We help NGOs and non-profit organizations work more closely with their stakeholders using critical design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and strategic storytelling.

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, activists, and community stakeholders. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects through the Cornell’s Law School, Small Farms Program, and Department of Natural Resources, including:

• Black Farmer Fund: To reconceive wealth beyond financial and intellectual capital to include social capital and ancestral wisdom, can black farmers build wider community?

• Her Whole Truth: Survivors of violence are especially vulnerable to being punished with “a living death sentence”: can sensitive, holistic storytelling help commute their sentences?

• Health Access Connect: A small successful non-profit, HAC has for years used “boda-boda” or motorcycle taxis to help Ugandans access low-cost healthcare: how to share their experience as the staff helps scale up their work across Africa? 

• Black Belt Citizens Fight for Health and Justice: The “Black Belt” region across Alabama and other states has suffered social, economic, and environmental injustices that has affected the lives of generations: can their stories help bring justice?  

• DEMO: Design & Engaged Media Organization: A start-up student organization seeks members to form an Engineering Project Team focused on helping communities use strategic storytelling and critical design thinking.

Transmedia knowledge includes essays, PechaKucha, info comics, videos, and museum exhibitions. Critical design teams will help researchers and community organizations develop their projects using critical design thinking and strategic storytelling to share their knowledge and resources with multiple stakeholders. 

Consulting on partners’ ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO’s Design Thinking  and Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as tactical media and organizational developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and artist activism overlap and all focus on engaging multiple stakeholders. Our partners’ interests include issues of local and international land rights, rights of the incarcerated and dispossessed, economic development for minorities in New York State, and social justice. 

This course serves Cornell’s long-standing mission of public engagement, as embodied in Cornell Cooperative Extension, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Engaged Cornell, and the Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative. 

Course Process and Projects

Over the semester, Cornell students develop design, media, and community engagement skills through seminar, lab, studio, and field activities: conceptualizing projects, learning technical skills, creating media, and consulting with school students and educators. 

Critical design teams will work with their partners, using design thinking to share their knowledge of transmedia forms, to learn from them about project-based learning, and to reflect together to generate insights and recommendations regarding the viability and scaleability of civic storytelling. 

Teams will complete three iterative projects, focusing on the theory and practice of design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and strategic storytelling while reporting on their work with partners. Over the semester, students will prototype and reflect on their design work through reports, information comics, PechaKuchas, and a portfolio website. 

Traditional and emerging scholarly media genres often seek to inform, enlighten, convince, persuade, and sometimes entertain and move readers. We will learn critical and creative skills for sharing research, consulting on community projects, and creating impact with different audiences, including specialists, community members, and the general public.

Community Engagement

ENGL 4705/INFO 4940 serves Cornell’s long-standing mission of community engagement, as embodied in the Department of English, the Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative, Engaged Cornell, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and the Bronfrenbrenner Center for Translational Research.  You can find out more about the course and the Civic Storytelling project through the Engaged Showcase and this Cornell Chronicle story.

Kaplan Fellowship

In June 2020, the Cornell Public Service Center awarded the Civic Storytelling Project one of two Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowships. Many thanks to the educators and students who made this project possible, as well as to the PSC and the Kaplan Family. Thanks also to the Office of Engagement Initiatives for an Engaged Opportunity Grant and long-term advice and guidance.

ENGL 4705/INFO 4940

Professor: Jon McKenzie
Students: Hadar Boker, Claire Choi, Jared Hornsberry, Claire Patzner, Anika Potluri, James Spaedt, Gayatri Sriram, Sandy Xia, Yuxuan Chen, Buma Gana, Emily Jacobsson , Weilun Jiang , Lorelei Meidenbauer, Mac Naggar, Sahana Halugudde Shridhar, Evan Y Tong, Michael Li Schwartz, Stella Shi, Soyee Park