In this presentation I will discuss aspects of design education at King Mongkut’s University of Technology’s School of Architecture and Design (SOA+D) in Bangkok, Thailand. In recent years, SOA+D has increasingly sidelined regionally and internationally hegemonic approaches to design education, in particular, the focus on the endless production of consumption, the relentless pursuit of market-satisfying innovation and the growing integration of design pedagogy within circuits of national and international capital accumulation. In place of these, SOA+D is experimenting with a range of socially and community orientated approaches to the teaching and learning of design. Central to these is the integration of teaching and learning with live socially engaged research and development projects. In these, significant aspects of learning are displaced from the abstractions of the classroom and (re-)located in open and equal conversations and practical collaborations between students, faculty and local communities. In our view, discussing this approach might contribute to increasingly necessary debates about ethically re-imagined approaches to design education and practice that are grounded in critical, empowering and egalitarian values rather than the endless pursuit of consumption-driven private-profits. I will discuss these issues in relation to a small set of case study projects in which students and faculty work within marginalized or underprivileged urban and rural communities in Thailand.