The Incubator: MIT DesignX Steers Architecture Students Toward Startups

Now in its second year of operation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) DesignX accelerator is an amped-up incubator that provides 24/7 workspace, mentorship, $15,000 in equity-free seed funding, and a business-focused curriculum for promising startups in the built space. “DesignX asks students to identify opportunities and problems that exist—or even more importantly, that will soon exist—in the realm of cities, design, development, art, and more,” says executive director Gilad Rosenzweig. “We want them to develop solutions—either products, services, or platforms—that can scale and make a large impact.”

Teams are admitted into the accelerator via a pitch competition open to the public. Each startup is required to have at least one member from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SAP), which encompasses students in design, real estate, and the avant-garde Media Lab. Successful teams are sponsored for one calendar year during which they go through two SAP courses; a boot camp that focuses on team organization, team building, legal issues, business planning, customer identification, and selecting a beachhead market; and a course to develop user personas, a value proposition, and a business model. The work typically bridges the students’ graduation and entrance into the professional community.

The eight teams comprising the DesignX 2017 cohort ventured into affordable housing, virtual reality, sewage, spatial computation, real estate development, and other markets. Ten new teams are on deck for DesignX’s tutelage this year; focus areas include sleep research, indoor agriculture, and disaster preparedness.

A central tenet of DesignX is that designers need to incorporate business thinking into their work. The architecture graduate students find themselves in the unfamiliar position of competing for startup seed money. “Even two years ago, this was considered only the realm of computer science and business graduates,” Rosenzweig notes.

The studio component is how the DesignX experience builds on the traditional structure of architectural education. However, Rosenzweig says, “the next generation of architects needs the skills of a design, technology, and business entrepreneur” to take on the dramatic changes in cities, climates, and demographics expected this century. His partner in DesignX, faculty director Dennis Frenchman, believes that the specific design strategies used in studio may hold the key: “What do you do when you don’t have enough information? You move ahead.”