Design
As our world and cultures undergo radical transformations, the role of design is expanding and evolving. The professional design world—whether in business, the arts, the nonprofit realm, or even government—increasingly values broad-based, transdisciplinary design knowledge complemented by individual virtuosity.
New styles and methods emerge from young designers who operate on the edge between play and transgression. Values such as sustainability and social justice that were yesterday’s extremes have become fundamental. The Graduate Program in Design prepares students to enter the design professions with dynamic skills, confidence, and well-tuned strategic thinking.
The program offers concentrations in communication design, industrial design, and interaction design. All students earning their MFA Design degree take core courses in design history, theory and criticism, research, materials and processes, and strategy and entrepreneurship.
All are invited to engage in advanced coursework in any of the three concentrations. Topic studios explore transdisciplinary mixes in collaborative and individual contexts. The curriculum culminates with an individual thesis project.
The program is committed to helping students develop personal voice and agency; it is also dedicated to collaborative practice and community engagement. Through studios, seminars, and special projects, it creates opportunities for students to engage with diverse design cultures around the world, taking advantage of San Francisco’s unique position in relation to the Pacific Rim and the Americas.
Through guest lectures, courses, and critiques, students meet and collaborate with worldclass thinkers and makers from many realms—not just design but also history, philosophy, business, government, science, and futurism. Guided by nationally and internationally renowned faculty members, the program offers both a strong studio apprenticeship and opportunities to explore unconventional avenues of expression.
The program opened new studios in fall 2007 with individual workspaces equipped with wireless ethernet, dedicated project rooms for studio courses and thesis work, gallery space, and resource collections. The new studios utilize sustainable methods and green materials, providing a space for creativity that is both technologically rich and environmentally responsible.
The college also has cutting-edge video editing equipment, computers, printers, and plotters. Projection rooms enable students to show digital work and screen video.
The field continues to break out of the traditional frames of designing objects and messages and move toward designing change—through transmedia systems, cultural interventions, and meaningful solutions in new spaces.
Program Chair Brenda Laurel observes, “As boundaries between disciplines blur, new forms and methods take shape. Tomorrow’s designers will work in a landscape that is both broader and stranger than that of today, and we must be ready to embrace greater opportunity and leadership in shaping the future of culture in radical ways. We are not decorationists. We are not kidding, although we are having fun.
“We are the wellspring of popular culture,” Laurel continues. “We are stepping up to the challenge. We believe that a great education can transform a cultural tagger into a sophisticated design interventionist. We believe that the future of design is the future of culture.”