Design

We prepare students for the unknown

Design at CCA begins with a quest, and the designer’s role is to find the best path forward, whether they’re asked to imagine the future of music or replacing plastics with sustainable alternatives. This spirit of inquiry is at the heart of our discipline. As students learn to embrace new methods of thinking and making through hands-on investigations and real-world challenges, they continually add to their design toolkits. They develop, fine-tune, or reinvent a deep set of craft skills, along with the ability to conceptualize solutions that make the world more ethical, sustainable, and enjoyable. With an ever-shifting and exciting landscape before them, our graduates emerge from CCA as interdisciplinary makers ready to take on a range of roles that require visionary thinking and a passion for pushing and expanding the boundaries of design.

Meet the Dean of Design

Dean Helen Maria Nugent studied environmental art and design at the Glasgow School of Art. With a portfolio of design-driven public art projects, and encouragement from undergraduate faculty, Nugent decided to pursue a graduate degree in design. Afterward, her path led her to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she taught and founded the renowned Found Objects program. Nugent’s experience co-developing curricula that integrate multiple disciplines has shaped what it means to study design today at CCA.

In addition to her scholarly and academic endeavors, Nugent is the co-founder of HAELO Design with Ron Kirkpatrick. HAELO is an independent, research-oriented studio that pursues speculative and commercial design projects with a focus on furniture, objects, services, and exhibition design. The studio’s commercial and speculative design work has been presented at the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial, The Chicago Cultural Center, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, NeoCon, and Devening Projects + Editions.

Faculty are creative practitioners and design leaders

Our dedicated faculty create a vibrant studio culture that unites ideas and craft. The hands-on, digital, and hybrid tools we use in our studios impact the ways we investigate and create solutions. Faculty foster collaborative experiences that help students expand their analytical skills and their ability to practice artistry in design. Ethical, elegant, sustainable, and profound design solutions inspire our daily research, prototyping, and speculative work with students.

Faculty expertise intersects broad fields of practice, including game design, publishing, global branding, enterprise applications, fashion illustration, photography, mixed media sculpture, user experience design, consumer electronics, and motion graphics, among many others. Some faculty work for top companies like Apple, IDEO, Facebook, and Google, while others run their own design studios or consultancies. What they all have in common is their commitment to providing an exceptional design education at one of the most exciting art and design schools in the United States.

Watch and learn with us

Each semester, the Design Division hosts a powerful slate of thinkers and practitioners who expand our idea of what design is and what design can do. The Spring 2024 Design Lecture Series reflects CCA Design’s commitment to being a sanctuary for emerging voices and diverse practices.

• Typecraft: Handcrafted display typefaces from rich South Asian crafts
• Design is Not Just for Pretty Things
• Building a Thoughtful Life: Lessons from Slow Fashion
• Scott Shigeoka: Curiosity Is Your Superpower
• Designers in Dialogue: Pioneers on AI and IXD
• Chronicle Books: the Joy, Irreverence, and Craft of Publishing
• All Together: The Origin Story of 1% for the Planet and Patagonia

Go beyond prototyping to make real solutions

Our six undergraduate programs train students in conceptual exploration, which includes the ability to research materials and examine ideas through the lenses of history and present-day society and culture. You’ll learn to apply your discoveries in studios, where you’ll gain hands-on experience in traditional craft skills, such as woodworking and welding, as well as cutting-edge tools for digital weaving, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, and virtual reality. Students merge analytical and craftmaking skills during immersive study-abroad courses or sponsored studios, which help you establish networks and gain real-world know-how from diverse practitioners and professional designers.

Hone in-demand skill sets to ignite change

Today’s graduate design students are envisioning alternative futures, honing skills and strategy to evolve their profession. Our three graduate design programs enable you to chart your own course, build lifelong networks, and realize your potential as a dynamic agent of cultural, social, and ecological change.

Our groundbreaking, STEM-designated MBA in Design Strategy draws on the culture of creativity particular to an art and design school to prepare students to transform systems and organizations through human-centric design principles and generative, future-focused business leadership.

Featured partnership: Studio Forward

Sponsored by Google

Break down the walls between disciplines, and space opens up for radical collaboration and transformation. Our work becomes both sharper and more expansive.

This premise informs Studio Forward, a partnership between CCA and Google. Studio Forward deploys the power of design to rethink the future of digital belonging. Exploring identity and inclusion and reimagining collective experience in the digital landscape. Together, students, faculty, and industry experts enlist new approaches to design education and envision digital futures that are inclusive, desirable, and connected. A cohort of students will go on to intensive summer internships, where they will advance the work of the studio and ready it for public presentation.

Featured partnership: Designing for Trust

Sponsored by Oracle

Great products don’t just function well, they connect in meaningful ways to the human experience. When CCA and Oracle set out to develop a mutually beneficial partnership, they focused on the idea of common human truths—in this case, trust. In the Designing for Trust course, CCA senior interaction design students partnered with Oracle Design to think holistically about automation, smart machines, and the human implications of both from a customer-experience standpoint. As they focused on what it means to be a trustworthy designer, students brought the wonder, rigor, and optimism baked into CCA’s Interaction Design program to the halls of Oracle, where they were immersed in the real-world context of design in a leading global company.

Center for the Arts and Public Life

CCA’s commitment to the value of art and design for social good dates back more than a century to its origins in the Arts and Crafts Movement. With a focus on community partnerships that advance social responsibility and environmental sustainability, CCA’s Center for the Arts and Public Life fosters connections between students and innovative companies, community organizations, and manufacturers that serve the public good. From TBD* and Social Lab, student-run studios that use design to empower Bay Area nonprofits, to public symposia, prototyping and research studios, and the annual collegewide IMPACT Awards, in which students compete to win funding and mentorship to bring their impactful ideas to fruition, the Center for the Arts and Public Life connects the classroom and the world to the benefit of all.

Research Labs

Hybrid Lab

The Hybrid Lab is an incredible campus resource for hacking, tinkering, and prototyping. This interdisciplinary space for making centers on innovative technology and advanced digital fabrication. Students have access to equipment ranging from LEDs and electronic knitting machines to soldering stations and a drill press. Experiment with sensors and motors, design wearable technology, and 3D-print your own objects, and collaboratively problem-solve with others who are investigating emerging technologies in the context of art and design.