Master in Design Studies (MDes)

"Site and Shelter: Design for the ‘Whole Landscape’" by Charlotte Leib (MDes '19) — Recipient of “Best Paper on Housing” prize, awarded by Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

How do we prepare for challenges that no longer conform to the boundaries of disciplines? The Master in Design Studies (MDes) program challenges students to understand and influence the underlying processes shaping contemporary life. More

Areas of Concentration

Art, Design, and the Public Domain

The program in Art, Design, and the Public Domain seeks creative and ambitious individuals from all backgrounds with a keen interest in contemporary issues of urban, historical, aesthetic and technological culture, and with a predilection for intervention, exhibition and public work.
Critical Conservation

The MDes program in Critical Conservation extends beyond issues of age, history and aesthetics to offer a framework of theory and research tools encompassing social, political and cultural meaning.
Energy and Environment

The Energy and Environments concentration focuses on buildings and landscapes as both small and large-scale thermodynamic systems that aim to maximize energy intake, use, and feedback, achieving broad design and ecological impacts.
History and Philosophy of Design and Media

History and Philosophy of Design is a platform for scholarly inquiry into design in the disciplines of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture and in other aesthetic, spatial and technological practices.
Real Estate and the Built Environment

In the contemporary global economy, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design must confront the complex mechanisms of finance and economics. Real Estate and the Built Environment engages both by considering design and investment as integrally connected.
Risk and Resilience

The Risk & Resilience concentration sets out to support novel approaches to socio-spatial planning through design, and prepares students to identify, articulate and propose preemptive forms of practice.
Technology

Coupling an intensive critical and theoretical approach with practical, lab-based projects, the Technology track allows post-professional students to pursue a broad spectrum of inquiries, including design computation, digital fabrication, robotics, and the exploration of responsive environments.
Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology

MDes candidates in the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration pursue advanced studies in topics related to contemporary urbanism, landscape, geography, or territory within the broader contexts of the global, social and natural environment.

If rapidly changing climates, media systems, energy flows, material economies, and migratory populations are the emerging challenges of our time, then the design disciplines offer unique insight on how to navigate these complex, open-ended conditions. Distinct from research in the sciences or humanities, design pedagogy involves highly interactive ways of thinking and learning, through hands-on, cross-disciplinary, multimedia practices that directly engage the technical, material, spatial, ecological, political, economic, thermodynamic and planetary dimensions of cultural life. Seeking to empower the next generation of designers and urbanists, the program utilizes novel and alternative methodologies in a collaborative, immersive environment. Ultimately, MDes at GSD challenges conventional ways of learning—through field work, fabrication, collaboration and dissemination—in a range of labs, seminars, workshops, initiatives, publications, and ongoing projects whose scope and diversity are unmatched by any other design school in the world.

The program consists of three semesters of coursework. Students in each area undertake a core set of courses, followed by research methods and related topical courses, selected from offerings within the GSD or from the many other schools and departments at Harvard. Students may elect to complete the program in three semesters of coursework, or they may extend their research into a fourth semester by pursuing an MDes Thesis Project, conducted independently or in collaboration with their peers and GSD faculty.

Whether it is to establish a research agenda for an academic career, retool for design practice, or enter design from an adjacent discipline, the MDes program is a nimble and flexible program designed to amplify and accelerate the cultivation of novel approaches to design for this century. Please review further information on the program’s areas of concentration and outcome throughout the GSD website. And, if possible, please join us for our Open House events to learn more about each of the programs.

Program Director
K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory