Celebrating FUSED’s Inaugural Year

With C-SED mentors and community members present, this Wrap-Up event gave the teams an opportunity to share their work from over the year and, for the four teams who completed the entire program, receive an award of $2,000!

Surrounded by a gallery showcasing the FUSED students’ incredible work and a delicious buffet from Jerusalem Garden, each participant in the FUSED program – team members, community collaborators, and facilitators – shared in the joy of an exciting first year of FUSED. 

What is the FUSED program? 

The FUSED (Functional Uses of Socially Engaged Design) Program supports and guides College of Engineering project teams through a clear social impact or community engagement element in their mission. 

Created using the very same SED process that it teaches, the FUSED Program was designed in response to a series of interviews with students in Fall 2023. Throughout this interview tour, the C-SED team was able to get direct feedback from project teams and identify how their design process could benefit from applying the Socially Engaged Design process model. 

Utilizing SED design steps such as exploration, stakeholder engagement, iterative development, and reflection, the C-SED team designed the FUSED program and prepared for its pilot year. 

FUSED’s Pilot Cohort 

The very first FUSED cohort hit the ground running in October 2024 when six project teams became the very first FUSED cohort at the program’s Kick-Off event. 

After their introduction to the FUSED program, these four teams attended an initial planning meeting, completed four Hybrid Learning Modules each, prepared for and completed a total of 16 coaching sessions, and created a final report that reflected on their personalized journey over the course of a year. 

After six months of exploring and adapting SED tools to their design process, generating ideas, developing prototypes, evaluating those prototypes, and repeating the cycle over again, four teams received an award of $2,000. 

C-SED sincerely congratulates these project teams for their work, dedication, and curiosity. You have the support and encouragement of the entire C-SED team. 

Here are the project teams of FUSED’s Pilot Cohort: 

BLUElab Data (Lauren May, Ashley Moulton, Chloe Taurel, and Priya Shah)

• Project: Working with MDining to reduce food waste using data analysis & predictive modeling (BLUElab Data.) 

BLUElab Metro (Savin Dasanayaka, Atlas Fracasso, Addison Henkel, Rachel Patyi, and Kushaal Sharma) 

• Project: Co-designing solutions to address community-identified needs and amplify the voices of those impacted by systemic shortcomings 

M-HEAL CSF Global (Anna Wattenbach, Sahana Raja, Esha Bingi, Maddison Cayer, and Peyton McCaslin)

• Project: The implementation of nutritional improvements to cerebral palsy therapy in Bangladesh 

M-HEAL PACT (Arya Gandhi, Kyle Crockett, Aidan Connolly, Evelyn Antony, and Eitan Frankowitz) 

• Project: The development of a low-cost, urine-based cervical cancer screening device to improve cervical cancer screening access in low- to middle-income countries 

Features on each project team will be coming soon! 

Looking ahead 

The FUSED program is expanding! Future iterations of FUSED may include: 

• The FUSED Peer Mentorship Program, in which previous participants can gain coaching and facilitation experience. 
• Closer collaboration with campus partners 
• Broader project team reach so that FUSED can support teams such as Solar Car and MRover. 

Congratulations again to all of the project teams! We hope to see you again soon. 

Questions about the FUSED program can be directed to c-sed-info@umich.edu.