Skip to main content
Applications for Fall 2025 are OPEN! $80 Application Fee Waiver. DSI SVA MFA Design for Social Innovation logo on a black and yellow background with white stripes.

Learn together.
Be a part of our 2025 cohort.

Apply for Fall 2025 before the January 15 Priority Deadline for earliest consideration.

MFA DSI is a graduate social design program that asks:

  • How can design offer pathways that shift us towards healthy, equitable systems?
  • What conditions and collaborations enable communities, systems, and nature to thrive?
  • How can social design increase care and our capacity
    for change?

APPLY NOW

Social design
works with communities, organizations, governments, businesses, and the planet through:

Strengthening Relationships + Care

Advocating for health, equity, anti-discrimination, justice, joy, and healing, Supporting shared values and interdependence, and honoring nature’s wisdom.
Design asks questions over solving problems, with care.

Intentionally
Co-Creating

Collaborating with communities, advocating for mutual benefit and abundance. Centering lived experience, while reducing harm.
Design can shift power, while building leadership and creatively responding.

Embracing Complexities

Breaking from things that no longer serve us. Recognizing the continuum and pluralities, and making the invisible visible.
Design supports new thinking over new things to imagine possibility and lead with vision.

EVENTS

SVA Graduate Programs Portfolio Review & Info Session NYC

Saturday, November 9 (11 – 5pm) @ SVA Graduate Center, 136 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
Join our combined School of Visual Arts Graduate departments for an in-person portfolio review and information session. Prospective graduate students can get feedback on their portfolio and speak with SVA graduate department representatives about curriculum, SVA campus life and new interdisciplinary options. See you there!

EVENT

MFA DSI *Virtual* Open House 2024

RSVP
EVENTS

Bold Outlines: Celebrating SVA’s Graduate Programs

READ MORE
EVENTS

Graduate Portfolio Day 2024: New York City

REGISTER
Thesis 2021

Rooted Restaurants

Evan Ressegger, Qingyi (Bridget) Qian, & Darya (Dasha) Zlochevsky (MFA DSI ’21)

“Rooted Restaurants” is reimagining restaurant resilience. The project focuses on local solutions and tools to co-create community restaurant resilience. The goal is to increase communications between restaurants on Avenue B in the East Village and their respective communities.

Sign up for the latest news from
Design For Social Innovation
Email Signup
Back to Top