From the Dean
Find out what it means to live a life of design by exploring our website.
Your visit to this website is a first step in crafting your education and career. That education and career will have a big impact on your life. It will shape how you think, who you meet, how you spend your time, where you live. It will be deeply rewarding and equally challenging. It will require the best you have to offer and enrich your life and the lives of those you serve.
The college is here to help you begin your journey in the design life. Our highly ranked programs not only teach professional excellence, but also help you learn important life skills, such as teamwork, collaboration, creative inquiry, crafting and making, and research. In short, you will learn to balance intuition with evidence as you design solutions to the confounding challenges we face.
We offer degrees in Architecture, Graphic & Experience Design, Industrial Design, Media Arts, Design and Technology, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and Design Studies and have focused applications in the built environment, product design, textile and fiber design, user experience, animation and multimedia, as well as creative practice through the exploration of mediums, composition, and storytelling. All ideas start with design thinking, which is a process that takes a human-centered approach to problem-solving.
No matter what degree program you choose, our faculty and staff are here to support you and provide a safe place for you to experiment, learn from mistakes, and begin your life in design.
So once again, welcome and here’s to great design!
Mark Elison Hoversten, PhD, FASLA, FCELA, AICP, Assoc. AIA
Our Strategic Plan
📰 🌊 Memorializing Flooding: How a Chance Collaboration Led to a Landmark Public Art Project
In the world of design and public art, serendipity often plays a pivotal role.
This was certainly the case for a group of designers and artists who, after initially crossing paths in the College of Design, found themselves working together years later on a significant public art project in Raleigh.
Alumni William H. Dodge [M.Arch. ‘12] and Lincoln Hancock [MGD ‘10] were selected for an opportunity to design a display about the floodplain at Crabtree Creek. The resulting award-winning project, “Alluvial Decoder,” tells the story of fifty years of flooding at the site.
This project, which began as an educational initiative, ultimately evolved into a large-scale installation that engages the community on multiple levels.
Read the full story about the collaboration in our bio!
📸 Photo credits: Jordan Gray (1 and 5), Keith Isaacs (2 and 4), Negin Naseri (3)
![📰 🌊 Memorializing Flooding: How a Chance Collaboration Led to a Landmark Public Art Project
In the world of design and public art, serendipity often plays a pivotal role.
This was certainly the case for a group of designers and artists who, after initially crossing paths in the College of Design, found themselves working together years later on a significant public art project in Raleigh.
Alumni William H. Dodge [M.Arch. ‘12] and Lincoln Hancock [MGD ‘10] were selected for an opportunity to design a display about the floodplain at Crabtree Creek. The resulting award-winning project, “Alluvial Decoder,” tells the story of fifty years of flooding at the site.
This project, which began as an educational initiative, ultimately evolved into a large-scale installation that engages the community on multiple levels.
Read the full story about the collaboration in our bio!
📸 Photo credits: Jordan Gray (1 and 5), Keith Isaacs (2 and 4), Negin Naseri (3)](https://design.ncsu.edu/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
We draw. We design. We draw some more. ✍️🐺
The Brian Shawcroft Prize is awarded every year to an architecture student nominated by a faculty member for their excellent hand-drawing skills. This year marks the 30th year of the competition.
Four students were awarded prizes for their work. Submissions are judged based on students’ use of hand drawing skills in the categories of the design process, documentation and analysis, and presentation.
This year, Vallery Gore [B.Arch] was awarded first prize and senior Elizabeth Elder claimed second. Caroline Coyle [B.Arch] and Debashri Kedar [M.Arch] both tied for third. Maggie Overton was awarded an honorable mention.
See the award-winning work in our bio!
Fold it, twist it, cut it, stitch it, glue it, wear it. Welcome to Constructing Relationships – the first step to great design @ncstate.💡✂️📄
This exhibition showcases the first design project freshmen tackle when joining the College of Design. Students take a subject matter that they have intimately known for their entire life: their body and their relationships with the people around them, and they make them the sites of design interventions.
Students observe and document these “sites” with intent and purpose, creating a new and deeper understanding of otherwise familiar subjects.
Methods of abstraction and translation are integral to the design process, giving students the ability to take in familiar objects, situations, and contexts and output novel and poignant design interventions.
In this assignment students create a wearable/inhabitable structure that examines how we relate to one another. The primary material of construction must be paper. The pieces should raise the viewer’s awareness of interpersonal relationships in profound and nuanced ways.
How students choose to highlight concepts on connection/ interaction/similarity vs difference/ interdependence depends a great deal on what aspects they deem important and what they would like to communicate to you, their audience.
To conceive, develop, and materialize this project students have worked in groups of 2-3 over 4 1/2 weeks. Their concepts grew from the unique attributes of their group and their relationships, the context they find themselves in (i.e. joining a new community here at the College of Design in the midst of a society-wide loneliness epidemic), and their material research into paper.
Across this project students worked iteratively and non-linearly, exploring a variety of strategies that are commonly utilized in the design process.
Be sure to check out the exhibition in Brooks Hall whenever you’re on campus to get the full experience!
