Degree candidates must successfully complete 60 credits, including all required courses, with a cumulative grade point average of 3.0. A residency of two academic years is required.

The first-year experience is grounded in project-based work—both through semester-long courses and shorter studio intensives—complemented by provocative speakers and inspiring field trips. The second year focuses on business structures, environmental stewardship, design metrics, strategy, entrepreneurship and delight. The yearlong thesis project generates change-making, multidisciplinary work around a chosen field of inquiry, resulting in a comprehensive set, documentation, robust fluencies and a powerful professional network of advisors ready to help in the move toward professional practice.

The program ends with a public celebration around the power of design.

First Year

Fall

Systems, Scale, and Consequence
This course traces the life of designed products and services through the systems that make them possible, valuable and meaningful. It examines some fundamental questions: What obligations must be addressed when conceiving the scale systems of designed objects? What constraints does working at scale put on the designer? How does conceiving these consequences change how we design? This course encourages collaboration to conceive, explore and articulate the implications of designed products and services—the limits, possibilities and opportunities that shape a professional designer's practice and career.

Making Studio
Making is at the heart of product design. Serving as an introduction to the re-emerging fields of making, hacking, modding and do-it-yourself (DIY), this course delves into techniques, tools and resources for expanding what we can make ourselves. We combine traditional and novel techniques and materials in electronics, computation, crafts, fabrication, entrepreneurship and more, moving beyond ideation and concepting to create fully functional products of design. Students will have opportunities for online exposure and access to a network of innovators, hackers, hobbyists and crafters producing DIY projects. Hands-on skill workshops in electronics and crafts are complemented with field trips, discussions and critiques. 

Framing User Experiences
Products are no longer simply products; they live within complex business and technological ecosystems. To fully understand the user experience, designers must be highly flexible communicators, facilitators, mediators and thinkers. Whether designing a dialysis machine, a mobile phone app, or a water filtration system for the developing world, design is as much about framing user experiences as it is about the creation of new artifacts. This course focuses on the relationships between objects and their contexts, how to identify human behaviors and needs and how those behaviors and needs converge to create user experiences. 

Interaction Design Fundamentals
The interaction between a product and its user is the foundation of good design. New technologies continue to create seemingly endless possibilities for interaction—qualities of light, movement and other sophisticated responses to meet the imagination of designers. In this course, students explore theories of interaction design as they apply to both physical and virtual systems. We investigate the rich relationships among people, objects and information through the lens of interaction design. A combination of lecture and hands-on studio exercises probe critical parts of the design process and human behavior, while addressing specific methods for human-centered concept exploration and the development of product behaviors. 

Studio Intensives I: Affirming Artifacts, Deconstruction and Reconstruction, Interaction Intervention
Studio Intensives I serves to immerse students into the power of design through the process of making. Affirming Artifacts investigates how intention can inform execution. In Deconstruction and Reconstruction, we abstract the elements of products and services into components that can be reshaped and reconceived. Interaction Intervention addresses how the physical object can transform human relationships. These 5-week classes supplement the full-semester courses through varied approaches and prolific output. 

Two-Dimensional Presentation: Drawing Design and Graphics Identity
A crucial skill of the designer is the ability to explore and communicate processes and ideas quickly through two-dimensional representation. In Drawing Design, we cultivate multiple drawing techniques on paper and on electronic drawing tablets, helping students "think out loud" in live, two-dimensional space. In Graphics and Identity, we acknowledge that the products of design are increasingly experienced through their graphic representation. Here students will explore the fundamental principles of graphic and identity design, building identities and portfolio templates. 

Studio Visits & Lecture Series
Throughout the program, students visit design sites and studios of several innovative and ambitious design makers in the New York City area. Curated by Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov, co-founders of Sight Unseen, students get a visceral immersion into the lives and spaces of outstanding local creatives. Visits will be followed by hosted discussions. Alternating weeks with the studio visits is an ongoing lecture series, hosting some of the most creative minds in the world of design. Lectures are followed by Q&A sessions and informal networking receptions. 

