ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how a historic cooperative education setting in Boston, Massachusetts, evolved into a departmental model for social design pedagogy that incorporates strategies for evaluating experiential learning in design education. The model consists of four elements: civic engagement and professional practice partnerships, reflective assessment milestones, applied learning curricula, and support for career growth in public interest design. Utilizing a flexible approach that synthesizes alternative and mainstream work-based learning settings, the institutional paradigm demonstrates how public interest design is interwoven through interdisciplinary design curricula to better align architectural education with ongoing changes in the fabric of societies worldwide.