The College

The College of Design encompasses the full range of design disciplines from graphic design, clothing design, and interior design to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. The college also includes programs in housing studies and retail merchandising. The faculty and students in the college seek to advance the quality and value of the natural, designed, and social environments, with a focus on the interaction of people and their world.

Located in one of the major design cities and in one of the largest research universities in the U.S., the mission of the University of Minnesota's College of Design is to be a national leader in the full range of design fields, with an emphasis on sustainable, socially responsible, civically engaged, user-sensitive, critical and collaborative design work.

• College profile
• Academic departments

College Initiatives

Design leadership is crucial to solving important societal needs -- economic, social, environmental -- through design of new systems, new policies, new ways of living and working.

The College of Design leads in the following areas through cross-disciplinary teaching, research, and outreach across our academic departments and research and outreach units:

• Sustainability and social justice, ranging from the research of our Center for Sustainable Building Research, our M.S. degree in sustainability, and our faculty work in areas such as landscape ecology, affordable housing, and homelessness.
• Digital design, including the research underway in our Digital Design Consortium and Human Dimensioning Lab, as well as faculty work in the area of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
• Culture and world heritage, embracing everything from our Center for World Heritage Studies in conjunction with UNESCO to our Goldstein Museum of Design, the largest design museum in a design college in the country.
• Urban and rural outreach, involving several research units -- the Metropolitan Design Center, Center for Rural Design, and Center for Changing Landscapes -- as well as faculty work among migrant workers and in urban neighborhoods and city schools.

We have several new initiatives underway that will link the college internally as well as with the larger university and community. These include:

• Product design, connecting most of the units in the college as well as with other colleges, such as the Institute of Technology and the Carlson School of Management, and several Twin Cities corporations.
• Human factors, linking faculty in the College of Design with those in kinesiology in the College of Education and Human Development and in mechanical engineering in the Institute of Technology.