Design is a powerful force—touching all types of societal challenges. Northeastern’s Master of Fine Arts in Design is a terminal degree rooted in critical and creative inquiry, offering students from all backgrounds an interdisciplinary, solutions-agnostic design education.
Throughout the two-year program, you’ll combine in-depth design theory with real world practice and cutting-edge technologies, mastering design process and research, human-centered design, experience design, information design, interaction design, human-computer interaction, systems thinking, speculative design, and social design as you build toward your thesis focusing on a subject in which you want to develop true expertise.
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Learning Outcomes
Research: Develop confidence using quantitative and qualitative design research methods, experimentation, and reconnaissance for design projects. Analyze and synthesize different types of data to inform decisions throughout the design process. Develop exploratory, evaluative investigations into human behavior, embodied forms of knowing, and lived human experience.
Interpret: Engage in critical analysis of data types from multiple sources, case studies, and scenarios of varying levels of complexity. Demonstrate the theoretical and practical value of “thinking in systems”, the power of abstraction, good models, and their relevance to design. Develop novel strategies for applying core systems concepts, principles of cognition, as well as models to design projects.
Make: Combine a working knowledge of analytical methods and personal practice with design principles to translate ideas and complex issues into proposal for systems, artifacts, communication, graphic forms, information flows, environmental conditions, or service offerings that reveal meaningful patterns and narratives and impact human experience using a range of techniques and modalities.
Critique: Articulate and develop literacy in design methods, history, and processes. Develop critical language to evaluate the quality of any design project in terms of its values, consequences, effectiveness, and sufficiency or efficiency in helping people understand, improve or accomplish their intentions, possibilities, or goals.
Present: Identify and compare methods for the representation of data, needs, values, goals, intentions, and actions of people. Model system aspects, components, relationships and interactions, in a coherent, holistic manner. Use multiple visual languages, formats and prototypes to build compelling arguments that consider cognitive and perceptual principles, and represent aspects that change over time as part of any series of events or experience.
Investigate: Engage in critical analysis of the work of predecessors and peers as well as, case studies from related design practices and other scholarly disciplines. Initiate, scope, develop, and defend compelling original research and/or design work that reveals new knowledge or understanding of a subject in the form of a graduate design thesis.
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Credits
60
Duration
2 Years
Location
Boston
Format
In-person
Type
STEM-designated
