Design Initiative at Dartmouth

Dartmouth’s home for design as a liberal art, where students from every major learn to turn curiosity into things that matter. The initiative grew out of the Human-Centered Design minor — the most popular minor on campus — and now spans the minor, CoLab, Design Corps student teams, the Design Fellows honors track, and the Design Loft studio.

CoLab, the Collaborative Intelligence Lab, embeds AI-native design coaching inside courses faculty already teach — we add to it, you run it — so students iterate more within the same timeframe and learn further along the trajectory of their ideas. Its first two terms reached five partner courses, 174 students, and 53 teams, with a trained TA pool and a course-development grant now open to faculty across Dartmouth.

Design at Dartmouth dates to 1987. The initiative marks the program’s fortieth year in 2027 with a new making studio, a gallery of exceptional student work, and a measurement layer that publishes what students actually learn to do.