MDes Program Domains

Students examining handing photos in an exhibition.

Design necessarily engages the most urgent and complex conditions of our time, and the Master in Design Studies program empowers students to address those conditions head on. The program is aimed at those who want to pair their design knowledge with tools to enable careers in public service, academia, NGOs, innovative ventures, as well as developing specific expertise for design practice. Applicants select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums. Design Studies at the GSD challenges conventional ways of learning, and achieves a scope and level of diversity that are unmatched by any other design school in the world. 

Program Domains

  • Ecologies

    Ecologies is the study of environmental and infrastructural systems and dynamics as they inform and interact with people, cities, and regions across a range of scales. Studies and research will explore the impacts of these interactions on climate, health, equity, culture, economics, politics, and the resultant shape of buildings, landscapes, and metropolitan areas.

  • Mediums

    One of the remarkable developments in contemporary culture is the convergence of practices that once unambiguously belonged to either creative design or technological experimentation and empiricism, but that today share methods, means, and concerns, in different mediums.

  • Narratives

    Narrative does not represent history “as it really happened,” nor reveal to us the “true” meaning of culture. Narrative, rather, constructs the figures, both literary and spatial, that open cultures to our attention as sites of projection, dispute, and transformation.

  • Publics

    Publics is the study of human groups and their roles, interactions, and experiences within the built and natural environment. This Domain within the MDes program sets out to support novel approaches to socio-spatial design, planning, and advocacy.

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