About
About
Embedded Files
Design For Impact Experience
Design For Impact Experience
DFI History
DFI History
Design for Impact: An Inter-Institutional Collaborative Initiative!
Design for Impact: An Inter-Institutional Collaborative Initiative!
Design for Impact (DFI) is an interdisciplinary, project-based, human-centered design course initiative co-founded and run in partnership by: the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, the Clemson University School of Architecture, the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the university-wide Boston College DFI program.
Co-designed and co-founded in 2019 by Dr. Julia DeVoy (Boston College), Dr. David Gray (Virginia Tech), Tsai Lu Liu (then at NC State), and Dan Harding (Clemson), the DFI initiative has formally run since Fall 2020. This Fall 2025, we celebrate our sixth year as a collaborative, cross-institutional academic design and innovation program involving students and faculty. DFI has expanded since its founding, welcoming incredible new colleagues from all the partner schools. The Wentworth Institute of Technology joined the partnership two years ago, brought into DFI by Dean Sedef Doganer. Faculty from the institutions have co-created and co-taught the DFI course since 2019, utilizing in-person and hybrid modalities.
The DFI experience involves grouping students from each university into interdisciplinary, inter-institutional teams. These teams are tasked with tackling a real-world design challenge focused on benefiting the common good. Working from a human-centered lens, teams integrate diverse academic disciplines to address complex problems, including (among others): architecture, psychology, business, computer science, engineering, industrial design, economics, environmental studies, and education.
DFI Annual Summit at Boston College.
Each November, DFI culminates with the BC Design for Impact Summit. Students and their faculty supervisors from Virginia Tech, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Clemson University travel to Boston to co-present their final team projects alongside their BC colleagues. This signature event is supported via Boston College’s Office of the Provost, the DFI-S&D Gift and the Dean of Undergraduate Programs & Students, LSEHD.
DFI Initiative Structure
DFI Initiative Structure
Students from each university enroll in a special learning course at their home institution. Over the years, the founding faculty of DFI have fine-tuned a structural pedagogy that is in-person and hybrid in nature and yields rich experiential outcomes. Participating students meet in-person to kick off the semester, meet their teammates, and understand the program initiative and project details. Students then meet both in-person with their home campus cohort and online weekly in the full large interinstitutional group for design studio lectures and critique sessions with the leadership faculty from all four institutions serving as principal advisors and reviewers. Students explore and are instructed in creative design-driven thinking processes, principles of interdisciplinary teamwork, and interdisciplinary project management. All students meet for a second time in-person in the middle of the semester to share, iterate, and refine their team project design directions. The semester culminates with the final in-person DFI Annual Summit where students gather to present their solutions to a jury of faculty and a large and wide audience of other innovators, academics, field professionals, family and friends!
Intercollegiate + Interdisplinary Approach
Intercollegiate + Interdisplinary Approach
Design for Impact is more than a course initiative —it’s a collaborative program that reshapes how students from multiple institutions and disciplines, who are unfamiliar with each other, come together and collectively ideate. communicate, design and respond to the pressing needs of society and the planet.
The Need for Interdisciplinary Collaboration: The traditional monoculture in higher education often restricts innovation and creative thought. By contrast, our approach encourages students to step beyond their academic confines, fostering an environment where interdisciplinary interaction is not just encouraged—it’s essential.
Our Distinctive DFI Approach: Students participate in teams that tackle design challenges throughout a semester-long project offered through in-person and hybrid format. There are at least three in-person touch points with all school partner participants through out the semester facilitated by accomplished faculty. There are in-person touch points for each school's own cohort members as well. The teams undergo rigorous training in design thinking and project management, collaborative working while also engaging in critical real-world application. Each phase of the project—from ideation to execution—is supported by a blend of individual study and collective endeavor, mirroring the collaborative nature of the real professional world.
