind, the specialization cultivates students’ sensibilities as educational designers: attuning to people, place, history and power, in all their heterogeneity and complexity; thinking expansively about what is and what could be; collaborating across communities, disciplines, generations; learning side-by-side with youth, adults and communities; iterating and reflecting critically and creatively on designs as living and always subject to change; being open to the unexpected; maintaining humility in the face of heterogeneity and complexity in human, built and natural worlds.