We challenge students to tackle some of the world’s most urgent problems.

Welcome to the online home for Stanford’s undergraduate Design degree. This site provides information, resources, and support for both prospective and current students pursuing our undergraduate design major through the School of Engineering. For information about our home institution, please visit the d.school website.

  • Human Centered Design

    The mission of the program has always been to graduate designers who can synthesize technology, aesthetics, and business factors in service of human need. Students emerge with both a strong engineering depth and technical know-how, as well as creative, visual thinking abilities and a deeply human-centered orientation to problem-solving. Their ability to seamlessly integrate across these two “right brain / left-brain" ways of thinking empowers them to make and build products, services, and experiences with transformative potential in service of people. As Product Design has evolved into Design, it remains a degree that provides a strong technical engineering foundation, while expanding both the ways of making and domain application areas for design.

  • An Interdisciplinary Program

    Our design degree is an interdisciplinary program, or an IDP, which means that it spans across departments and is highly collaborative in nature. Since its inception in the 1960s, our program has always been a uniquely interdisciplinary major, with coursework spanning Mechanical Engineering, Art, Computer Science, Psychology, and other fields. With its evolution to an IDP, Design is now even more interdisciplinary. This is reflected in our leadership, where you get to take classes, and in our teaching community.

Empowered ability to make with humility

Fluency in prototyping across a wide range of mediums, built upon a strong engineering foundation. Paired with technical know-how in a chosen Methods depth. Plus strong visual thinking and expression abilities.

Making Depth

The curiosity to immerse in and understand a context / lens for design work, including learning in a chosen Domain focus. The “substrate” for design work.

X-Disciplinary Perspective

Values-Centered

A deeply human-centered orientation to problem-solving. The care and responsibility to be leading stewards of the planet, all people, and the data we generate.

Pathways Within Design

Students will get to sharpen their making skills and abilities and gain professional fluency by choosing one of three Method Depths tracks. Students will also take courses within a Domain Focus area to immerse themselves in a need space that they’re curious about, and emerge with a changed perspective. By completing a domain focus sequence, students are primed with enough context to use what they learned in the Design Core, and SoE mathematics and science classes, to scope their capstone project senior year.

Please consult the Design Degree page of the Undergraduate Engineering Handbook (UGHB) for program sheets and other specific course details. You can also find course information on our DESIGN-BS Bulletin Page.

Our Home at Stanford

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) is the home of Stanford’s design degrees. We encourage you to check out the website to catch up on all the excitement that is taking place at, and with, the d.school. There is a rotating menu of elective classes to choose from, along with shorter-format learning experiences that allow you sample the many applications of design and explore a design-driven future.

Our program is offered within the School of Engineering (SoE) at Stanford. To discover additional programs, opportunities, resources, news, and more, we invite you to explore the main website for the School of Engineering: homepage.