Boston College
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Virginia Tech University
Clemson University
Instructors
Instructors
Boston College
Boston College
Julia DeVoy
Julia DeVoy
Dean of Undergraduate Programs & Students, Boston College, LSEHD
Dean Julia DeVoy, Ph.D., MTS, MBA, is a developmental psychologist who serves as Undergraduate Dean of Students and Programs for BC-LSEHD, as well as an academic program designer, innovator, and entrepreneur. With a strong background in both academia and practice, DeVoy has worked in and across fields such as innovation futuring and scenario planning, entrepreneurship, design-driven thinking, cyber moral-ethical learning, sustainability, and restorative and transformational justice, both nationally and internationally, since 1989. DeVoy's education includes a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Boston College, an M.B.A. from Oxford University, an M.T.S. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from St. Lawrence University. Dr. DeVoy is the 2019 co-founder of the Design for Impact (DFI) initiative, along with Professor Dan Harding (Clemson), Dr. David Gray (VTech), and Dean Lu Liu (formerly of NC State -now also at VTech).
Clemson University
Clemson University
Dan Harding
Dan Harding
Director, Community Research and Design Center (CR+DC) and Professor of Architecture
Chloe Voltaire
Chloe Voltaire
Lecturer at Clemson University
Dan Harding is a Professor of Architecture and Community Design+Build and serves as the director of the Community Research and Design Center (CR+DC) and the Architecture + communityBUILD graduate certificate program (A+cB) striving to ensure that South Carolina communities intently embrace the social, economic, and environmental pillars of sustainability. In 2013, DesignIntelligence named Harding as one of the thirty most influential design educators in the country, citing the impact of his community-centric work.
Chloe is a Lecturer in the School of Architecture at Clemson University. She graduated with a B.S in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture Degree from Clemson University. She has experience in both Architecture, as a designer and Construction, in preconstruction management.
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Katarina Richter-Lunn
Katarina Richter-Lunn
Assistant Professor of Industrial Design
Simon Williamson
Simon Williamson
Professor of Industrial Design
Sedef Doganer
Sedef Doganer
Dean of the School of Architecture and Design
Katarina Richter-Lunn is an architectural designer, creative technologist, and an Assistant Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Her interdisciplinary research, situated at the intersection of design, psychology, and physiology, is dedicated to promoting well-being through the built environment.
Katarina is additionally a Visiting Lecturer in Design Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, and served as the TeenArch Summer Program Coordinator and Lecturer at UCLA from 2022 to 2025. She has also taught as a Lecturer at Northeastern University’s Department of Art and Design and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Alongside her doctoral degree at Harvard, she worked as a research assistant with the Materials Processes and Systems Group (MaP+S) and was a member of the Aizenberg Lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Katarina holds a Doctor of Design (D.Des.) and a Master's in Design Studies (M.Des.) in Architecture, Technology, and Innovation from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.) from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, with a minor in Sustainable Environments. She was also awarded the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2022 and named a Built Environment Deans Advancing Change (BEDAC) Fellow in 2025.
Simon Williamson is a professor of Industrial Design in the Provost's Office at the School of Architecture and Design at Wentworth Institute of Technology. He graduated from the University of Northumbria and holds a Masters in Design from the Royal College of Art. Before he began teaching, his professional range included the design and manufacture of his own line of desktop consumer goods, old school modelmaking and product development of toy concepts through to the prototype phase, as well as toy inventions.
Sedef Doganer is the Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at Wentworth Institute of Technology and a Professor of Architecture. Before joining Wentworth, she was a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she held roles as Department Chair and Associate Dean of Design, Inclusion, and Engaged Scholarship. Her research focuses on the intersection of architecture and tourism, with recent studies in heritage tourism, historic preservation, and sustainable tourism development. Dr. Doganer holds multiple degrees in architecture from Istanbul Technical University, is a registered architect in Turkey, and serves on the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the board of Docomomo/NE.
Virginia Tech University
Virginia Tech University
David Gray
David Gray
Assistant Professor and Assistant Department Head for Undergraduate Programs in the Engineering Education Department
Dr. Gray's research focuses on disciplinary identity formation and the development and administration of curricular and extracurricular interdisciplinary project based learning programs.
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