The Design Studies Thesis Prize is given annually for the best thesis by a Master in Design Studies student. Often, the Thesis Prize recognizes distinct methodologies of design research and is awarded to multiple students for separate projects.

2023
Alaa Suliman Eltayeb Mohamed Hamid, MDes Art, Design, and the Public Domain
“Ghostopia – Interrogating Colonial Legacies and A Manifesto for the Mondernized Nile”

2022
Allison Hyatt, MDes Energy and Environment
“Priorities in Building Decarbonization: Accounting for Total Carbon and the Time Value of Carbon in Cost-Benefit Analyses of Residential Retrofits”
Anny Li, MDes History and Philosophy of Design and Media
“The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984”
Nicole Piepenbrink, MDes Critical Conservation
“Here Lies Darby Vassall: Rendering the Obscured and Concealed History of Slavery at Christ Church Cambridge”

2021
Juan David Grisales, MDes Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
“From Humboldt to Caldas: Environmental Liberations through Tropical Altitudes”
Proey Liao, MDes History and Philosophy of Design and Media
“An Attempt to Approach a Void: Georges Perec, Cause commune, and the Infraordinary”

2020
Angela Mayrina, MDes Art, Design, and the Public Domain
“A Guidebook to an Empty Land: Kalimantan and the Shadows of the Capital”
Karan Saharya, MDes Critical Conservation
“In the Name of Heritage: Conservation as an Agent of Differential Development, Spatial Cleansing, and Social Exclusion in Mehrauli, Delhi”

2019
Isaac Dov Kornblatt-Stier, MDes Critical Conservation
“Architecture for a New World: Louis Kahn and Philadelphia”
Malinda Seu, MDes Art, Design, and the Public Domain
“Cyberfeminism Catalog 1990–2020”
Maggie Tsang, MDes Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
“Lines in The Sand: Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands”

2018
Jiabao Li, MDes Technology
“TransVision: Exploring the State of the Visual Field”
Enrique Aureng Silva Estrada, MDes Critical Conservation
“Critical intervention: the liminality of earthquakes, fragments, and palimpsests as alternatives to preservation in Mexico”

2017
Gabriel Munoz Moreno and Santiago Serna Gonzalez, MDes Energy and Environments
“Sovereignty on Stilts: Drawing a Genealogy of Extra-Territorial Urbanization along the Mudflats of the Tropical Belt”