Design for Social Entrepreneurship

About this class:

DeSE is focused on creating innovative new materials from rice straw, bagasse, sugarcane waste and rice hulls as a way to help EARTH University in Costa Rica better use their agricultural waste materials. By upcycling these materials into potential products or base materials from which products can be made, we are turning "waste" into productive goods that benefit the university environmentally and economically.

Agricultural Waste Materials:

Rice Hull

Rice Straw

Sugarcane waste

Fine sugarcane waste (bagasse)

About me:

This will be my first real plunge into social entrepreneurship. I took the Babson-Olin-RISD Product Design and Development course last fall. While we examined a few case studies on business models of social entrepreneurship, we didn't get to learn about the actual ways in which people go about doing it.

I’m currently working on earning a HPSS (History, Philosophy, Social Sciences) concentration in Environmental Studies. It’s something I care deeply about. I have taken as many courses on sustainability as possible while at RISD and would like to encourage a student group on campus to work on RISD’s progress in that area.

I enjoy sketching and rendering concepts, especially digitally. I also really like using two-dimensional graphics to communicate ideas. I would like to work on building better problem-solving skills, as well as, creating better, sustained flows of communication and understanding within a group. I think it’s really important to work as a group, even though I sometimes feel objectives can be reached faster alone. Teams where everyone mutually works off of each other’s strengths can be great to work in.

I’m most interested in working with people and culture. I love learning new cultures and understanding different ways of life. I think differences are just as interesting as similarities, if not more so.

Although I don't have previous social entrepreneurial experience, I’m hoping that I will be able to design for a social or environmental cause in the future.