Teaching  >  Designing for Social Change

How can we encourage and inspire meaningful social change? How can we design and implement effective programs that address pervasive problems at the local, national, and international levels?

In this course, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring specific steps of the design and implementation process, including: finding inspiration; identification, recruitment, and retention of target audiences; staff selection; setting global and incremental goals; evaluating success, and so on.

We take a human-centered design approach and examine characteristics of youth and community programs in the fields of education, social welfare, human development, health promotion, human rights, and civic engagement.

We critique existing designs and, working in teams, develop our own community-based programs around social issues that we care about.


School of Education & Social Policy
Northwestern University