THE RISD CENTER FOR DESIGN AND BUSINESS (CDB)

The Rhode Island School of Design’s Center for Design and Business (RISD-CDB) is a 10-year-old department within RISD that helps industry, educational institutions and government entities set up and manage collaborative design research projects with RISD students, faculty and alumni.

More and more businesses and institutions are discovering the strategic importance of design and its relationships to creativity and innovation. Inspired by this burgeoning interest in “design thinking,” The RISD Center for Design and Business is building a network of design innovators--including industry, students, faculty and other organizations--to explore how design can answer questions, solve problems and create opportunities in business and society.

The CDB guides our clients to explore, define and reveal the evolving opportunities inherent in their organizations. As a leader and developer of this network, the CDB helps our clients capture and retain the insights they have gained during their time at RISD so they can be used in an ongoing learning process within their own environments.   

Innovations. New ideas. New markets. These are just some of the exciting results that industry leaders like Maytag, DuPont, NASA and others have achieved by collaborating with RISD students and faculty in various design research projects over the last 30 years. As many of our industry partners have found, these projects have often produced innovative, unexpected, solutions and new directions to design-related issues.

The Center for Design and Business works with industry to build collaborative research partnerships with RISD students, faculty and alumni--some of the best design thinkers in the world. We assist RISD’s industry partners to define, implement and manage the type of design research collaboration that best suits their specific needs.

These collaborations can range from in-classroom sponsored studios to longer-term research to freer-form custom collaborations. All of these have the same goal: Discovering new ways to explore and solve design challenges. They help our industry partners discover innovative ideas at the heart of their businesses.

When the design research project ends, the collaboration and relationship continues. The CDB keeps the process of design discovery alive with our partners by capturing, or documenting, it in ways that allow them to share the innovative process within their organizations and their clients. This knowledge base is available to all the CDB’s partners.   

The CDB’s network of sponsored projects, which includes our unique case-study database, is an invaluable resource for industry and remains the hub of our ever-expanding network of innovators.
For more information on how to collaborate with the RISD Center for Design and Business contact:

Bill Foulkes
Executive Director
Center for Design and Business
Rhode Island School of Design
169 Weybosset Street
Providence, RI 02902
401-454-6558
www.centerdesignbusiness.org