Fellows Create Distinct Resources for Key DFA Studio Themes
In May 2024, the Fellows Program concluded its year-long journey with 12 student leaders and alumni from the DFA Network. In the fall, these fellows collaborated to take support calls, offer resources and guidance to the network, and research the most pressing needs of students in their DFA studio experience. By spring, they focused on the sustainability pillars of Studio Leadership, Design Education, and Community Partnerships. Through prototyping, testing, and iteration, the fellows created three innovative and unique resources essential for studio sustainability.
The success of the program lay in bringing student leaders from across the network to support their peers. By creating a peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and sourcing design opportunities from direct experience, the 12 Fellows utilized an on-the-ground perspective into the DFA studio experience which enabled them to produce distinct resources. They identified niche insights about leadership roles, curricular needs for effectively accomplishing leadership responsibilities, and opportunity spaces in DFA project resources. The culmination of their research and testing is an important step forward in expanding the organization’s support resources for helping studios thrive at the local level.
Leadership Launchpad
A workshop designed for incoming Studio Leads to learn essential leadership skills in goal-setting, prioritization, and timeline management.
The Challenge: How can we organize and deliver resources to incoming studio leads, who come from established studios, during their onboarding process to boost self-confidence in their leadership abilities?
The Solution: Leadership Launchpad is a guided activity that accompanies DFA’s studio leadership syllabus and how-to reference resources. The resulting workshop and activity template prepare new studio leads to strategize and prioritize their goals and create an action plan within a set timeframe. The interactive quality creates an engaging way for incoming leaders to practice the skills of people and project management.
Community Partnership Roadmap
A roadmap for studio leadership to explore critical skill sets for building collaborative projects with community partners.
The Challenge: How can we guide studios through establishing and facilitating successful community partnerships throughout a DFA term and beyond?
The Solution: The Community Partnership Roadmap is a novel resource fulfilling a major opportunity space in DFA’s project curriculum. The interactive roadmap and accompanying resource page help DFA students visualize the entire community partnership journey. It establishes expectations with community partners from the start and encourages disciplined communication between parties throughout the project to cultivate strong relationships. It is a summation of the partnership-building experience, the other half of the DFA project endeavor on top of the DFA design process.
Empowering Decisive Team Leads
A workshop for Team Leads to explore critical skill sets for successful team leadership and design education facilitation.
The Challenge: How can we prepare potential and current team leads with training to confidently integrate facilitating design process learning into their project team leadership?
The Solution: The Team Leads workshop focuses on the specific skill sets that project leaders need to support a team through a meaningful and successful project experience. The workshop employs hands-on activities and intentional reflection to help participants build capacity in reinforcing design concepts, decision making, meeting structuring, and culture building. The resources refocus teams on design learning rather than project outcomes, emphasizing a process-based learning model for the unique Team Lead role.
Want to access the resources? Log in to your studio workspace on the Community Platform.
Read on to hear about the Fellows’ experiences in the Fellows Program and celebrate their next steps in summer!
Kera Daughtery
School: Texas State University - San Marcos
Specialization: Community Partnerships
“A key learning I'm taking away from my time with DFA is that the journey is much more valuable than the outcome.”
Alastair (Ally) Merrett
School: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Specialization: Design Education
“I learned how impactful 1-1 mentorship is!”
Riddhi Singhania
School: Vanderbilt University
Specialization: Community Partnerships
“Through my fellowship, I have learned about accountability and self motivation in a professional environment and also learned about the importance of providing constant support through shared experiences.”
Joel Yong
School: Rhode Island School of Design
Specialization: Community Partnerships
“Through the DFA Fellowship, I gained an intimate look on what it's like to be a nationwide organization, prioritize work that has potential to be most impactful, and the indispensable feeling of being a part of a cohort of people who are all striving to do good!”
Keerthana Ravikumar
School: New York University
Specialization: Studio Leadership
“Connection and community, I learned to become a better collaborator and how to accommodate different working styles of my team mates.”
Erica Fu
School: Carnegie Mellon University
Specialization: Studio Leadership
“Every DFA studio is different and we should celebrate those differences!”
Maddy Ward
School: Northwestern University
Specialization: Studio Leadership
“It was great being able to work on an interdisciplinary team again to complete design projects, this time for DFA studios across the country. I hope they are able to benefit from our project as much as I did.”
Avani Guduri
School: Carnegie Mellon University
Specialization: Design Education
Avani will be interning at Duolingo this summer making cool product design decisions. She will also be a senior studio lead at DFA CMU this upcoming year.
Lindsay Gleason
School: North Central College
Specialization: Design Education
“My time with DFA has taught me the process of consistent reinvention. DFA is always evolving and I think that is beautiful and important.”
Shruthi Chidambaram
School: University of Cincinnati
Specialization: Community Partnerships
Shruthi will be visiting Acadia this summer, exploring work-life balance, and staying involved in community engagement.
Tanvi Jadhav
School: Rice University
Specialization: Design Education
“Building across a network for many different stakeholders can be difficult, but leads to great insights.”
Jessica Moskowitz
School: Oberlin College
Specialization: Studio Leadership
“Everything is iterative; the "process" and learning are the goals.”
