MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation (DRI)

DRI at Illinois

MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation 

The three-year MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cultivates designers who envision and create inclusive futures in academia, industry, and communities. We invite students with design or design-adjacent* academic or professional backgrounds to apply. We prepare our graduates to drive responsible innovation in design practice and pedagogy by addressing pressing contemporary questions around climate change, ethics and social justice, equity, technology access, identity, and cultures. We equip our students with the knowledge and skills to build a more equitable and sustainable world through traditional and emerging practices including, but not limited to, graphic design, visual analytics, systems and service design, multimodal interaction, and visual communication and narrative.

* Students without an undergraduate design degree will enroll in design studio electives focused on tools, methods, and skill building in their first graduate year.

The MFA DRI consists of three years of coursework totaling 64 credit hours and a thesis project which can be delivered in either of these ways:

• Option 1: A written thesis document + exhibition in the the Krannert Art Museum
• Option 2: A written thesis document + two national peer-reviewed conference presentations + public on-campus lecture here at Illinois

DRI is Interdisciplinary

We provide unique opportunities to make a real-world difference by working with world-class University of Illinois design faculty whose research addresses Afro-futurism, equity-centered design, sustainability and sustainable materials, social innovation, multimodal interfaces for social computing, the fight against human trafficking, the design of virtual reality narratives, and the history and theory of immersive media. MFA DRI students participate in ongoing projects in Urbana-Champaign and around the world, and in addition they can:

• Engage all the resources and opportunities of studying in a world-class Tier 1 Research University
• Collaborate with PhD students in Informatics who specialize in design
• Develop partnerships at the Research Park, a nationally recognized technology hub that cultivates start-ups and accelerates corporate innovation at companies such as Abbott Laboratories, ADM, Ameren, Capital One, and State Farm

Selected MFA DRI Theses

• Holly Strickland, “Care-Stories: Using storytelling to address the mystification of women’s health experiences.” IDEALS. Alumni profile
• Joshua Pridemore, “(Hu)man enough: Design interventions for facilitating familial conversations about masculine gender expression.” IDEALS. Alumni profile
• Zhi Luo, “The Public in Print: Revisiting Historical US Political Visuals in a Digital Age.” IDEALS. Alumni profile
• Faithful Oladeji, “Presence in the UnBuilt Environment: Designing the User Experience of Architecture With Virtual Reality.” Issuu, IDEALS, Alumni profile

Recent Visiting Design Critics

• John Jennings (AY 2023)
• Brianna Wiens (AY 2023)
• Antionette Carrol (AY 2022)
• George Aye (AY 2022)
• Sadie Red Wing (AY 2021)
• Elizabeth Resnick (AY 2021)

Core Courses

Studio Courses 

ARTD 451 Ethics of a Designer in a Global Economy …… 4 units 

Ethics of a Designer in a Global Economy (EDGE) studio presents complex problems of ethics within the graphic design practice. Individual sections address social and environmental issues. 

ARTD 595 MFA Design for Responsible Innovation Studio …… 16 units

This studio provides the MFA design student with tools to define and develop their body of work in the context of the DRI program’s mission by pursuing an individual or collaborative path. The course enhances the student’s ability to develop a rigorous theoretical framework and select appropriate methods and processes for design research and pedagogy.

Studio Elective Courses in Fine & Applied Arts …… 16  units
(You’ll choose Studio Electives and Electives from the School of Art & Design, the College of Fine & Applied Arts, and diverse programs throughout the campus.)

ARTD 599 Thesis  …… 8 units 

Faculty guidance in writing and depositing thesis for MFA concentrations in Industrial Design or Design for Responsible Innovation. Students enroll with the faculty member who is supervising the thesis. 

(Students enroll with the faculty member who is supervising the thesis. In the final two semesters, the Thesis course allows the student work concertedly on the written thesis document in close consultation with their Thesis Committee Chair. This course serves as the gateway for deposit with the Thesis Office at the Graduate College in the final semester.)

Seminar Courses 

ARTD 551 Design for Responsible Innovation Research Impact …… 4 units 

This seminar helps DRI graduate students connect their research with pedagogy and professional development strategies to disseminate their research into publishing, conferences, communities, and other relevant venues.

ARTD 570 Design for Responsible Innovation Research Methodology ……  4 units

This seminar coordinates readings in design theory and the processes and principles of human-centered design with graduate students’ emerging thesis research interests. Students will address the role of design research methodology in establishing design practice and design pedagogy. DRI graduate students enrolled in this course will be well-prepared to take leadership roles in the corresponding ARTD 270 Design Methods

ART 594 Art and Design Graduate Student Teaching Seminar  …… 1 unit

Students in this course will learn about pedagogy and related resources available on campus. Structured for students across A+D degree programs, this course will focus on broadly relevant, rather than discipline-specific, practices. Other times, it will ask students to share discipline specific knowledge with the goal of developing interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that can be used in a range of teaching contexts. Students will always be encouraged to adapt course materials to their specific needs.

Electives 

Free Elective Courses  …… 11 units

View Course Descriptions and Class Schedule on the Course Explorer.

Faculty Research Interests

Catalina Alzate
Participatory Design, Community Healthcare, Digital Rights, Critical Theory in Design, Design and Policing

Eric Benson
Life-Centered Systems Thinking, Sustainable Materials, Speculative Futures

Katie Blazek
User Experience Design, Design & Mediation

Molly Catherine Briggs
Immersive Rhetorics in Print Media, Nineteenth-Century Popular Media, Landscape Representation, Spatial Epistemologies, Visual Culture

Juan de la Rosa

Jena Marble
Design Theory, Design Process and Methodology, Design Impacts on Health, Typography, Brand History

Deana McDonagh
Empathic Design Research, Disability, Aging, User-Centered Design, Invention to Innovation, Gender

Joshua Pridemore
Societal Constructs, Social Narratives, Gender, Masculinity

Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan
Human-machine Interaction Design, Cognitive Psychology, Auditory Cognition, Sound Studies, Media Arts

Stacey Robinson
Afro-Futurism, Black and Brown Utopias, Race, Graphic Novels, African Diasporas and Wakanda

Juan Salamanca
Social Computing, Interaction Design, Mediating Artifacts, Visual Analytics

Nekita Thomas
Co-Design, Race, Urban, Social Justice

Marco Trevisani Montresor
Graphic and User-interface Design, Traditional and Electronic Music Composition and Performance, Creative Coding, Creative Consulting

Recent Faculty Books

A list of DRI faculty recent book publications

Advice for Applicants

Learn all about applying to A&D graduate programs and review the required application materials carefully. Please note that while the application requests a personal statement, we strongly recommend that instead you write a research proposal of preferably 3-5 pages that addresses the following points:

• Propose a research topic that connects with one or more of our faculty’s research interests
• Refer to specific theorists and comment on how the proposed project might build on their work
• Demonstrate some familiarity with relevant research literature
• Describe 2 or 3 research goals
• Propose 3 or 4 research questions related to those goals
• Mention 2 or 3 possible use cases and/or data-collection methods that could be used to provide evidence related to those questions
• Comment on how the University of Illinois in particular might be a good location for this work

Not every statement can be this complete, but this is the general direction. The purpose of the research statement is to demonstrate your capacity for pursuing design research, not to declare a final plan. It is normal for plans to change as the student goes through the program.

Recent MFA Exhibitions

These MFA micro-sites offer you a glimpse into the kind of research our MFA DRI students have done over the past few years.