DSI Mapping Intro Questionnaire 2026

  • Where are you from? Where did you grow up, and where do you consider home now — if those are different places?
  • What do you do when you're not doing design? Hobbies, side pursuits, things you'd spend a whole Saturday on. Include anything you're quietly good at that never shows up on a résumé — an instrument, a language, bike repair, fermenting things, competitive anything.
  • What's your most and least favorite food?
  • What are you curious about right now? Not necessarily related to your career — the thing you keep reading about or the last thing you got obsessed with for no practical reason.
  • You are exiled to a deserted island and can only take three non-essential items. What are they and why?
  • What's your design background? How you got here, what you've made, what you were doing before this program — including if the answer is "not design."
  • How do you like working? How do you like getting feedback: blunt, gentle, written, in conversation? Do you prefer working alone, in pairs, or in groups?
  • What tools do you use? Software, hardware, code, analog. List the ones you're fluent in, have poked at or want to learn.
  • What's a project or idea you love? Someone else's work — a product, a building, a campaign, a piece of software, an organization, a single chart. Tell us why it stuck with you.
  • Share a quote that inspires you
  • Where do you want to have an impact? What should change in the world? A place, an issue, a group of people, an industry — however you want to define it. Something you'd fix if you had the standing and the resources to fix it. Be as specific as you can.
  • What do you want to learn — in this class and beyond it? And separately: what are you expecting this class to be?
  • What's the biggest risk you've taken? A decision that could have gone badly and that you made anyway.
  • What are you most proud of? It doesn't have to be work, and it doesn't have to be impressive to anyone but you.
  • What's a skill you have that has nothing to do with design?
  • Who do you want to become?
  • What's a question you'd want the rest of the class to answer?
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.— Wayne Dyer