Spring

Design Research and Integration
Design, its related tools and its research methods have become essential components for companies that seek disruptive change and true innovation, and have found that old models lead only to incremental solutions. This course will examine early phases of the innovation process with an emphasis on design research methods—from framing an initial challenge to inspiration, insight, synthesis, idea and concept. We address the key transitions between articulating needs and designing solutions for those needs. Working in teams on a shared challenge, students will create designs that convert creative ideas into action and products grounded in human-centered research. 

Designing for Sustainability and Resilience
Many product designers feel trapped in siloed roles, supporting the production of wasteful, disposable and toxic materials. Through the theme of food, this course examines relationships, systems and infrastructures connecting us to local and global sustainability: growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, distributing, selling, preserving, cooking, eating and disposing of the waste related to food—the elements that shape many aspects of our lives and relate directly to our planet's future. Working with sustainability experts and change makers (including scientists, engineers, farmers and other specialists), students create designs that address one of the most fundamental aspects of life. Sessions take place at various locations throughout New York City and its surrounding region, as living laboratories for design projects. 

Lenses of Design Enterprise
With a focus on reframing products of design through various filters—commercial, philanthropic, discursive, educational and otherwise—this studio course examines the reworking of designs in accordance with the context in which the products live. Students refract their projects through some of the hardest and most necessary design constraints (energy, carbon, behavior change, learning), rethink one or more of the design conditions that bind them and then propose ways to create novel enterprises. In addition to understanding new models for companies, leadership and organizational development, students explore skills for using design and entrepreneurial thinking to convert ambition into action. Students practice discussing and presenting design within a range of business, accounting, social and academic situations. 

Studio Intensives II: Material Futures, Design Experiments, Design Performance
Studio Intensives II introduces matter, participation and performance. Moving from materiality and science to politics and presentation, these classes help students place their products of design—and themselves—in powerful design contexts. In Material Futures, students convene at New York's Material ConneXion to investigate how intelligent material selection can improve product performance and reduce environmental impact. In Design Experiments, students develop methods and frameworks to experiment with new scientific ideas, emerging technologies and participatory platforms. Design Performance pushes the boundaries of presentation with innovative and performance-based approaches to introducing design solutions to clients, consumers and other stakeholders.

Design Narratives: Video Storytelling, Histories and Point of View
In Storytelling, the basic principles of visual communication using techniques in contemporary filmmaking are covered. Working in teams on a tangible project, students will get hands-on experience in different stages of the whole storytelling process, including observation, ideation, script-writing, storyboarding, shooting and editing. Histories looks at the past 20 years of design history, focusing on some of the objects, personalities and forces that have come to define contemporary design practice and discourse. In Point of View, we develop competencies around point of view, a core building block of any successful design and any successful design career. The design provocation, "Why do we make the things we make?" bookends the course—asked once at the beginning and again at the end—with an eye toward demonstrating that point of view can sharpen both intent and result, and that students have learned its utility in informing the best design work. 

Studio Visits and Lecture Series
Throughout the program, students visit design sites and studios of several innovative and ambitious design makers in the New York City area. Curated by Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov, co-founders of Sight Unseen, students get a visceral immersion into the lives and spaces of outstanding local creatives. Visits will be followed by hosted discussions. Alternating weeks with the studio visits is an ongoing lecture series, hosting some of the most creative minds in the world of design. Lectures are followed by Q&A sessions and informal networking receptions.

Workshop: Design Interventions
In this weekend workshop, over the course of 72 hours, students will participate in a full-immersion creative urban experience that challenges designers to "stop, drop and design." Through "on the street" research, all-night charrettes, clever material selections and guerrilla installations, students will collaboratively engage with New York City to execute social design responses that enlighten, disrupt, question and posit. The workshop will take place almost entirely outside of a traditional studio environment. Intervention projects may range from graphic installations to publicly placed objects, spatial editing and more.

Second Year

Fall

Thesis I
Thesis I is an opportunity to explore design-thinking, design-making, and design-doing that is ambitious in scope, innovative in approach and worthwhile in enterprise. Each student chooses an area of investigation and then begins rapid design-making exercises to create a body of design work, research, ideation and presentation materials. Research and exploration help to surface the design opportunities that resonate most powerfully with a point of view, the urgencies of design needs, the scale of potential solutions and the richness of design endeavor. Since theses tend to be multilayered, students are encouraged to execute design work on a continuum of enterprise—from design gestures and discursive design concepts through primary and secondary research to prototypes, systems and business models.

