Learn to lead, creatively.
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?
EVENTS
MFA DSI Thesis Show 2025
Celebrate this year’s graduating students as they share their thesis projects. Through inspiring interventions, social issues, and partners, their explorations show us how MFA Design for Social Innovation designers find a common coexistence in future-building.
MFA DSI graduate students explore social innovation through co-design and community-led collaborations supporting people and the planet. This year, our keynote speaker is Amer Jandali (MFA DSI ‘16), founder of Marketplace of the Future and CEO of social design studio Future Meets Present.
Heart of Dinner volunteering at MFA DSI Open Session
SVA students support Heart of Dinner 愛心餐, a nonprofit organization combating food insecurity and isolation in NYC elderly Asian communities at an MFA DSI Open Session.
Housing Justice collaboration in the Bronx
This community-based effort unites to improve tenant rights in the Bronx. Please click below to learn more.
Andrea Miranda Salas (MFA DSI ’20)
DSI Alum putting social design to work. “What are DSI graduates doing? What kind of jobs do DSI students get?”
Power is Local
Catherine Mazzocchi and Jennifer Ulloa (MFA DSI ’20)
Power is Local builds Black, Latinx, & Spanish-speaking Northern Manhattan community power, to ensure that people most impacted by energy insecurity’s increasingly harmful effects on community wellbeing can develop critical policy action.