Master in Design Studies

The Design Studies program consists of four semesters of coursework with no studios. Applicants select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums—and undertake a core set of courses, including research methods and related topical courses. Following that domain foundation, each student then forges an individualized trajectory, leveraging course offerings across the GSD, as well as other schools and departments at Harvard. During their fourth semester, Design Studies students from all four domains come together to focus on collaborative advanced research in the form of open projects, in which their expertise finds application on a current issue.

Distinct from research in the sciences or humanities, design pedagogy involves highly interactive ways of thinking and learning that directly engage the technical, material, spatial, ecological, political, economic, and planetary dimensions of cultural life. Design Studies at the GSD challenges conventional ways of learning. The program offers an unrivaled depth, breadth and diversity of educational experience in the service of a broad range of enhanced academic, professional, and personal trajectories. From our rapidly warming environment and its mass extinctions and disfiguring social inequities, to colossal media systems and their manipulations of ideological economies, the decade of 2020 is charging ahead with multiplying planetary crises requiring novel responses and fundamentally new horizons of inquiry. The Master in Design Studies program prepares students to lead us into this new world.

The design disciplines are critical to engaging the most urgent and complex conditions of our time, and the Master in Design Studies program at the GSD prepares students to rise to the challenge, with training that is at once foundational, multitudinous, and incisive. The Master in Design Studies degree is open to applicants who possess, at minimum, an undergraduate degree. The program invites applicants with previous education or experience in the design disciplines, as well as applicants from a wide range of educational backgrounds, professional fields, and life experiences. Please explore further information about the program’s four domains, Design Studies degree requirements, and related courses and faculty. And please join us for our Open House events to learn more about each of the domains and possible trajectories through them.