Design Delight
This course celebrates the joy of design. While design is traditionally seen as a problem-solving discipline, there are incredible opportunities to introduce products and experiences into the world that find their genesis in other rationales. Through design making, interviews and research, students will play with stimulation, celebration, amplification, choreography, symbolism and emotion as tools that inform a new design ethos. We will challenge traditional needs-based design processes, and delve into celebration, heightened articulation and drama as new expressions of design. Through the lens of the emotional and the experiential, students will explore both the place of design within the world of the senses, and the role of the senses within the world of design.

Lifecycle and Flows
The hidden forces behind how consumer objects are made is the focus of this course. Systems thinking, lifecycle analysis and stakeholder management theory will all be used as frameworks for understanding the industrial process. We also examine the ecological, social and financial impact of a consumer product across the full product lifecycle. Critical analysis, business logic, design research and thing-making consciousness is addressed. Coursework follows the product manufacturing cycle from ideation to final end-of-life. Students document the lifecycle of a product and develop an alternate design scenario that radically improves it.

Dynamics of Strategy and Design
Strategy, like design, is about making difficult choices: what's essential, what's different and, perhaps most importantly, what to leave out. What are the right choices to make, and how do you get better at making them? This course hones the ability to understand and anticipate design consequences, and to deliberately influence them through strategic design choices. Students develop competency in strategic analysis, concepting and decision-making, and gain practice in articulating strategic arguments for their work. Ideas, tools and case studies are presented by guest lecturers (venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, corporate managers and leaders from technology start-ups) who will share their experiences in creating, launching and managing innovative businesses.

Workshop: Global Vectors for Development
Design can play a profoundly meaningful role in supporting global development, public health and quality of life. In this immersive weeklong workshop, we look at the shifting nature and models for global development and international aid, and their intersections with design and design thinking. These include public health, sustainable development and public policy. Examples may include the design of new products and systems for maternal health in a rural setting, appropriate products to set up schooling in an emergency refugee camp after a disaster and social enterprise ideas for communities in emerging markets that want to access Western markets. The key objective is to engage students in an overview of global development issues and practices in the context of design. 

Spring

Thesis II
The work undertaken in this course represents the culmination of the program and will embody the knowledge and strategies students have learned during the past two years. Thesis II culminates with a written thesis and a formal verbal and visual presentation by each Master of Fine Arts degree candidate.

Business Structures
This course examines the critical aspects of successful organizations, including the development of strategy and business models, business plans and pitches, intellectual property and entrepreneurship. Through an exploration of fundamental business issues at the beginning of the 21st century, students develop either a business plan for a new organization or a new business model and strategic plan for an existing organization. The result is a formal "pitch" presentation given to guest professionals and classmates.

Service Entreprenueurship
The services we engage with in today's world increasingly blur the line between the physical and the virtual, and a careful choreography is taking place in the background. Sometimes the process is so seamless that we often don't consider how marketing, user experience, information architecture, physical objects, interpersonal communications and physical spaces all come together to result in a great experience. This course looks at designing services that make designers and their customers happy. We explore the essential components of a service—from people and communication to interaction, artifacts and infrastructure—and delve into the methods of designing and delivering elegant service experiences. Case studies of various services are introduced (both successful and catastrophic), and students create their own service concept, launch strategy and presentation deck.

Product, Brand, and Experience
Products are increasingly seen as the embodiments of brands and consumer experiences, with product design playing a critical role in reflecting a brand's personality. In this course, students discover how product design, consumer experience and branding interrelate, and how addressing the needs of users and markets from different perspectives can provide a more holistic approach to the creation of designed objects. We work through a complete design process, defining an opportunity within a specified consumer space, performing research, developing insights and strategy, concepting and refining. Throughout the process, students concentrate on creating a cohesive and viable brand campaign, including final design, identity and packaging.

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