ARC4500H F
Instructor: Steven Fong
Meeting Section: L0101
Monday, 6:00PM - 9:00PM

This graduate level course introduces students to entrepreneurship as a modality of design thinking and professional practice. The intention is to equip students with actionable skillsets by providing experience with the processes and procedures for executing projects.

The course consists of seminars delivered by faculty and invited guest speakers. Speakers are drawn from across a spectrum of disciplines and stakeholders allied with architecture. Past speakers have included business owners, developers, agency executives, CFO’s, lawyers and activists. The curriculum includes an introduction to business model development; branding and marketing; value proposition creation; prototyping; and presentation.

In each past iteration of this course, students have learned about entrepreneurship in relation to a specific opportunity. Previous themes of the course have included the economies of small-batch manufacturing; the effects of disruption; and anticipation of legalization. For 2022, in the context of a global slowdown and as we gain perspective on the halcyon 2010’s, we will focus on one of the traditional arenas in which  entrepreneurship operates through all economic cycles- urban commercial real estate development.

Our goal is to create a design-based, business-savvy cohort who self-identify as empowered changemakers. We hope for a future generation of entrepreneurs with the agency to address some of the pressing urban issues we face- social justice; climate change; housing insecurity.