OCTOBER 2025

Don Norman Design Award in Excellence Goes to MFA DSI Alum Susanti Vijaykumar

“So I invite you – To build cities, classrooms, and systems where people don’t have to leave their tongues behind to belong.” – Susanti Vijaykumar

We’re thrilled to announce Susanti Vijaykumar (MFA DSI ‘25) has won the Don Norman Design Award in Excellence for her project, The Sapna Rannaghor (The Dream Kitchen) Cookbook Project. Congratulations Susanti – we’re so proud to have you as part of our MFA DSI family.

The Sapna Rannaghor Cookbook Project, co-designed in the English for Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) classes at Sapna NYC with emergent bilingual Bangladeshi immigrant women, centers these cultural assets and native Bangla language skills, using food and recipes as vehicles for building English proficiency and community.

Incubated in MFA DSI’s honors program (Fast Track) which centers prototyping, and evolving into Susanti’s MFA DSI graduate thesis, this winning project epitomizes social design through its community-centered approach to creating lasting social change.

We are also beyond excited to announce Héctor Ruiz (MFA DSI ‘25)’s project Estamos Hablando (We Are Speaking) was a finalist for the Don Norman Design Award 2025.

Héctor’s project creates spaces for community members to make a visual code in the form of a digital font designed “by” them, and was also incubated and developed at MFA DSI.

Don Norman Design Award (DNDA) honors grassroots projects by early-career teams, design trained or not, whose work embodies the core principles of Humanity-Centered Design (HCD+) and shows promise to make a substantial difference to the lives of the communities for which they are intended. The projects must address at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A distinguished international jury evaluates each submission based on the merits and assigns a score accordingly. These two projects and MFA DSI alum make us so proud and we’re honored they have been recognized by the Don Norman Design Award.