Design and Arts Corps
Design and Arts Corps
Design and Arts Corps
Design and Arts Corps is an integrated community-engaged design and arts program serving all Herberger Institute students, faculty and staff. Through this program, participants engage in direct and ethical partnership and collaboration with communities to learn and practice design-and-arts-based programming and actions that activate community goals and facilitate experiential learning and purpose-driven research.
Mission
The Design and Arts Corps partners with communities to place designers, artists, scholars and educators in public life and prepares students to use their creative capacities to advance culture, strengthen democracy and imaginatively address today’s most pressing challenges.
Vision
Communities, designers and artists working together to make the world a better place
Values
- Leverage the creative and scholarly resources of the university to build assets in, with and for communities of location, spirit, experience or tradition.
- Prepare students to engage ethically and thoughtfully in our multiple communities.
- Honor diversity and pluralistic ways of knowing and engaging in the world.
- Practice honesty, transparency and reciprocity in our community partnerships and arts/design actions.
- Use participatory democratic processes to build and participate in public spaces of community and collaboration.
- Support risk-taking, experimentation and the possibility of failure to inspire innovation and engaged learning.
- Evaluate and assess in order to grow stronger.
View the Principles of Design and Arts Corps Projects
Our work
Curriculum-building
Design and Arts Corps is currently focused on curriculum-building. We are building a competency-based curriculum that uses micro-credentialing. This means that Design and Arts Corps learning is scaffolded into multiple modules offered in hybrid online/in-person learning experiences. The intended audience is Herberger Institute students, but we are welcoming partners outside of ASU to use the modules to support community-engaged learning. Each module is self-contained, and also scaffolds with other modules. The modules are currently hosted on Canvas, which is Arizona State University’s online learning platform.
All students who participate in Design and Arts Corps first begin with the Foundation Modules, which were piloted with students, staff, faculty and community partners.
Project spotlight
Goodmans Interior Structures, Spring 2019: Building community service
Two student resident dance artists—Maggie Waller and Justin Villalobos—focus on small weekly activities (delivered asynchronously and uploaded to a shared space and/or a physical space for the warehouse team), plus a workshop per team which builds to a cumulative performance experience centered around Goodmans’ community-service mission, people’s roles as community-engaged volunteers within (and across) the organization, and the importance and value of each and every employee.
Explore the foundation modules
Each module is about 90 minutes long and introduces content through a collaging of storytelling, reflective practice, skill-building exercises and mini-lectures that offer context, examples and connections to the real practices of people. There is a multiplicity of voices and experiences in each of the modules, and many community partners, students, artists, designers, staff, faculty and guests have been a part of contributing to and sharing expertise in the curriculum. By August of 2020, there will be 32 Design and Arts Corps modules online.
Self-enroll:
Who's involved
Director
Staff
Inaugural Design and Arts Corps fellows
Theory of Change
Most design and arts move from process to product in a linear way.
The Design and Arts Corps wraps process and product into a continuous cycle while adding participatory publics. Community engages in each part of the creative cycle and together we collectively leverage design and/or the arts to build value in specific ways.
Partners and projects
Apache Junction, Spring 2018: Positively Ghostly
Apache Junction, Spring 2018: Positively Ghostly
As a part of the “Positively Apache Junction” partnership, Project Cities (a university-community partnership program housed in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability) connected with our Design and Arts Corps graduate-level course in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre. The theatre artists and scholars drew on their abilities as storytellers, researchers and artists to highlight Apache Junction’s cultural vitality and to strengthen social cohesion. Inspired by the idea of “lost treasure,” the artists (including youth participants from the City’s Youth Advisory Council) built performance pieces highlighting Apache Junction’s historical context, unique legacies and the deep relationship residents have to the Superstition Mountains. They built a site-specific public performance piece held at Flatiron Park in the heart of downtown.
City of Tempe, Fall 2017, Spring 2018: Programming for city parks
City of Tempe, Fall 2017, Spring 2018: Programming for city parks
Part one: Teams of graduate students studying visual design communication in The Design School work with city of Tempe staff and local residents to imagine programming for city parks.
Biodesign Institute at ASU, Spring 2017: Science Exposed
Interested in partnering with us? Propose a partnership
