Students
Students come to the Parsons MS SDM program from all over the world. Their experience combines studios, seminars, networking, events, symposia, and more. This page will inform you about student projects like First Year Studio and Second Year Studio, student resources, and other opportunities.
Walk Her Path
Walk Her Path is an interactive facilitation device to engage critically with the diverse experiences of Domestic Abuse and make visible the additional barriers faced by excluded groups. It aims to assist service providers and policy makers identify changes needed to take an intersectional approach that responds to the needs of all women, especially the most disadvantaged. Co-designed with researchers working on Violence Against Women and the NGO Amina MWRC. Designer: Monica Gomez Barboza RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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Diseño y Diáspora Podcast
“Diseño y diáspora” is the top international podcast on social design, with 600 episodes (primarily in Spanish). Reaching 6,000 monthly listeners, it highlights Global South perspectives and emerging practices like Future, Service, and Policy Design. Featured in 60+ university curricula, it bridges research and practice, interviewing 600+ global experts. Ranked #1 in Spanish-speaking countries, it amplifies underrepresented voices in health, migration, and education. Notable episodes, like Arturo Escobar’s, attract thousands. Designer: Mariana Salgado RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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Care Link
Carelink is a framework that harnesses the data management capabilities of artificial intelligence to bridge gaps in breast cancer patient care. Through qualitative research, we examine patient experiences, identify key stakeholders, and explore how AI can enhance care. The fragmented healthcare systems and overwhelming medical jargon leads to confusion and stress. To address this, we propose a centralized, user-friendly framework that simplifies medical data, consolidating information from various providers. Integrating AI, our design enhances clarity, emotional support, and ethical data management, building a more patient-centered, proactive approach to breast cancer care. Designer: Vibha Tourani, Kareena Vaswani,Prajakta Gholap …
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Threshold: A Call For Action
If Manual scavenging, banned in India since 1993, persists due to caste discrimination, poverty, neglect, and weak enforcement. Lack of data and open dialogue hides the scale of the problem. Threshold, an atypical publication, addresses these realities through Vocalization (stories), Perceptions (facts), and Actions (future steps). Combining narratives with data, it focuses on fostering empathy, challenging biases, and calls for dialogue, dignity, and collective responsibility toward ending this human rights crisis. Designer: Priya Chaudhary RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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Countering Rhetoric
This project implements a neoliberal notion of redistribution by proposing a new function for money that renders income tax redundant, directly redistributing wealth between people’s bank or savings accounts. In doing so, the system transforms trickle-down economics from rhetoric into reality. Friedrich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan would be proud. Designer: Dr. Austin Houldsworth RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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MobiliMate
Inclusive Smart Mobility is a digital platform designed to empower individuals with mobility impairments by breaking barriers of ableism and promoting equality. Built with user-centered design, it offers interactive maps, real-time navigation, accessible parking reservations, and community-driven insights. By enabling independent mobility, social participation, and informed decision-making, this platform fosters inclusion, enhances mental well-being, and redefines accessible travel for local and international destinations, turning mobility into freedom. Designer: Hoda Solati and Shima Solati RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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Bringing The Bread Home
Bread Economics draws parallels between building a thriving economy and baking sourdough bread. Using flour and water as metaphors for labor and capital, we explore how Adam Smith’s free-market economy can shift through invisible forces and interventions. Inspired by J.K. Gibson-Graham’s alternative economic theories, we reimagine economies as living systems, like sourdough starters, that thrive through continual care, sustainable practices, and more balanced approaches to markets, enterprises, and labor. Designer: Maryam Ashraf, Nakshi Shah, Vidhi Shah, Youngjun Shin RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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From Stories to Systems: A Participatory Design Intervention for Student Wellbeing in Under-Resourced China
This project explores participatory storytelling as a tool to reshape student well-being within the regimented K-12 education system in China. Responding to rising mental health challenges, it critiques how schools often equate adapting to rigid structures with well-being. Collaborating with a middle school in Guigang, the project developed a four-component framework to amplify student voices. It offers a replicable model to surface student stories as a bridge between lived experience and systemic action in constrained educational environments, reframing the narrative around student well-being. Designer: Polly Xu and Xuanxuan Huang RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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But They Built Roads
But they built roads…” is often used to justify colonialism, suggesting its infrastructure benefited colonies or excusing its violence. This project challenges that myth by analyzing the economic legacy of colonial transport networks in Africa through a slime mold simulation model. The findings reveal how colonial railroads, built for extraction not connection, still constrain African economies—highlighting the need for indigenous infrastructure and critical reassessment of inherited colonial systems. Designer: Mohamed Berrada RETURN TO GOOD INTERVENTIONS ’25 EXHIBITION
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MS SDM Panel Discussion
Be comfortable being uncomfortable: Reflections from the MS SDM Peer-to-Peer Panel Starting a new academic year invites fresh questions about what strategic design looks like in practice. We opened the semester with a Peer-to-Peer Panel designed to meet those questions head on, pairing an opening conversation with Professor Edward Cardimona with a student panel that traced real paths through the first year of MS Strategic Design and Management. The brief for the session was simple, be specific, be honest, and share what actually helped. What emerged was a clear through line, growth follows discomfort, and strategic design is a practice…
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