Design for Sustainable Communities is an engineering-focused course at UC Berkeley taught by Dr. Susan Amrose.
The course provides conceptual and hands-on experience developing sustainable and scalable solutions to alleviate poverty and address basic human needs. Students work on interdisciplinary teams and partner with an outside client working to achieve positive sustained impact in a resource constrained community. Students and their client define a design challenge currently facing the organization and each team commits to produce a set of deliverables that respond to the challenge. Hands-on work is complemented by mini-lectures and short workshops as well as case studies of ongoing projects. In the past, students have joined the course from a variety of backgrounds, including engineering, business, public policy, ERG, physics, architecture, and public health, among others.
Funding for Design for Sustainable Communities comes from the Blum Center for Developing Economies, with additional support from the UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The course provides conceptual and hands-on experience developing sustainable and scalable solutions to alleviate poverty and address basic human needs. Students work on interdisciplinary teams and partner with an outside client working to achieve positive sustained impact in a resource constrained community. Students and their client define a design challenge currently facing the organization and each team commits to produce a set of deliverables that respond to the challenge. Hands-on work is complemented by mini-lectures and short workshops as well as case studies of ongoing projects. In the past, students have joined the course from a variety of backgrounds, including engineering, business, public policy, ERG, physics, architecture, and public health, among others.
Funding for Design for Sustainable Communities comes from the Blum Center for Developing Economies, with additional support from the UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
