Students tackle social situations through design

“Everything that we see around us started with an idea.” This maxim guides Michelle Whang in her involvement with Design for America, a national organization that utilizes design to find solutions to problems facing society. With 36 American university branches, DFA helps USC students make  a positive impact on the surrounding community. Recent student projects focus on a spate of issues including the environment, art education and fostering conversations about gender in elementary and high school classrooms.

This week, the DFA is hosting an upcoming Open Studio Night to highlight the past semester’s accomplishments and to recruit for the spring semester.

The Daily Trojan recently spoke with Whang, a member of DFA’s Team Mobility and Team Education, and Faith Wang, DFA’s Chief Financial Officer and Co-External Events Coordinator, about their work in the organization.

DT: What inspired you to get involved in DFA?

MW:  I was inspired to get involved with DFA because I wanted to make a change outside of the classroom. I wanted to break out of the safe bubble surrounding me and step out to see real-world issues and learn about how I can play my part and give back to my community.

DT: Describe, in your own words, what the mission of DFA is.

FW: Design for America aims to tackle problems and social issues in our community with human centered impact design. This means we focus on our users by working with them every step of the way, from defining our problem and gaining user insights, to building and testing our prototypes.

DT: What are your own interests in design?

FW: Design can be applied to so much. I’m excited to apply design to service projects I may be involved with in the future. DFA Nationals hosts a design workshop in China, and I’d love to someday volunteer there to teach design thinking in Chinese.

DT: Name and describe some projects that you have personally worked on.

MW:  In Team Education, we believe that with proper education, there is no limit to a child’s potential. Through our product “The Dashboard,” we hope to provide a platform for students to intrinsically motivate themselves to achieve more by documenting their educational journeys in a holistic, visually aesthetic online portfolio.

In Team Mobility, sponsored by Fiat Chrysler, we are working on creating a solution to combat the first-mile, last-mile problem. Los Angeles is very spread out and metro stops are infrequent, which leads to many low-income citizens not having convenient access to the metro. For these low-income citizens who may not own cars, smartphones or credit cards, we have set out to create a seamless, inexpensive form of transportation to take users exactly where they need to go at a very low cost. Los Angeles is very spread out and metro stops are infrequent, which leads to many low-income citizens not having convenient access to the metro. For these low-income citizens who may not own cars, smartphones or credit cards, we have set out to create a seamless, inexpensive form of transportation to take users exactly where they need to go at a very low cost. We have developed an on-demand ride-sharing service for low-income people in Los Angeles that provides short rides to and from metro stations.

FW: My first semester at DFA I was on Team Mental Health, where my team and I built a card game that promoted healthy and positive discussion to tackle depression. Last semester, I worked on a project that ran an Instagram page, @authentic.la, an educational page about gentrification in downtown Los Angeles. In addition, we brought an art installation downtown where we were able to discuss with people from all walks of life their favorite memories in downtown Los Angeles.

DFA’s Open Studio Night will be held from 8 to 10 p.m. on Nov. 30 in URC 108.