SEPTEMBER 2025

MFA DSI Alum Susanti Vijaykumar and Héctor Ruiz (MFA DSI ’25) are Don Norman Design Award finalists

The Don Norman Design Award honors bold ideas grounded in Humanity-Centered Design (HCD+), real-world impact, and deep collaboration with communities.

Both Susanti and Héctor’s nominated projects incubated at MFA Design for Social Innovation in our Fast Track course, an honors program that encourages the opportunity to prototype and propel their idea into the real world at an accelerated rate. These projects evolved into their MFA DSI graduate theses.

Susanti and Héctor won SVA Alumni Scholarship Awards 2025 for their projects. In May 2025, both Susanti and Héctor exhibited their projects at MFA Design for Social Innovation’s NYCxDesign Week Exhibition.

These two endeavors epitomize social design in their community-centered approach to creating lasting social change. Susanti’s project, The Sapna Rannaghor (Dream Kitchen) cookbook project, came out of collaborating with adult immigrant women to generate a new language-justice-centered approach to language learning. Héctor’s project, Estamos Hablando (We Are Speaking), creates spaces for community members to make a visual code in the form of a digital font designed “by” them.