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Now is the Time to Apply for Fall 2025.

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 Studies Info Session & Open House 2024

Saturday, December 7 (1 – 4pm) @ SVA Graduate Center, 136 W 21st Street, NYC (first floor)

Join our info session featuring 16 SVA Graduate Programs. Hear more about MFA Design for Social Innovation program and learn more about what a degree in social design can do for you (and our futures) and why we need more creative leaders.

EVENTS

Ask Us Anything! Info Session for Fall 2025

REGISTER HERE
EVENTS

Afterthought: Design Critique with Emily Kao

RSVP
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Scholarships: A closer look at Financial Aid

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Thesis 2024

Todo Sobre Las Chicas

Joy Roach (MFA DSI ’24)

“Todo Sobre Las Chicas” helps teen girls in Latin America socially reintegrate after in-home abuse and trauma by envisioning a girl-led future of safety through independence, inner confidence, faith-based activities, and the development of sisterhood.”

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