Designmatters is Art Center’s College-wide social impact initiative, exploring research, advocacy and action through design education.

About Designmatters

The world today faces challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity - including urban congestion, depleted natural resources, housing shortages and crises in education and healthcare. Solutions to these challenges increasingly require collaborations offering diverse approaches and perspectives. Because mankind lives in a designed world, designers are pivotal to the success of these collaborations.
Public awareness of the importance of design beyond mere consumerism and style is rapidly growing, and design is now an equal partner with many enterprises, including business, medicine, science, technology and urban planning.
A college-wide initiative launched in 2001, Designmatters is a social impact program that embraces global engagement and projects of social relevance through design education. Since its founding, Designmatters has implemented an international slate of educational projects that have generated tangible outcomes with broad dissemination beyond the walls of the studio and College. This work includes participatory and human-centered research, cross-sector partnerships with NGOs and development agencies, and collaborations with experts from other disciplines such as engineering and the social sciences.

The portfolio of innovations generated through Designmatters projects includes product prototypes, mobility concepts and systems, and a significant array of communication projects for public advocacy. This varied portfolio reflects four broad thematic areas of inquiry: public policy, global healthcare, human sustainable development, and social entrepreneurship.

Designmatters Mission

Through research, advocacy and action, Designmatters strives to engage students, faculty and staff in an ongoing exploration of the links between design and issues of social and humanitarian importance.

They believe that design, responsibly conceived and applied, can contribute to solving such contemporary challenges as sustainable development and providing for basic needs and services, including adequate public health, safety, education, housing and transportation.
They seek to forge collaborations with individuals, educational and cultural institutions, industry, community agencies and international organizations that yield tangible solutions to contemporary social challenges.

Contacts

Mariana Amatullo
Vice President
Director, Designmatters Department
Art Center College of Design

Elisa Ruffino
Producer and Sr. Associate Director, Designmatters Department
Art Center College of Design