DSI MFA Design for Social Innovation SVA NYC. Get an MFA in social design. Applications are still open. APPLY TODAY. White text on a a dark pink background with a dotted yellos arrow going in a circle.

Join our Fall 2025 cohort.

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?

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.

DSI MFA Program

EVENTS

MFA DSI Thesis Show 2025

Monday, March 12 (1:00 - 5:30 pm EST), SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street NYC

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.

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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.

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Housing Justice collaboration in the Bronx

This community-based effort unites to improve tenant rights in the Bronx. Please click below to learn more.

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Alum At Work

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?”

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Thesis 2020

Thesis 2020

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.