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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 ArchitectureGraphic & Experience DesignIndustrial DesignMedia Arts, Design and TechnologyLandscape 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 hereโ€™s to great design!

Mark Elison Hoversten, PhD, FASLA, FCELA, AICP, Assoc. AIA

Our Strategic Plan

The College of Design educates students to become innovators and thought leaders while creating a community for designers, researchers, scholars and practitioners. Our vision is to pursue excellence in design education, scholarship and engagement to empower a more just, healthy, resilient, flourishing and sustainable future.

College of Design Strategic Plan web

Be a part of the Designlife

We’re always up to something – and it’s often amazing. Follow us on instagram to see how we’re living the Designlife.

Follow us on Instagram
Fold it, twist it, cut it, stitch it, glue it, wear it. Welcome to Constructing Relationships - the first step to great design @ncstate.๐Ÿ’กโœ‚๏ธ๐Ÿ“„

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 โ€œsitesโ€ 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 viewerโ€™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 youโ€™re on campus to get the full experience!
Designers arenโ€™t *that* scary. Right? 
Happy Halloween! ๐Ÿˆโ€โฌ›๐ŸŽƒ๐Ÿ•ฏ๏ธ
We canโ€™t wait to see all the new faces coming to learn about our undergrad programs during open house this weekend! โค๏ธ๐Ÿบ

๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Let us know in the comments what program youโ€™re most excited to learn about!
May your fall break be as peaceful as the sunrise through the windows of your favorite studio ๐ŸŒ