PRACTICE DESIGN. ENGAGE STAKEHOLDERS. CREATE SOLUTIONS WITH IMPACT.
Our team is excited to offer the Socially Engaged Engineering & Design (SEED) course for the 2025 Winter semester. This 3-credit, elective course will provide students the opportunity to explore complex challenges, engage with real stakeholders, and design people-first solutions. The course is listed as ENGR 490 (class #33530) and ENGR 599 (class #33529) for special topics in engineering. Please note: there are no prerequisites for this course!
Offered WIN25, Tuesdays + Thursdays, 1:00 – 2:30pm @ C-SED, 3rd Floor G.G. Brown
Skills of Socially Engaged Engineering and Design (SEED):
- Engage with stakeholders to explore and understand a given challenge
- Perform primary and secondary research on contextual factors related to your challenge
- Learn and practice interviewing skills, defining key takeaways, ideating and prototyping
- Present a solution idea and summary of your process at the end of the winter semester in a design expo event.
- There may be an opportunity to continue your work in a funded Summer Fellowship program!
How does it work?
The SEED class will be hosted in a hybrid format, is group project based and requires significant independent teamwork outside of course hours. You will work on a team in this course.
Project topics and first stakeholder interactions will be provided. This year, teams will focus on the issue of Food Access + Sustainability on campus. With connections to colleagues in MDining and PlanetBlue, as well as to current efforts in recycling, composting, dining, energy and food access around campus, students will engage in the socially engaged design process to deeply understand the current ecosystem at University of Michigan.
Instructors
This course will be led by Charlie Michaels and Claudia Cameratti-Baeza from the Center for Socially Engaged Design.
Are you interested in joining the SEED Capstone course? Please get in touch with Lawryn Fellwock, lawryn@umich.edu