D-Lab: Design
MIT's D-Lab: Design teaches design, experimentation, and prototyping for problems faced by underserved communities, with emphasis on the constraints of designing for developing countries. Multidisciplinary student teams take on semester-long projects developed with community partners, field practitioners, and outside experts, often continuing work started in the companion course D-Lab I: Development. Topics include designing for affordability, designing for manufacture, sustainability, and methods for working effectively with community partners and end users. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include the syllabus, project briefs, and assignment structure used in the actual MIT class, run through the Edgerton Center and Mechanical Engineering department. The course is free to access with no certificate offered, in keeping with MIT OpenCourseWare's standard model of publishing real course materials rather than a repackaged lecture series.